Guest Editors' Introduction: Dependable Agent Systems

It is well known that building dependable software systems for dynamic environments is difficult. It is also well known that building large-scale distributed software systems is difficult. The relatively few attempts to combine these two tasks confirm that successfully building large-scale distributed systems with predictable dependability properties is exceptionally difficult. The articles in this special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems deal with this issue and discuss an emerging and exciting new approach to building these most challenging kinds of systems.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Realizing Service-Centric Software Systems

Service-centric software system is a multidisciplinary paradigm concerned with software systems that are constructed as compositions of autonomous services. These systems extend the service-oriented architecture paradigm by focusing on the design, development, and maintenance of software built under SOAs. In this special issue, we present five articles that tackle service-centric software systems.     

Special Issue on Parallel Programming Models and Systems Software for High-End Computing

This special issue features a collection of papers that extend the literature in unique ways, improving the state of art of programming models and systems software for high-end computing systems.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Intelligent Educational Systems of the Present and Future

Education in the 21st century faces an increasing number of challenges that require intelligent systems. The learning environments of today and tomorrow must handle distributed and dynamically changing content, a geographical dispersion of students and teachers, and generations of learners who spend hours a day interacting with multimillion-dollar multimedia environments. The new learning environments are moving beyond kindergarten through college classrooms to distance learning, lifelong education, and on-the-job training; they're entering the multifaceted universe of virtual worlds and ambient spaces. The articles in this special issue report novel, cutting-edge, intelligent learning environments. The systems not only have intelligent computational architectures but also are empirically tested on humans. Empirical research is of course essential to test system fidelity in delivering the intended pedagogy and to assess learning gains, usability, and learner satisfaction. This article is part of a special issue on intelligent educational systems.     

Low-Power Design for Real-Time Systems

Real-time Systems often are located in the special environments where the power consumption is a big concern. Upon presence of timing constraints, the low power design on the real-time systems has significant impact on the performance as well as the schedulability of the systems. The system developers are facing the challenges for reducing the power consumption and meeting the timing constraints in the real-time systems.This paper represents one of few attempts to address the issue of the low power design on real-time systems. We present two power reduction methods: one is at the software compilation level and the other at the operating system level. Given a real-time program, an inter-instruction power reduction technique is proposed to transform the program to another one with lower power consumption. In addition, a scheduling algorithm for real-time operating systems is proposed to reschedule real-time programs when the execution time of the programs is changed. Therefore, the proposed scheduling algorithm works together with the proposed power reduction technique to make sure all programs meet their deadlines and to improve the system schedulability. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed inter-instruction reduction method by comparing it with the cold scheduling algorithm and show that the proposed method outperforms the cold scheduling algorithm and reduces more energy power.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Intelligent Systems for Interactive Entertainment

This special issue presents research in innovative aspects of intelligent interactive entertainment (IE) that haven't seen much publication yet. AI researchers find IE interesting because it requires systems that think, behave, and interact the way that real people do. An invited article discusses the challenges, important trends, and future directions for intelligent IE. The other selected articles deal with a variety of topics: generating nonrepetitive behavior of nonplayer characters in video games; 3D virtual characters using speech, posture, pointing, and involuntary movements to interact with 2D presentations; applying a movie set metaphor to manage multiple software agents in dynamic scenarios; using spatial and temporal coherence as constraints for defining synchronization of actions and turn-taking in location-based games; adding humorous one-liners to text-based applications; and a user interface in which objects react and adapt to the user's focus of attention. This article is part of a special issue on interactive entertainment.     

Techno-Crimes and Criminal Justice Systems: Law Enforcement’s Role in the Criminal Justice Systems

In last month’s issue, I began a discussion of today’s criminal justice systems as it related to their, at least perceived, inability to deal with techno-crimes. This column will continue that discussion about the law enforcement — the police — responsibilities as part of the overall criminal justice system of a modern nation-state.     

混合动态系统的联通格式

混合动态系统是指即具有连续动力学特性又具有离散事件驱动性质的一类特殊的动力系统,并且两者之间存在着相互耦合作用.例如在"机群作战战术与防空系统效能"仿真中,有诸如飞机及导弹飞行等的连续事件系统,有探测模型、目视模型、火力击中目标、高炮发射过程等离散事件系统.混合系统有明显的外部特征,如不连续性、自治/受控切换以及自治/受控状态跳变等.为了研究这类系统的动态特性,研究人员开发了各类仿真软件,这些软件一些实现了产生系统模型的功能,一些实现了实时仿真功能,一些实现了实时监控模型运行的功能.而在一个系统仿真过程中需要用到不同软件来完成整个仿真任务,这就要求各个软件之间能够实现数据通信.而混合动态系统的联通格式实现了软件之间的数据共享.     

