Thermal bowing, often referred as bulging or out-of-plane wall deflection, is a common issue on sandwich panel walls caused by a temperature differential between a building interior temperature and the environment. The stresses caused by temperature changes in concrete members are widely known in the practice of bridge design, but not on sandwich wall panels. For sandwich wall panel applications, it is common to have non-composite panels when the designer expects a high temperature gradient, what yields a less economical design, but reduces the bowing. This project aimed to validate current assumptions regarding the heat flow in sandwich wall panels and to perform a parametric study of panels subject to thermal loads, varying the concrete layer thickness, panel length, type of shear connector and separation using a commercial finite element analysis software. This study concluded that current design practices either underestimate, in the case of multiplying the classical mechanics values by the reported degree of composite behavior, or overestimate the real value of bowing, by using classical mechanics. A method for determining the percentage of composite action and compute bowing was developed and recommendations addressing the importance of this type of loading were given.

[pt] APIs (do inglês - application programming interfaces) desempenham um papel crucial no desenvolvimento de software. Quase todos os programadores estão frequentemente na posição de utilizar APIs de terceiros. Atualmente, encontramos várias pesquisas que procuram explorar e compreender as interações dos usuários com a API do ponto de vista da usabilidade. No entanto, tais estudos deixam de fora um aspecto importante da qualidade de uso de uma API, a comunicabilidade. Ao contrário da usabilidade, cuja definição está associada à facilidade de uso e aprendizagem, a comunicabilidade está associada à capacidade de um artefato de comunicar sua lógica de projeto. Uma API que carece de comunicabilidade pode levar os usuários ao uso indevido e produzir bugs em seu código. Esta tese de doutorado aborda este problema a partir de uma perspectiva de Engenharia Semiótica. Ao caracterizar uma API como um artefato mediador da comunicabilidade, começamos nossa tese com a proposta de que as APIs deveriam ser coloquiais. Diagnosticamos em nosso primeiro estudo que os usuários, em certos casos, têm dificuldade em compreender a lógica interna de funcionamento de um API apenas olhando para suas interfaces. Neste estudo, descobrimos que as APIs muitas vezes carecem de comunicabilidade. Enquanto a usabilidade é sobre a capacidade do usuário de aprender e usar uma API, a comunicabilidade é sobre a capacidade da API de transferir a comunicação do projetista para o usuário, expondo assim sua lógica de projeto. Uma API conversacional é aquela que pode expor sua lógica interna através de suas interfaces, atendendo aos contextos pragmáticos de seus usuários. A partir deste estudo, nós nos propusemos então a definir o que é uma API conversacional na prática e a investigar quais métodos ou tecnologias seriam necessários para auxiliar os projetistas na criação de tais APIs. Nesta tese, propomos uma estrutura conceitual e um método para apoiar o projeto de APIs de conversação. Ao projetar uma API, o projetista tem em mãos três maneiras diferentes de enviar sua mensagem ao seu usuário: o código fonte, a documentação e o comportamento da API. Nossa estrutura conceitual explora como caracterizar e classificar uma API de conversação de acordo com os três tipos de mensagens da perspectiva do projetista. Nosso método de apoio ao projeto da API de conversação, que foi inspirado nos resultados e lições aprendidas de uma pesquisa-ação que realizamos, consiste em três etapas. O primeiro passo é ajudar o projetista a identificar quem são os usuários da API e suas necessidades de conversação específicas. Na segunda etapa, o método ajuda o projetista na modelagem de possíveis conversas de API com os diferentes usuários mapeados para atingir seus objetivos. Finalmente, o método fornece um conjunto de diretrizes para guiar o projetista na definição das interfaces API, incluindo sua parametrização. Usando este método, realizamos um estudo de caso com um projeto de API, que visa apoiar a refatoração de programas Java. Do ponto de vista do projetista da API, o método o ajudou a criar empatia com seus usuários e a melhor derivar e refletir sobre os requisitos e conversas que a API deve fornecer aos diferentes perfis de usuários. / [en] APIs (application programming interfaces) play a crucial role in software development. Almost any programmer is often at the position of using thirdparty APIs. Currently, we find several researches that seek to explore and understand users interactions with the API from an usability point of view. However, such studies leave out an important aspect of an API quality of use, the communicability. Unlike usability, whose definition is associated with ease of use and learning, communicability is associated with an artifact s ability to communicate its design logic. An API that lacks communicability can lead users to misuse and produce bugs in their code. This doctoral thesis addresses this problem from a Semiotic Engineering perspective. By characterizing an API as a mediating artifact for communicability, we started our thesis with the proposal that APIs should be conversational. We diagnosed in our first study that users, in certain cases, have difficulty in understanding the internal operating logic of an API just by looking at its interfaces. In this study, we found that APIs often lack in communicability. While usability is about the user s ability to learn and use an API, communicability is about the API s ability to transfer the designer communication to the user, thus exposing its design rationale. A conversational API is the one that can expose its internal logic through its interfaces, attending the pragmatic contexts of its users. From this study, we then set out to define what a conversational API is in practice and to investigate what methods or technologies would be needed to assist designers in creating such APIs. In this thesis, we propose a conceptual framework and a method to support the design of conversational APIs. When designing an API, the designer has in hands three different ways to send his message to his user: the source code, the documentation, and the behavior of the API. Our conceptual framework explores how to characterize and classify a conversational API according to the three types of messages from the designer s perspective. Our method of supporting conversational API design, which was inspired by the results and lessons learned from an action-research we conducted, consists of three steps. The first step is to help the designer on identifying who the API users are and their specific conversational needs. In the second step, the method helps the designer on modeling possible API conversations with the different mapped users to achieve their goals. Finally, the method provides a set of guidelines to guide the designer in defining the API interfaces, including their parameterization. Using this method, we perform a case study with an API design, which aims at supporting the refactoring of Java programs. From the API designer s point of view, the method helped him on creating empathy with his users and better deriving and reflecting upon the requirements and conversations that the API should provide to the different user profiles.

