Any software development project is based on assumptions about the state of the world that probably will hold when it is fielded. Investigating whether they are true can be seen as an important task. This paper describes how an empirical investigation was designed and conducted for the EU funded APOSDLE project. This project aims at supporting informal learning during work. Four basic assumptio...

The Internet/World Wide Web (Web) is a critical medium for the sharing of business information between retail firms and their customers (business-to-customer or B2C). Although electronic commerce (e-commerce) has received considerable research attention, little research has examined the effect of e-commerce’s Web presentations on retail customer shopping experiences. This twophase study explore...

Improving human resources performance (HRP) is the most important task of the century. However, we have few measures or management interventions to make such improvement possible; although we cannot identify the pattern to be followed by human resources because systems and processes in an organization are often regarded as a kiss of death to encouraging creativity. For improving human resource ...

In this paper, a novel transformerless interleaved high step-down conversion ratio dc–dc converter with low switch voltage stress is proposed. In this converter, two input capacitors are series-charged by the input voltage and parallel discharged by a new twophase interleaved buck converter. Based on the capacitive voltage division, the main objective of the voltage-divider circuit in the conve...

Replication is a widely used method for achieving high availability in database systems. Due to the nondeterminism inherent in traditional concurrency control schemes, however, special care must be taken to ensure that replicas don’t diverge. Log shipping, eager commit protocols, and lazy synchronization protocols are well-understood methods for safely replicating databases, but each comes with...

In this report, a dual-scale modeling approach is presented to describe turbulent twophase interface dynamics in a Large Eddy Simulation spatial filtering context. To close the unclosed terms related to the phase interface arising from filtering the Navier-Stokes equation, a resolved realization of the phase interface is explicitly filtered. This resolved realization is maintained on a high res...

Most enterprise data is distributed in multiple relational databases with expert-designed schema. Using traditional single-table machine learning techniques over such data not only incur a computational penalty for converting to a flat form (mega-join), even the human-specified semantic information present in the relations is lost. In this paper, we present a practical, twophase hierarchical me...

Deep learning has dramatically improved the performance of sounds recognition. However, learning acoustic models directly from the raw waveform is still challenging. Current waveform-based models generally use time-domain convolutional layers to extract features. The features extracted by single size filters are insufficient for building discriminative representation of audios. In this paper, w...

Co-allocation is a fundamental infrastructure to aggregate heterogeneous and distributed resources in grid environments. Although it has been studied extensively, coallocation under the constraints to budget and deadline still remains an opening issue, which means that tradeoff between user QoS requirements and system performance should be agreed. In this paper, a novel agent-based twophase co-...

We introduce a technique that can be used to model the behaviour of protocols. In our model each process within a protocol belongs to a particular class. A set of rules governs the behaviour of a process within a process class. The rules give rise to a transition system that models the behaviour of the protocol. By exploiting the homogeneous behavior of a process within a particular class it is...