Architects' Journeys: Building, Traveling, Thinking

Traveling Architects - A New Way of Herding Cats

Making software developers work towards a common goal may be likened to herding cats. If we further spread developers around the globe, we run increased risks of being unable to design and impose coherent software architectures on projects, potentially leading to lower quality of the resulting systems. Based on our experiences in a large, distributed research and development project, PalCom, we...

Architectural thinking and modeling with the Architects' Workbench

S. Abrams B. Bloom P. Keyser D. Kimelman E. Nelson W. Neuberger T. Roth I. Simmonds S. Tang J. Vlissides Collecting and organizing all of the architectural information for a system is a challenge faced by information technology (IT) architects. Transforming that information into models of a viable architecture and keeping associated work products consistent and up to date is an even greater cha...

Engineering a Semantic Desktop for Building Historians and Architects

We analyse the requirements for an advanced semantic support of users—building historians and architects—of a multi-volume encyclopedia of architecture from the late 19 century. Novel requirements include the integration of content retrieval, content development, and automated content analysis based on natural language processing. We present a system architecture for the detected requirements a...

Building excitement for critical thinking

Forward Thinking: Building Deep Random Forests

The success of deep neural networks has inspired many to wonder whether other learners could benefit from deep, layered architectures. We present a general framework called forward thinking for deep learning that generalizes the architectural flexibility and sophistication of deep neural networks while also allowing for (i) different types of learning functions in the network, other than neuron...