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Social Adaptation: When Software Gives Users a Voice

Objective

Adaptation is a desirable feature of software systems to respond autonomously to changes so that human’s time and effort are minimized. The ultimate goal is that users get their dynamic requirements met correctly and efficiently. Adaptation is triggered and guided by certain drivers such as context changes and quality assessment of its execution. Traditional adaptive systems engineering assumes a system ability to monitor adaptation triggers autonomously. This assumption, however, is not always possible due to limitation of technology and also to the lack of infrastructure needed to do that in certain uses of the system.

Example: imagine a disaster management system which needs data about a flash flood to decide upon what rescue strategy to adopt. There could be no fully-automated way to monitor these data and, moreover, it could be impossible to monitor if an execution of a strategy was successful, i.e. impossible to monitor quality. The system will have to try a strategy assuming that it is correct, all that under a high degree of uncertainty.

SOCIAD suggests that people are powerful monitors who can provide data which are essential for adaptation and unmonitorable by relying on solely automated means. This proposal will develop requirements engineering framework (theoretical principles, models, automated analysis mechanisms, CASE tools, and case studies) for modelling, gathering and using users’ feedback in order to guide software adaptation.

Raian published SOCIAD idea as a New Ideas Track paper in FSE’11, a top software engineering conference, and a full paper in ENASE’12 conference winning the Best Paper Award.

Raian moved to BU in Feb 2012 . He is still in the probation period with a high teaching and adminstrative load. This grant will enable Raian to remain active in research and advance EU excellence in the very timely area of SOCIAD. BU has indicated that once this grant is given, it will further support SOCIAD to cover its full costs.
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Call for proposal

FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG
See other projects for this call

Coordinator

BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY
EU contribution
€ 100 000,00
Address
FERN BARROW BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY
BH12 5BB Poole
United Kingdom

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Region
South West (England) Dorset and Somerset Bournemouth
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Administrative Contact
Paul Lynch (Mr.)
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Total cost
No data