Abstract

Software Requirement Specification documents provide natural language descriptions of the core functional requirements as a set of use-cases. Essentially, each use-case contains a set of actors and sequences of steps describing the interactions among them. Goals of use-case reviews and analyses include their correctness, completeness, detection of ambiguities, prototyping, verification, test case generation and traceability. Message Sequence Chart (MSC) have been proposed as a expressive, rigorous yet intuitive visual representation of use-cases. In this paper, we describe a linguistic knowledge-based approach to extract MSCs from use-cases. Compared to existing techniques, we extract richer constructs of the MSC notation such as timers, conditions and alt-boxes. We apply this tool to extract MSCs from several real-life software use-case descriptions and show that it performs better than the existing techniques. We also discuss the benefits and limitations of the extracted MSCs to meet the above goals.

Abstract

Integrating components of vehicular network with the Internet has emerged recently for fulfilling the ever-growing demand for a safe and comfortable driving experience. Road Side Unit (RSU) clouds help in serving requests arriving from vehicles but are limited by available resources. It is also required to reduce the overhead cost corresponding to Virtual Machine (VM) migrations caused by high mobility of vehicles. Also, requests need to be served within their stipulated delay constraint. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm to schedule requests at RSU clouds. Our algorithm efficiently schedules service requests from vehicles while taking care of their delay constraints and VM migrations. The simulation results confirm that our proposed scheduling technique helps in serving more number of requests within their stipulated delay constraint with lesser VM migrations.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach designed to answer questions on a reading comprehension passage. It is an end-to-end system which first focuses on comprehending the given passage wherein it converts unstructured passage into a structured data and later proceeds to answer the questions related to the passage using solely the aforementioned structured data. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed design is first of its kind which accounts for entire process of comprehending the passage and then answering the questions associated with the passage. The comprehension stage converts the passage into a Discourse Collection that comprises of the relation shared amongst logical sentences in given passage along with the key characteristics of each sentence. This design has its applications in academic domain , query comprehension in speech systems among others.

Abstract

Domain Specific Modeling Languages (DSML) significantly improve productivity in designing Computer Based System (CBS), by enabling them to be modeled at higher levels of abstraction. It is common for large and complex systems with distributed teams, to use DSMLs, to express and communicate designs of such systems uniformly, using a common language. DSMLs enable domain experts, with no or minimal software development background, to model solutions, using the language and terminologies used in their respective domains. Although, there are already a number of DSMLs available for modeling CBSs, their need is felt strongly across multiple domains, which still are not well supported with DSMLs. Developing a new DSML, however, is non trivial, as it requires (a) significant knowledge about the domain for which the DSML needs to be developed, as well as (b) skills to create new languages. In the current practice, DSMLs are developed by experts, who have substantial understanding of the domain of interest and strong background in computer science. One of the many challenges in the development of DSMLs, is the collection of domain knowledge and its utilization, based on which the abstract syntax, the backbone of the DSML is defined. There is a clear gap in the current state of art and practice, with respect to overcoming this challenge. We propose a methodology, which makes it easier for people with different backgrounds such as domain experts, solution architects, to contribute towards defining the abstract syntax of the DSML. The methodology outlines a set of steps to systematically capture knowledge about the domain of interest, and use that to arrive at the abstract syntax of the DSML. The key contribution of our work is in abstracting a CBS from a domain into a Domain Specific Machine, embodied in domain specific concepts. The methodology outlines, how the Domain Specific Machine, when coupled with guidelines from current practices of developing DSMLs, results in the definition of the abstract syntax of the intended DSML. We discuss our methodology in detail, in this paper.

Abstract

The focus of the ongoing Digital and Industry 4.0 revolution is on re-engineering business operations to take advantage of various technologies, including robotics. Conceptualizing, say, a robotics solution to automate aspects of warehouse operations involves multiple activities: understanding the problem space in sufficient detail to identify the right automation opportunities; working through the space of possible solution options and developing the solution design; and building a prototype solution with sufficient functional detail to enable customer experts to assess its suitability with respect to multiple concerns, and its impact on the business processes and environment. Only after that can a project be initiated to engineer and deploy the production solution, while making the necessary changes to the business system. With current practice, conceptualization and prototyping typically takes several months and considerable manual effort. In this paper, we present an environment for rapid prototyping of robotics solutions that facilitates a knowledge-centric approach based on capability composition. The environment enables systematic capture of functional domain knowledge, modular composition of solution space capabilities, and expression of the solution concept using a constrained natural language. Detailed functional simulators are generated automatically from the resulting design. This results in high customer confidence in the solution, substantial reductions in cycle time, and productivity gains due to modular reusability of solution knowledge and components.