According to World Health Organization, around 7 million people die every year due to diseases caused by air pollution. With the improvements in Internet of Things in the recent years, environmental sensing systems has started to gain importance. By using technologies like Cloud Computing, RFID, Wireless Sensor Networks, and open Application Programming Interfaces, it has become easier to collect data for visualization on different platforms. However, collected data need to be represented in an efficient way for better understanding and analysis, which requires design of data visualization tools. The GreenIoT initiative aims to provide open data with its infrastructure for sustainable city development in Uppsala. An environmental web application is presented within this thesis project, which visualizes the gathered environmental data to help municipality organizations to implement new policies for sustainable urban planning, and citizens to gain more knowledge to take sustainable decisions in their daily life. The application has been developed making use of the 4Dialog API, which is developed to provide data from a dedicated cloud storage for visualization purposes. According to the evaluation presented in this thesis, further development is needed to improve the performance to provide faster and more reliable service as well as the accessibility to promote openness and social inclusion. / Enligt World Health Organization dör 7 miljoner människor varje år på grund av sjukdomar orsakade av luftföroreningar. Med förbättringar inom Internet of Things under senare år, har betydelsen av system för miljösensorer. Genom att använda tekniker som molntjänster, RFID, trådlösa sensornätverk och öppna programmeringsgränssnitt, har det blivit enklare att samla in data för visualisering på olika plattformar. Men insamlad data behöver bli representerad på ett effektivt sätt för bättre förståelse och analys, vilket kräver utformande av verktyg för visualisering av data. Initiativet GreenIoT strävar mot att erbjuda öppen data med sin infrastruktur för hållbar stadsutveckling i Uppsala. I detta arbete presenteras en webb-tillämpning, som visualiserar den insamlade miljödatan för att hjälpa kommunen att implementera nya policies för hållbar stadsutveckling, och stimulera medborgare till att skaffa mer kunskap för att göra miljövänliga val i sin vardag. Tillämpningen har utvecklats med hjälp av 4Dialog API, som tillhandahåller data från lagring i molnet för visualiseringssyfte. Enligt den utvärdering som presenteras i denna rapport konstateras att vidare utveckling behövs för att förbättra dels prestanda för att erbjuda en snabbare och mer tillförlitlig service, och dels åtkomstmöjligheter för att främja öppenhet och social inkludering.

