The adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and model-based design within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry has been hindered by the perception that using BIM authoring tools demands more effort than conventional 2D drafting. To enhance design efficiency, this paper proposes a BIM command recommendation framework that predicts the optimal next actions in real-time based on users' historical interactions. We propose a comprehensive filtering and enhancement method for large-scale raw BIM log data and introduce a novel command recommendation model. Our model builds upon the state-of-the-art Transformer backbones originally developed for large language models (LLMs), incorporating a custom feature fusion module, dedicated loss function, and targeted learning strategy. In a case study, the proposed method is applied to over 32 billion rows of real-world log data collected globally from the BIM authoring software Vectorworks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can learn universal and generalizable modeling patterns from anonymous user interaction sequences across different countries, disciplines, and projects. When generating recommendations for the next command, our approach achieves a Recall@10 of approximately 84%. The code is available at: https://github.com/dcy0577/BIM-Command-Recommendation.git
Microphone array techniques are widely used in sound source localization and smart city acoustic-based traffic monitoring, but these applications face significant challenges due to the scarcity of labeled real-world traffic audio data and the complexity and diversity of application scenarios. The DCASE Challenge's Task 10 focuses on using multi-channel audio signals to count vehicles (cars or commercial vehicles) and identify their directions (left-to-right or vice versa). In this paper, we propose a graph-enhanced dual-stream feature fusion network (GEDF-Net) for acoustic traffic monitoring, which simultaneously considers vehicle type and direction to improve detection. We propose a graph-enhanced dual-stream feature fusion strategy which consists of a vehicle type feature extraction (VTFE) branch, a vehicle direction feature extraction (VDFE) branch, and a frame-level feature fusion module to combine the type and direction feature for enhanced performance. A pre-trained model (PANNs) is used in the VTFE branch to mitigate data scarcity and enhance the type features, followed by a graph attention mechanism to exploit temporal relationships and highlight important audio events within these features. The frame-level fusion of direction and type features enables fine-grained feature representation, resulting in better detection performance. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. GEDF-Net is our submission that achieved 1st place in the DCASE 2024 Challenge Task 10.
Paloma Guenes, Rafael Tomaz, Marcos Kalinowski
et al.
The Impostor Phenomenon (IP) is widely discussed in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and has been evaluated in Computer Science students. However, formal research on IP in software engineers has yet to be conducted, although its impacts may lead to mental disorders such as depression and burnout. This study describes a survey that investigates the extent of impostor feelings in software engineers, considering aspects such as gender, race/ethnicity, and roles. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of IP on their perceived productivity. The survey instrument was designed using a theory-driven approach and included demographic questions, an internationally validated IP scale, and questions for measuring perceived productivity based on the SPACE framework constructs. The survey was sent to companies operating in various business sectors. Data analysis used bootstrapping with resampling to calculate confidence intervals and Mann-Whitney statistical significance testing for assessing the hypotheses. We received responses from 624 software engineers from 26 countries. The bootstrapping results reveal that a proportion of 52.7% of software engineers experience frequent to intense levels of IP and that women suffer at a significantly higher proportion (60.6%) than men (48.8%). Regarding race/ethnicity, we observed more frequent impostor feelings in Asian (67.9%) and Black (65.1%) than in White (50.0%) software engineers. We also observed that the presence of IP is less common among individuals who are married and have children. Moreover, the prevalence of IP showed a statistically significant negative effect on the perceived productivity for all SPACE framework constructs. The evidence relating IP to software engineers provides a starting point to help organizations find ways to raise awareness of the problem and improve the emotional skills of software professionals.
The Continuous software engineering is a collaborative software development environment which offers the continues development and deployment of quality software project within short time. The Continuous software engineering practices are not yet mature enough, and the software organizations hesitate to adopt it. This study aims: (1) to explore the Continuous software engineering challenges by conducting systematic literature review (SLR) and to get the insight of industry experts via questionnaire survey study; (2) to prioritize the investigated challenges using fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP). The study findings provides the set of critical challenges faced by the software organizations while adopting Continuous software engineering and a prioritization based taxonomy of the Continuous software engineering challenges. The application of FAHP is novel in this research area as it assists in addressing the vagueness of practitioners concerning the influencing factors of Continuous software engineering. We believe that the finding of this study will serve as a body of knowledge for real world practitioners and researchers to revise and develop the new strategies for the successful implementation of Continuous software engineering practices in the software industry.
