Företaget Ida Infront, där examensarbetet utfördes, var intresserad av hur den grafiska pluginkonfigurering kan göras mer användarvänlig i deras egenproducerade mjukvaruprogram iipax. Programmet iipax används bland annat till att effektivisera ärendehanteringsprocesser och digitala arkiveringar. Det är till stor del uppbyggt av plugins vilka förtecknas i en konfigurationsfil men även i vissa fall det grafiska användargränssnittet. Pluginkonfigurering sker genom att användaren fyller i pluginnamn, parameternamn och parametervärden för ett plugin i ett formulär. Det finns ingen information i programmet vilka plugins som finns eller vad de har för parametrar, vilket gör det svårt att konfigurera plugins. Utifrån en kravspe-cifikation som angavs i början av examensarbetet och möten med anställda på Ida Infront har en prototyp tagits fram som visar hur man kan konfigu-rera plugins på ett enklare sätt. Prototypen är ett modifierat iipax-program där ett ramverk, som består av en databas med plugins och en grafisk konfigureringskomponent, ingår. Ramverket använder "reflection" för att hitta plugins, vilket gör att bara plugins som existerar på servern kan läggas till i databasen. I konfigureringskomponenten kan användaren välja plugins från en lista och pluginparametrarna fylls i och valideras automatiskt. Det undersöktes även hur annotationer kan användas för att förbättra möjlighe-terna att samla in information om plugins. I prototypen krävs inte samma förkunskap av användaren för att konfigurera plugins som i ett omodifierat iipax och risken att användaren gör fel har minskats. Enligt min uppfatt-ning har pluginkonfigureringen blivit användarvänligare, men det har inte utförts någon undersökning för att bekräfta detta. / The company Ida Infront, where the thesis was performed, was interested in how plugin configuration can be made more user-friendly in their self-produced software application iipax. The program iipax is used, among other things, to streamline workflow processes and digital archives. It is largely made up of plugins listed in a configuration file, but in some cases also in the graphical user interface. Plugin configuration is done by the user who fills in the plugin name, parameter names and parameter values into a form. There is no information available in the program about which plugins exist or what parameters they have, making it difficult to configure the plugins. Based on a specification given in the beginning of the thesis work and on meetings with employees at Ida Infront, a prototype has been developed that shows how configuring plugins in a simpler way is done. The prototype is a modified iipax application in which a framework, consisting of a database with plugins and a graphic configuration component, is included. The framework uses "reflection" to locate plugins, which means that only plugins that exist on the server can be added to the database. In the configuration component, the user can choose a plugin from a list and plugin parameters are filled in and validated automatically. It was also examined how annotations can be used to improve the ability to collect information about plugins. The prototype does not require the prior knowledge of the user to configure the plugins in an unmodified iipax and the risk that the user make an error has been reduced. In my opinion configuring plugins has been made more user-friendly, but no research has been done to confirm this.

Detecting performance issues in software systems is desirable and sometimes critical. In this thesis, a new tool is presented for the purpose of testing performance at a smaller scale. This tool, JFRNG, is implemented as an extension to the Java testing framework TestNG with the purpose of allowing developers to test the performance of Java code in unit and integration tests. The thesis also contains a study of the current methods and approaches to automating the process of detecting performance issues.  An evaluation of JFRNG is performed both in terms of performance and usability, where the tool is compared to JfrUnit, a similar tool that targets the JUnit framework. A usability survey took place during the usability evaluation where professional Java developers gave their opinions on the clarity of the code that is produced by JFRNG and JfrUnit. The survey participants found the code produced by JFRNG to be easier to read and understand and also rated JFRNG slightly higher on a number of specific aspects related to the clarity of the code. The added performance overhead that was observed for JFRNG during the performance evaluation is on par with JfrUnit and does add some run time for tests, suggesting that developers should be mindful when selecting tests that should utilize JFRNG. The functionality is relatively extensive, allowing developers to collect and test for a large number of metrics related to the tested code. Finally, the thesis is concluded with some suggestions for future work, such as integrating more complex methods for detecting performance regressions based on collected metrics.

