In this paper a computational cognitive model for intentional inhibition is introduced based on cognitive and neurological literature about intentional inhibition, action ownership and action awareness. In this model the interplay between a positive (and potential) selection of an action, and the negative impacts of the same action is addressed. Neurological evidences have shown how this interp...

Tekkotsu (the name means “framework” in Japanese) is an application development framework for the Sony AIBO robot that endeavors to provide an intuitive set of primitives for perception, manipulation, and control. The framework also addresses some of the human-robot interaction problems faced by mobile robot application developers. See www.Tekkotsu.org. The contributions of this work lie in thr...

The importance of software security cannot be overstated. In the past, researchers have applied program analysis techniques to automatically detect security vulnerabilities and verify security properties. However, such techniques have limited success in reality because they require manually provided code-level security specifications. Manually writing and generating these code-level security sp...

Run-time reconfiguration of FPGAs has been around in academia for more than two decades but it is still applied very seldom in industrial applications. This has two main reasons: a lack of killer applications that substantially benefit from run-time reconfiguration and design tools that permit to quickly implement corresponding reconfigurable systems. This tutorial gives a survey on state-of-th...

To build a data-integration system, the application designer must specify a mediated schema and supply the descriptions of data sources. A source description contains a source schema that describes the content of the source, and a mapping between the corresponding elements of the source schema and the mediated schema. Manually constructing these mappings is both laborintensive and error-prone, ...

There are more APIs than ever, and designing APIs that are usable by their target audience is difficult. Work at Microsoft has demonstrated that running controlled usability studies with participants from different personas and analyzing the results of these studies using the cognitive dimensions framework is effective at identifying and preventing usability problems in APIs. This paper present...

In an effort to support the growing trend of the Java programming language and to promote web-based personalized education, the Java Intelligent Tutoring System (JITS) was designed and developed. This tutoring system is unique in a number of ways. Most Intelligent Tutoring Systems require the teacher to author problems with corresponding solutions. JITS, on the other hand, requires the teacher ...

This paper describes and discusses the application of various state-of-the-art techniques to improve the design and usability of a web application in the B2C area. It is illustrated by the ongoing project of developing an intelligent destination recommender system (DieToRecs). These techniques comprise four particular evaluation steps: 1. a concept test, 2. a cognitive walkthrough, 3. a heurist...

Piaget’s classic work on how children learn showed that when learners engage in critical discussions with peers who have ideas that conflict with their own, that contributes effectively to their developing deep understanding of the concepts involved. Building on this foundation, we have developed a novel and powerful approach to collaborative learning that exploits the power of online technolog...

Programmers use security APIs to embed security into the applications they develop. Security vulnerabilities get introduced into those applications, due to the usability issues that exist in the security APIs. Improving usability of security APIs would contribute to improve the security of applications that programmers develop. However, currently there is no methodology to evaluate the usabilit...