Executive Information Systems: Successes and Failures,Insights and Misconceptions

Executive information systems have come a long way in a short period of time. Management consultants, software and hardware vendors, the MIS department, and executive users have all played important rotes in this development. This article reviews executive information systems, assesses where they are today, and looks ahead to what is Just over the horizon.     

Executive Information Systems: Successes and Failures, Insights and Misconceptions

Executive information systems have come a long way in a short period of time. Management consultants, software and hardware vendors, the MIS department, and executive users have all played important rotes in this development. This article reviews executive information systems, assesses where they are today, and looks ahead to what is Just over the horizon.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Challenges for Reliable Design at the Nanoscale

It is with great pleasure that we introduce this special issue on Advanced Technologies and Reliable Design for Nanotechnology Systems to the IEEE Design & Test readership. We have selected four articles to cover a wide spectrum of techniques and applications for the reliable design of nanoscale systems; the techniques aim to circumvent the high defect rates and transient errors expected in advanced nanoscale technologies. Written by outstanding researchers in the field, these articles cover experimental and speculative topics. As with all special issues, these topics only represent the techniques and methodologies available today.     

Pictorial Information Systems

A pictorial information system is a special type of information system supporting the manipulation, storage, retrieval, and analysis of pictorial data. In the past, pictorial information systems have usually been designed for specific applications. But recent advances in data base technology, computer graphics, and pictorial data structures have led to the development of more general-purpose systems. This special issue is a survey of several design aspects of these systems.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Interaction of Many-Core Computer Architecture and Operating Systems

Rapid changes in platform hardware resources with the evolution of many-core architectures will require a fundamental reexamination of mainstream system-software design decisions to support multiple cores and to efficiently manage on-chip hardware resources shared among the multiple cores. In turn, the evolution of many-core processor architectures will be successfully sustained by the new capabilities and features added to the system software, perhaps while requiring substantial support from hardware. The guest editors introduce five articles on the interaction of computer architecture and operating systems for this special issue of IEEE Micro.     

Special Issue: Emerging,Ambient and Ubiquitous Systems 2015

This special issue is based on the best papers from the 6th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT), which was held at London, United Kingdom, on 2–5 June 2015. The conference attracted a large number of scientific papers that contributed to the state-of-the-art in the areas of pervasive and ambient information systems. This special issue follows on the same topics published earlier in the journals of Future Generation Computer Systems in 2013, 2014 and 2016 [1], [2], [3]. With rapid technological developments, we thought that it would be interesting once more to draw together high-quality work in this field.     

Processor Allocation and Checkpoint Interval Selection in Cluster Computing Systems

Performance prediction of checkpointing systems in the presence of failures is a well-studied research area. While the literature abounds with performance models of checkpointing systems, none addresses the issue of selecting runtime parameters other than the optimal checkpointing interval. In particular, the issue of processor allocation is typically ignored. In this paper, we present a performance model for long-running parallel computations that execute with checkpointing enabled. We then discuss how it is relevant to today's parallel computing environments and software, and present case studies of using the model to select runtime parameters.     

Tools for the construction and analysis of systems

In order to develop reliable software and systems, we depend on practical techniques for the construction and analysis of such software and systems. This special issue of Software Tools for Technology Transfer presents various tool-supported techniques that can help with the construction and analysis of such reliable software and systems. The papers in this special issue are extended versions of selected conference papers from the proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS 2018).

     

软件系统协调技术研究

复杂软件系统常常由若干子系统或组件通过组装而成,子系统或组件之间的有效协调是系统开发的一个关键问题.特别是在开放、分布和移动的企业计算环境下,软件系统包含大量异构实体,对协调的可重用性、动态性和适应性提出了更高的要求,以应对业务环境和用户需求的持续变化.对软件系统协调技术的研究现状进行了综述,从协调体系结构、协调设计与实现方法学、协调活动的表示等视角对目前的协调技术进行了总结,探讨了复杂软件系统的协调策略,最后指出了目前协调技术存在的问题和面临的挑战.     

Quality requirements engineering for systems and software architecting: methods, approaches, and tools

Requirements engineering and software architecture are quite mature software engineering sub-disciplines, which often seem to be disconnected for many reasons and it is difficult to perceive the impact of functional and non-functional requirements on architecture and to establish appropriate trace links for traceability purposes. In other cases, the estimation of how non-functional requirements, as the quality properties a system should pose, is not perceived useful enough to produce high-quality software. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of quality requirements for architecting and building complex software systems that in many cases require multidisciplinary engineering techniques, which increases the complexity of the software development process.     

Hybrid Computer Systems

Today's increasing emphasis on simulation of continuous dynamic systems lends a special significance to this issue of Computer. Hybrid computers, with their tremendous computing speed resulting from the all-parallel configuration of their analog subsystem, are particularly suited for dynamic system simulation. Indeed, back in the 1950's analog computers were the only game in town when it came to real-time simulation of flight vehicles. Digital computers of that era were simply too slow in the numerical solution of differential equations.