In this research project, we aim to explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as an interface to interact with API tools in natural language. Bubeck et al. [1] shed some light on how LLMs could be used to interact with API tools. Since then, new versions of LLMs have been launched and the question of how reliable a LLM can be in this task remains unanswered. The main goal of our thesis is to investigate the designs of the available system prompts for LLMs, identify the best-performing prompts, and evaluate the reliability of different LLMs when using the best-identified prompts. We will employ a multiple-stage controlled experiment: A literature review where we reveal the available system prompts used in the scientific community and open-source projects; then, using F1-score as a metric we will analyse the precision and recall of the system prompts aiming to select the best-performing system prompts in interacting with API tools; and in a latter stage, we compare a selection of LLMs with the best-performing prompts identified earlier. From these experiences, we realize that AI-generated system prompts perform better than the current prompts used in open-source and literature with GPT-4, zero-shot prompts have better performance in this specific task with GPT-4 and that a good system prompt in one model does not generalize well into other models.

Vorgestellt werden verschiedene Programmierschnittstellen von Creo. Des Weiteren werden Anwendungsmöglichkeiten im Bereich der konstruktionsbegleitenden Simulation (Creo Simulate) vorgestellt. Ziel ist die Entlastung des Konstrukteurs/Berechners von Routineaufgaben und die Integration von Wissen in das Simulationsmodell.

Regression testing of an evolving software system may involve significant challenges. While, there would be a requirement of maximising the probability of finding out if the latest changes to the system has broken some existing feature, it needs to be done as economically as possible. A particularly important class of software systems are API libraries. Such libraries would typically constitute a very important component of many software systems. High quality requirements make it imperative to continually optimise the internal implementation of such libraries without affecting the external interface. Therefore, it is preferred to guide the regression testing by some kind of formal specification of the library. The testing problem comprises of three parts: computation of test data, execution of test, and analysis of test results. Current research mostly focuses on the first part. The objective of test data computation is to maximise the probability of uncovering bugs, and to do it with as few test cases as possible. The problem of test data computation for regression testing is to select a subset of the original test suite running which would suffice to test for bugs probably inserted in the modifications done after the last round of testing. A variant of this problem is that of regression testing of API libraries. The regression testing of an API is usually done by making function calls in such a way that the sequence of function calls thus made suffices a test specification. The test specification in turn embodies some concept of completeness. In this thesis, we focus on the problem of test sequence computation for the regression testing of API libraries. At the heart of this method lies the creation of a state space model of the API library by reverse engineering it by executing the system, with guidance from an formal API specification. Once the state space graph is obtained, it is used to compute test sequences for satisfying some test specification. We analyse the theoretical complexity of the problem of test sequence computation and provide various heuristic algorithms for the same. State space explosion is a classical problem encountered whenever there is an attempt of creating a finite state model of a program. Our method also faces this limitation. We explore a simple and intuitive method of ameliorating this problem – by simply reducing the size of the state vector. We develop the theoretical insights into this method. Also, we present experimental results indicating the practical effectiveness of this method. Finally, we bring all this together into the design and implementation of a tool called Modest.

