Automatic generation of correct software from requirements has long been a “holy grail” for system and software development. According to this vision, instead of implementing a system and then working hard to apply testing and verification methods to prove system correctness, a system is rather built correctly by construction. This problem, referred to as synthesis, is undecidable in the genera...

This paper presents a novel method for generating balancing character poses by means of a weighted inverse kinematic constraint algorithm. The weighted constraints enable us to control the order of priority so that more important conditions such as balancing can take priority over less important ones. Maintaining a balancing pose enables us to create a variety of physically accurate motions (e....

Addressing social determinants of health (SDH) requires multileveled intervention designs. Increasingly, organizations and coalitions face pressure to use evidence-based strategies when seeking to address SDH. Evidence-based strategies , however, must be locally relevant and integrated into existing systems to function efficiently. We propose the incorporation of an effective rapid assessment t...

Dynamical processes in biology are studied using an ever-increasing number of techniques, each of which brings out unique features of the system. One of the current challenges is to develop systematic approaches for fusing heterogeneous datasets into an integrated view of multivariable dynamics. We demonstrate that heterogeneous data fusion can be successfully implemented within a semi-supervis...

In many situations, we are interested in controllers that implement a good trade-off between conflicting objectives, e.g., the speed of a car versus its fuel consumption, or the transmission rate of a wireless device versus its energy consumption. In both cases, we aim for a system that efficiently uses its resources. In this paper we show how to automatically construct efficient controllers. W...

If we can automatically derive compiler optimizations, we might be able to sidestep some of the substantial engineering challenges involved in creating and maintaining a highquality compiler. We developed Souper, a synthesizing superoptimizer, to see how far these ideas might be pushed in the context of LLVM. Along the way, we discovered that Souper’s intermediate representation was sufficientl...

Synthesis from components is the automated construction of a composite system from a library of reusable components such that the system satisfies the given specification. This is in contrast to classical synthesis, where systems are always “constructed from scratch”. In the control-flow model of composition, exactly one component is in control at a given time and control is switched to another...

Studies of biological systems are often facilitated by diagram models that summarize the current understanding of underlying mechanisms. The increasing complexity of our understanding of biology necessitates computational models that can extend these representations to include their dynamic behavior. We present here a new tool we call Synthesizing Biological Theories which enables biologists an...

At least two important tasks in modern data management exist outside traditional database models and query languages: data transformation and feature programs. Data transformation is the informal preprocessing code that transforms raw data into a dataset that is appropriate for import into a relational database for deeper analysis. Feature programs transform raw data into a compact piece of tra...

BACKGROUND The theory of middle managers' role in implementing healthcare innovations hypothesized that middle managers influence implementation effectiveness by fulfilling the following four roles: diffusing information, synthesizing information, mediating between strategy and day-to-day activities, and selling innovation implementation. The theory also suggested several activities in which mi...