This master thesis design and implement new software which can help children learn and practice "Wubi" Chinese typewriting. The purpose of designing this software is to effectively reduce the phenomenon in China known as "forget how to write while taking pen", so-called character amnesia. First we interviewed two experienced teachers and one class of pupils from an elementary school to collect data. Based on the data we collected, we built a set of prototypes by using PowerPoint on computer and evaluated it by three invited children who belonged to our target user group. After we modified our prototype, we implemented it on a computer using the Java programming language. When the process came to the evaluation part, we invited four students who had background knowledge on the field of HCI and its evaluation methods, to help us finish a cognitive walkthrough evaluation. Although some part of our software, such as certain interfaces and sequences, should be improved in the future work, the opinions of the evaluators were mostly positive.

GraalVM is a new Java Development Kit developed by Oracle that promises improved performance when running Java programs. In this paper we compare the performance of both the community edition and the enterprise edition of GraalVM to OpenJDK and OracleJDK, using both Java 8 and Java 11. We use the DaCapo benchmark suite to test these JDKs. The results are analysed using statistically rigorous methodology. We find that the performance of the different JDKs vary significantly depending on the benchmark, making it difficult to draw any definitive conclusions.In the end we can see that GraalVM Enterprise Edition using Java 8 will outperform the other JDKs tested in the majority of cases.

Sequenced semantics, which was first proposed in the context of temporal databases, is the semantics for the evaluation of a program on values annotated with time metadata. The time metadata records when each value is “live” (is valid or has existence). Sequenced semantics stipulates that a computation on values annotated with temporal metadata must be equivalent to, in effect, running the computation at every time point with only the values alive at that time. Sequenced semantics is challenging to program because it is more than just a re-interpretation of the run-time behavior of a program; for instance, a sequenced “if-else” statement may need to evaluate both the “true” and “false” branches, in different time slices of the computation. This thesis introduces MultiverseJava. MultiverseJava supports sequenced semantics for time stamped values in a Java program. Programmers currently have to resort to ad hoc methods to implement sequenced semantics in Java programs; hence, a better approach is needed. We show how MultiverseJava can be implemented using a MultiverseJava to Java translation. The translation layer weaves support for computing with the timestamped values into a Java program. This thesis describes the MultiverseJava architecture, the layer, semantic templates, and experiments to quantify the cost of MultiverseJava.

Master thesis is focused on retrieval of multimedia information based on location of mobile device. Paper describes mobile platforms technology and technology behind location sensing and two-dimensional barcode recognition. There is also included design of client-server architecture for information retrieval of location based multimedia data. Master thesis includes report of system testing and some ideas about new features for implemented location based information distribution system.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(地球環境学) / 甲第19347号 / 地環博第140号 / 新制||地環||28(附属図書館) / 32349 / 京都大学大学院地球環境学舎環境マネジメント専攻 / (主査)准教授 西前 出, 教授 星野 敏, 教授 小方 登 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Global Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