Developers of reusable software elements, such as libraries, usually have the responsibility to provide comprehensive and high quality documentation to enable eective reuse of those elements. The eective reuse of libraries depends upon the quality of the API (Application Program Interface) documentation. Well established libraries typically have comprehensive API documentation, for example in Javadocs. However, they also typically lack examples and explanations, which may dicult the eective reuse of the library. StackOverow.com (SO) is a Question and Answer service directed to issues related to software development. In SO, a developer can post questions related to a programming topic and other members of the site can provide answers to help him/her solve the problem he/she has at hand. Despite of the increasing use of SO by the software development community, the information related to a particular library is spread along the website. Thus, SO still lacks an organization of its crowd knowledge. In this dissertation, we present a semi-automatic approach that organizes the information available on SO in order to build a kind of documentation for APIs, called cookbooks (recipe-oriented books). The cookbooks generated by the approach are called crowd cookbooks. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, cookbooks were generated for three APIs widely used by the software development community: SWT,LINQ and QT. Desired features that cookbooks must meet were identied and a study with human subjects was conducted to assess to what extent the generated cookbook meet those features. Through the study it was also possible to identify what is the perceived usefulness by the subjects in relation to the use of cookbooks in APIs learning. The results showed that the cookbooks built using the proposed strategy, in general, meet the identied features. Furthermore, most human subjects considered that cookbooks do not have an appropriate format to the learning of APIs. / Desenvolvedores de elementos reusáveis de software, como as bibliotecas, em geral têm a responsabilidade de disponibilizar documentação abrangente e de alta qualidade para permitir o reuso efetivo desses elementos. O reuso efetivo de bibliotecas depende da qualidade da documentação da API (Interface para Programação de Aplicativos). Bibliotecas bem estabelecidas tipicamente têm documentação abrangente, por exemplo em Javadocs. Porém, essa documentação geralmente carece de exemplos e explicações, o que pode dicultar o reuso efetivo da biblioteca. Stackoverow.com (SO) é um serviço de perguntas e respostas (Q&A) direcionado a questões relacionadas ao desenvolvimento de software. No SO, um desenvolvedor pode postar perguntas relacionadas a um tópico de programação e outros membros do site podem disponibilizar respostas para ajudá-lo a resolver o problema que ele tem em mãos. Apesar da utilização crescente do SO pela comunidade de desenvolvimento de software, a informação relação a um biblioteca está espalhada ao longo do site. Assim, o SO ainda carece de uma organização do crowd knowledge nele contido. Nessa dissertação, será apresentada uma abordagem semi-automatizada que organiza a informação disponível no SO para a construção de um tipo de documentação para APIs, conhecido por cookbooks (livros orientados a receitas). Os cookbooks produzidos pela abordagem proposta são chamados crowd cookbooks. Para avaliar a abordagem proposta foram gerados cookbooks para três APIs amplamente utilizadas pela comunidade de desenvolvimento de software: SWT, LINQ e QT. Foram identicadas características desejáveis de cookbooks e realizado um estudo com sujeitos humanos para entender em que grau os cookbooks construídos atendem a estas características. Por meio estudo também foi possível compreender melhor os pers de uso dos cookbooks mais apropriados em relação ao aprendizado de APIs. Os resultados mostraram que os cookbooks construídos pela estratégia proposta, em geral, atendem às características identicadas. Além disso, a maior parte dos sujeitos humanos considerou que cookbooks não possuem um formato adequado ao aprendizado de APIs. / Mestre em Ciência da Computação

Året är 2017 och den ökande användningen av enheter som är kopplade mot internet har exploderat okontrollerat. Enheter modifieras i en snabb takt för att kunna kopplas samman med syftet att få en mer effektivare vardag, i folkmun häftigare enheter och framförallt för att generera en ökad försäljning av dessa produkter. Kommunikationsverktygen kopplas samman och därmed samlas en stor mängd data på enskilda enheter som kan bli sårbara i form av övervakning, intrång och övertagande för syften som innehavaren kan vara helt omedveten om. Om individens enhet är medverkande i scenariot att stänga ned servern som håller en samhällstjänst uppe under en tidpunkt av en allvarlig fysisk attack mot Sverige: Vem bär i så fall skulden? Detta kallas överbelastningsattack och är en av många potentiella sårbarheter i dagens samhälle.   Internet of Things är ett nytt fenomen som är relativt outforskat med många öppna och obesvarade frågor. Forskningen ligger otvivelaktigt steget efter. Det gemensamma i forskningsartiklarna är slutsatsen: vi ska forskare vidare inom detta område. Alarmerande eftersom enheterna redan är närvarande i vardagen. Informationssäkerheten och individens personliga integritet är vad som står på spel, och frågan är vad individerna är villiga att offra för att ha de senaste produkterna.   Metoden och genomförandet av denna kandidatuppsats har bestått av det explorativa tillvägagångssättet. En litteraturstudie av forskningsartiklar och personliga intervjuer har genomförts med relevanta individer inom området.   Denna kandidatuppsats kommer inte att ge facit på vad som bör göras härnäst. Målet är att upplysa om olika problemställningar avseende fenomenet Internet of Things. I uppsatsen ligger fokuseringen på att generera en beskrivning av hur informationssäkerhet och personlig integritet kan påverka skapande och användandet av enheter som är uppkopplade mot Internet of Things.   Syftet med denna explorativa studie är att identifiera och beskriva faktorer som bidrar med ett framgångsrikt skapande och användande av Internet of Things enheter med fokusering på informationssäkerhet och personlig integritet. Slutsatserna är att faktorer som påverkar är bekräftelse av identitet, standarder, otillgänglig åtkomst samt användarkontroll.

