David Davenport

Anonymity on the Internet: why the price may be too high

By allowing anonymous Net communication, the fabric of our society is at risk.

Impact of maintainability defects on code inspections

Software inspections are effective ways to detect defects early in the development process. In this paper, we analyze the impact of certain defect types on the effectiveness of code inspection. We conducted an experiment in an academic environment with 88 subjects to empirically investigate the effect of two maintainability defects, i.e., indentation and naming conventions, on the number of functional defects found, the effectiveness of functional defect detections, and the number of false positives reported during individual code inspections. Results show that in cases where both naming conventions and indentation defects exist, the participants found minimum number of defects and reported the highest number of false positives, as compared to the cases where either indentation or naming defects exist. Among maintainability defects, indentation seems to significantly impact the number of functional defects found by the inspector, while the presence of naming conventions defects seems to have no significant impact on the number of functional defects detected. The presence of maintainability defects significantly impacts the number of false positives reported. On the effectiveness of individual code inspectors we observed no significant impact originated from the presence of indentation or naming convention defects.

Computationalism: Still the Only Game in Town

Mental representations, Swiatczak (Minds Mach 21:19–32, 2011) argues, are fundamentally biochemical and their operations depend on consciousness; hence the computational theory of mind, based as it is on multiple realisability and purely syntactic operations, must be wrong. Swiatczak, however, is mistaken. Computation, properly understood, can afford descriptions/explanations of any physical process, and since Swiatczak accepts that consciousness has a physical basis, his argument against computationalism must fail. Of course, we may not have much idea how consciousness (itself a rather unclear plurality of notions) might be implemented, but we do have a hypothesis—that all of our mental life, including consciousness, is the result of computational processes and so not tied to a biochemical substrate. Like it or not, the computational theory of mind remains the only game in town.

The Two (Computational) Faces of AI

There is no doubt that AI research has made significant progress, both in helping us understand how the human mind works and in constructing ever more sophisticated machines. But, for all this, its conceptual foundations remain remarkably unclear and even unsound. In this paper, I take a fresh look, first at the context in which agents must function and so how they must act, and second, at how it is possible for agents to communicate, store and recognise (sensory) messages. This analysis allows a principled distinction to be drawn between the symbolic and connectionist paradigms, showing them to be genuine design alternatives. Further consideration of the connectionist approach seems to offer a number of interesting clues as to how the human brain—apparently of the connectionist ilk—might actually work its incredible magic.

Intelligent Systems: The Weakest Link?

This paper investigates the role intelligent systems may play in the design, operation and maintenance of safety critical applications. It questions whether the techniques currently used to construct intelligent knowledge-based systems can produce designs which can meet the performance requirements of such applications and which, in particular, can be trusted. The paper concludes that conventional rule-based systems are essentially ad-hoc and thus not really suitable, however, more sophisticated techniques as embodied in the abductive, qualitative reasoning and inscriptor approaches are seen to point the way to a solution.

An extended user interface for CAL systems

Abstract This paper examines the problems of complexity in human-computer interaction from the perspective of CAL systems. By considering the very special demands of young, pre-reading age children, it shows how pointing type interfaces can be extended in a simple and natural manner based on the notion that the position of, and spatial relationship between objects, is of significance. Various examples based on this extended interface concept are introduced to demonstrate its functionality.

Towards a quality service layer for web 2.0

Despite the help of search engines and Web directories, identifying high quality content becomes increasingly difficult as the Internet gets ever more crowded with information. Prior approaches for filtering and searching content with respect to user-specific preferences do exist: Recommendation engines employ collaborative filtering to support subjective selection, (semi-)automatic page ranking algorithms utilize the hypertext link structure of the World Wide Web to assess page importance, and trust-based systems employ social network analysis to determine the most suitable Web pages. The use of implicit and explicit user feedback, however, is often either ignored or its exploitation is limited to isolated Web sites. We thus propose a quality overlay framework that enables the collection and processing of user-feedback, and the subsequent presentation of quality-enabled content for any Web-site. We present the quality overlay framework, propose an architecture for its realization, and validate our approach by scenarios and a detailed design with sample implementation.