Abstract

Energy consumption has dramatically increased in the residential building sector over the past few years. Many researchers today are interested not only in designing energy-efficient buildings but also in evaluating the actual building performance and managing operations for delivering the design intent. Monitoring building performance using currently available sensors and mobile applications poses challenges in terms of cost and standardization. This paper presents a new approach to make sensors affordable and inter-operable by designing open-source hardware and using well-established standards for data communication and storage, thereby making energy monitoring ubiquitous and affordable in the residential sector. The proposed solution uses low-power loggers, Bluetooth Low Energy wireless communication version 4 for data transfer from loggers to mobile phones for further transfer to cloud, oneM2M standard to ensure interoperability, and NGSI-LD for data management.

Abstract

In the last decade, civic crowdfunding has proved to be effective in generating funds for the provision of public projects. However, the existing literature deals only with citizen's with positive valuation and symmetric belief towards the project's provision. In this work, we present novel mechanisms which break these two barriers, i.e., mechanisms which incorporate negative valuation and asymmetric belief, independently. For negative valuation, we present a methodology for converting existing mechanisms to mechanisms that incorporate agents with negative valuations. Particularly, we adapt existing PPR and PPS mechanisms, to present novel PPRN and PPSN mechanisms which incentivize strategic agents to contribute to the project based on their true preference. With respect to asymmetric belief, we propose a reward scheme Belief Based Reward (BBR) based on Robust Bayesian Truth Serum mechanism. With BBR, we propose a general mechanism for civic crowdfunding which incorporates asymmetric agents. We leverage PPR and PPS, to present PPRx and PPSx. We prove that in PPRx and PPSx, agents with greater belief towards the project's provision contribute more than agents with lesser belief. Further, we also show that contributions are such that the project is provisioned at equilibrium.

Abstract

This paper describes the Neural Machine Translation systems of IIIT-Hyderabad (LTRC-MT) for WAT 2019 Hindi-English shared task. We experimented with both Recurrent Neural Networks & Transformer architectures. We also show the results of our experiments of training NMT models using additional data via backtranslation.

Abstract

Neural text-to-speech synthesis (NTTS) models have shown significant progress in generating high-quality speech, however they require a large quantity of training data. This makes creating models for multiple styles expensive and time-consuming. In this paper different styles of speech are analysed based on prosodic variations, from this a model is proposed to synthesise speech in the style of a newscaster, with just a few hours of supplementary data. We pose the problem of synthesising in a target style using limited data as that of creating a bi-style model that can synthesise both neutral-style and newscaster-style speech via a one-hot vector which factorises the two styles. We also propose conditioning the model on contextual word embeddings, and extensively evaluate it against neutral NTTS, and neutral concatenative-based synthesis. This model closes the gap in perceived style-appropriateness between natural recordings for newscaster-style of speech, and neutral speech synthesis by approximately two-thirds.

Abstract

Musical training causes structural and functional changes in the brain due to its sensory-motor demands. This leads to differences in how musicians perceive and process music as compared to nonmusicians, thereby providing insights into brain adaptations and plasticity. Correlational studies and network analysis investigations have indicated the presence of large-scale brain networks involved in the processing of music and have highlighted the differences between musicians and non-musicians. However, studies on functional connectivity in the brain during music listening tasks have thus far focused solely on static network analysis. Dynamic Functional Connectivity (DFC) studies have lately been found useful in unearthing meaningful, time-varying functional connectivity information in both resting-state and task-based experimental settings. In this study, we examine DFC in the fMRI obtained from two groups of participants, 18 musicians and 18 non-musicians, while they listened to a musical stimulus in a naturalistic setting. We utilize spatial Group Independent Component Analysis (ICA), sliding time window correlations, and a deterministic agglomerative clustering of windowed correlation matrices to identify quasi-stable Functional Connectivity (FC) states in the two groups. To compute cluster centroids that represent FC states, we device and present a method that primarily utilizes windowed correlation matrices occurring repeatedly over time and across participants, while excluding matrices corresponding to spontaneous fluctuations. Preliminary analysis indicate states with greater visuo-sensorimotor integration in musicians, larger presence of DMN states in non-musicians, and variability in states found in musicians due to differences in training and prior experiences.