Computing systems have become heterogeneous with the increasing prevalence of multi-core CPUs, Graphics Processing Units (GPU) and other accelerators in them. OpenCL has emerged as an attractive programming framework for heterogeneous systems. However, utilizing mul- tiple devices in OpenCL is a challenge as it requires the programmer to explicitly map data and computation to each device. Utilizing multiple devices simultaneously to speed up execu- tion of a kernel is even more complex, as the relative execution time of the kernel on different devices can vary significantly. Also, after each kernel execution, a coherent version of the data needs to be established. This means that, in order to utilize all devices effectively, the programmer has to spend considerable time and effort to distribute work across all devices, keep track of modified data in these devices and correctly perform a merging step to put the data together. Further, the relative performance of a program may vary across different inputs, which means a statically determined work distribution may not work well. In this work, we present FluidiCL, an OpenCL runtime that takes a program written for a single device and uses multiple heterogeneous devices to execute each kernel. The runtime performs dynamic work distribution and cooperatively executes each kernel on all available devices. Since we consider a setup with devices having discrete address spaces, our solution ensures that execution of OpenCL work-groups on devices is adjusted by taking into account the overheads for data management. The data transfers and data merging needed to ensure coherence are handled transparently without requiring any effort from the programmer. Flu- idiCL also does not require prior training or profiling and is completely portable across dif- ferent machines. Because it is dynamic, the runtime is able to adapt to system load. We have developed several optimizations for improving the performance of FluidiCL. We evaluate the runtime across different sets of devices. On a machine with an Intel quad-core processor and an NVidia Fermi GPU, FluidiCL shows a geomean speedup of nearly 64% over the GPU, 88% over the CPU and 14% over the best of the two devices in each benchmark. In all benchmarks, performance of our runtime comes to within 13% of the best of the two devices. FluidiCL shows similar results on a machine with a quad-core CPU and an NVidia Kepler GPU, with up to 26% speedup over the best of the two. We also present results considering an Intel Xeon Phi accelerator and a CPU and find that FluidiCL performs up to 45% faster than the best of the two devices. We extend FluidiCL from a CPU–GPU scenario to a three-device setup hav- ing a quad-core CPU, an NVidia Kepler GPU and an Intel Xeon Phi accelerator and find that FluidiCL obtains a geomean improvement of 6% in kernel execution time over the best of the three devices considered in each case.

M. Tech. (Department of Information & Communication Technology, Faculty of Applied and Computer Sciences), Vaal University of Technology. / Many studies have evaluated and compared the existing open-sources Semantic Web platforms for ontologies development. However, none of these studies have included the dot NET-based semantic web platforms in the empirical investigations. This study conducted a comparative analysis of open-source and dot NET-based semantic web platforms for ontologies development. Two popular dot NET-based semantic web platforms, namely, SemWeb.NET and dotNetRDF were analyzed and compared against open-source environments including Jena Application Programming Interface (API), Protégé and RDF4J also known as Sesame Software Development Kit (SDK). Various metrics such as storage mode, query support, consistency checking, interoperability with other tools, and many more were used to compare two categories of platforms. Five ontologies of different sizes are used in the experiments. The experimental results showed that the open-source platforms provide more facilities for creating, storing and processing ontologies compared to the dot NET-based tools. Furthermore, the experiments revealed that Protégé and RDF4J open-source and dotNetRDF platforms provide both graphical user interface (GUI) and command line interface for ontologies processing, whereas, Jena open-source and SemWeb.NET are command line platforms. Moreover, the results showed that the open-source platforms are capable of processing multiple ontologies’ files formats including Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Ontology Web Language (OWL) formats, whereas, the dot NET-based tools only process RDF ontologies. Finally, the experiment results indicate that the dot NET-based platforms have limited memory size as they failed to load and query large ontologies compared to open-source environments.