Thesis advisor: James W. Morris / This dissertation is a comparative phenomenological and theological analysis on Catholic and Muslim traditions of pilgrimage to sacred tombs and shrines in south central Java, Indonesia. Both in the Muslim and Christian traditions, pilgrimage is a rich and complex religious practice that has served as a privileged milieu in which pilgrims and their communities attempt to foster diverse kinds of communion with God and His spiritual company of saints and other sacred figures, including the founders and paradigmatic ancestors of the local community. Precisely due to its richness and complexity as a spiritual and religio-cultural practice driven by the deeper and inclusive dynamics of communion, pilgrimage has also become a crucial practice in which a distinctive and hybrid religio-cultural identity is forged and negotiated in creative and fruitful ways--among others through the process of engaging various forms of otherness including other religious traditions and cultures--in the context of a long historical continuum that is also marked by tensions and ambiguities. Based on the underlying and multifaceted category of communion with God, the self, and the other that lies at the heart of the pilgrimage traditions in Islam and Catholicism, and guided by the method of the new comparative theology, this study attempts to offer a focused analysis of the major ways in which this dynamic of communion is played out in the deeper shared features and intimate encounters that exist between these two pilgrimage traditions in south central Java. Carried out from the perspective of the Catholic tradition, this study also seeks to explore the ways in which the extraordinary depth and breadth of these dynamics of communion in the Muslim and Catholic pilgrimage traditions--that in Catholic theology can be placed under the inclusive category of the work of the Spirit (pneumatology)--can serve as a creative avenue for a comparative theological enrichment of our contemporary understanding of the Catholic doctrine and practice of communio sanctorum ("communion of saints and the holy"). Drawing from both the most salient features of both the Muslim and Catholic pilgrimage practices in south central Java as well as the corresponding insights from the larger Islamic and Catholic traditions, this proposed pneumatological framework for a renewed understanding of the Catholic theology of communio sanctorum can be seen as the modest constructive fruit of this study's comparative theological engagement with the dynamics of pilgrimage in these two traditions. Through this process, the Catholic theology and practice of communio sanctorum is also made more richly anchored in the Catholic principles of communion, mediation, and sacramentality. And since this very process includes other religious tradition(s), the Catholic doctrine of communio sanctorum becomes remarkably inclusive and expansive as well, thus becoming a profoundly "catholic" theological vision. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Post-editing machine translation has become more common in recent years due to the increase in materials requiring translation and the effectiveness of machine translation systems. This project presents a system for formalizing structured translation specifications that facilitates the assessment of the performance of a post-editor. This report provides details concerning two software applications: the Ruqual Specifications Writer, which aids in the authoring of post-editing project specifications, and the Ruqual Rubric Viewer which provides a graphical user interface for filling out a machine readable rubric file. The project as a whole relies on a definition of translation quality based on the specification approach. In order to test whether potential evaluators are able to reliably assess the quality of post-edited translations, a user study was conducted that utilized the Specifications Writer and Rubric Viewer. The specifications developed for the project were based on actual post-editing data provided by Ray Flournoy of Adobe. The study involved simulating the work of five post-editors, which consisted of developing texts and scenarios. 17 non-expert graders rated the work of the five fictional post-editors, and an Intraclass Correlation of the graders responses shows that they are reliable to a high degree. The groundwork laid by this project should help in the development of other applications that assist in the assessment of translation projects in terms of a specification approach to quality.

Message passing has been the dominant parallel programming model in cluster computing, and libraries like Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Portable Virtual Machine (PVM) have proven their novelty and efficiency through numerous applications in diverse areas. However, as clusters of Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) and heterogeneous machines become popular, conventional message passing models must be adapted accordingly to support this new kind of clusters efficiently. In addition, Java programming language, with its features like object oriented architecture, platform independent bytecode, and native support for multithreading, makes it an alternative language for cluster computing. This research presents a new parallel programming model and a library called VCluster that implements this model on top of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The programming model is based on virtual migrating threads to support clusters of heterogeneous SMP machines efficiently. VCluster is implemented in 100% Java, utilizing the portability of Java to address the problems of heterogeneous machines. VCluster virtualizes computational and communication resources such as threads, computation states, and communication channels across multiple separate JVMs, which makes a mobile thread possible. Equipped with virtual migrating thread, it is feasible to balance the load of computing resources dynamically. Several large scale parallel applications have been developed using VCluster to compare the performance and usage of VCluster with other libraries. The results of the experiments show that VCluster makes it easier to develop multithreading parallel applications compared to conventional libraries like MPI. At the same time, the performance of VCluster is comparable to MPICH, a widely used MPI library, combined with popular threading libraries like POSIX Thread and OpenMP. In the next phase of our work, we implemented thread group and thread migration to demonstrate the feasibility of dynamic load balancing in VCluster. We carried out experiments to show that the load can be dynamically balanced in VCluster, resulting in a better performance. Thread group also makes it possible to implement collective communication functions between threads, which have been proved to be useful in process based libraries.