Porous materials exist widely and play an essential role in many industries and in daily life. Industrial areas where they can be easily found are energy management, vibration suppression, thermal insulation, fluid filtration, and sound absorption. The introduction of pores in a material makes it possible to modify the properties of the initial material. These changes generate or reinforce desired properties, which are not observed or exhibited in a limited way in the original material. In particular, the variation of the structural properties of porous materials, such as the porosity and the size of the pores, imply an evolution of the acoustic properties like the acoustic impedance and the acoustic attenuation of these materials. This fact explains why porous materials currently attract a huge attention in the development in the acoustic field to absorb sound noises at low frequencies of the range 2 – 6 kHz and to apply to high frequency domain. In this context, porous metals are relatively new classes of engineering materials. Research is set up to carry out studies on the ultrasonic characterization and the simulation of the porous metals in the interest of high frequency applications. Two important acoustics properties of the materials were determined from measurements in water using two methods: the first is based on an insertion-substitution technique and the second is based on a multiple reflection echoes technique. In both cases, the transit time measurements and the frequency analysis are carried out considering the reflection and transmission coefficients at the interfaces to determine the ultrasonic celerity and the attenuation in the porous material. A simulation model is developed in parallel to evaluate these results. Several porous materials were investigated with the porosity ranging from 25% to 50% with pore size ranging from 1.7μm to 60μm. The acoustic impedance of the porous material depends linearly on the porosity and can be described by a simple model of homogenization of a fluid in a solid matrix. Results show that the acoustic attenuation strongly depends on the porosity and can reach 4.3 dB.mm-1 at 1MHz.
Julian Frattini, Davide Fucci, Daniel Mendez
et al.
Context: Advances in technical debt research demonstrate the benefits of applying the financial debt metaphor to support decision-making in software development activities. Although decision-making during requirements engineering has significant consequences, the debt metaphor in requirements engineering is inadequately explored. Objective: We aim to conceptualize how the debt metaphor applies to requirements engineering by organizing concepts related to practitioners' understanding and managing of requirements engineering debt (RED). Method: We conducted two in-depth expert interviews to identify key requirements engineering debt concepts and construct a survey instrument. We surveyed 69 practitioners worldwide regarding their perception of the concepts and developed an initial analytical theory. Results: We propose a RED theory that aligns key concepts from technical debt research but emphasizes the specific nature of requirements engineering. In particular, the theory consists of 23 falsifiable propositions derived from the literature, the interviews, and survey results. Conclusions: The concepts of requirements engineering debt are perceived to be similar to their technical debt counterpart. Nevertheless, measuring and tracking requirements engineering debt are immature in practice. Our proposed theory serves as the first guide toward further research in this area.
Aakash Ahmad, Mahdi Fahmideh, Ahmed B. Altamimi
et al.
Internet of Things Driven Data Analytics (IoT-DA) has the potential to excel data-driven operationalisation of smart environments. However, limited research exists on how IoT-DA applications are designed, implemented, operationalised, and evolved in the context of software and system engineering life-cycle. This article empirically derives a framework that could be used to systematically investigate the role of software engineering (SE) processes and their underlying practices to engineer IoT-DA applications. First, using existing frameworks and taxonomies, we develop an evaluation framework to evaluate software processes, methods, and other artefacts of SE for IoT-DA. Secondly, we perform a systematic mapping study to qualitatively select 16 processes (from academic research and industrial solutions) of SE for IoT-DA. Thirdly, we apply our developed evaluation framework based on 17 distinct criterion (a.k.a. process activities) for fine-grained investigation of each of the 16 SE processes. Fourthly, we apply our proposed framework on a case study to demonstrate development of an IoT-DA healthcare application. Finally, we highlight key challenges, recommended practices, and the lessons learnt based on framework's support for process-centric software engineering of IoT-DA. The results of this research can facilitate researchers and practitioners to engineer emerging and next-generation of IoT-DA software applications.
Background: A growing amount of software is available to children today. Children use both software that has been explicitly developed for them and software for general users. While they obtain clear benefits from software, such as access to creativity tools and learning resources, children are also exposed to several risks and disadvantages, such as privacy violation, inactivity, or safety risks that can even lead to death. The research and development community is addressing and investigating positive and negative impacts of software for children one by one, but no comprehensive model exists that relates software engineering and children as stakeholders in their own right. Aims: The final objective of this line of research is to propose effective ways in which children can be involved in Software Engineering activities as stakeholders. Specifically, in this paper, we investigate the quality aspects that are of interest for children, as quality is a crucial aspect in the development of any kind of software, especially for stakeholders like children. Method: Our contribution is based mainly on an analysis of studies at the intersection between Software Engineering (especially software quality) and Child Computer Interaction. Results: We identify a set of qualities and a preliminary set of guidelines that can be used by researchers and practitioners in understanding the complex interrelations between Software Engineering and children. Based on the qualities and the guidelines, researchers can design empirical investigations to obtain deeper insights into the phenomenon and propose new Software Engineering knowledge specific for this type of stakeholders. Conclusions: This conceptualization is a first step towards a framework to support children as stakeholders in software engineering.
The term behavior engineering (BE) encompasses a broad integration of behavioral and compositional requirements needed to model large-scale systems. BE forms a connection between systems-engineering processes and software-engineering processes. In software engineering, interpreting requirements can be perceived as specifying behavior, which is viewed in terms of chronology of events in the modeled system. In this paper, we adopt BE in its general and integrating sense to search for a unifying notion of an event as a fundamental behavior-modeling concept. We examine several bodies of research with various definitions of an event and its basic units and structure. We use the thinging machine (TM) model to analyze notions related to events, including Dromey s behavior trees, fluents (change over time), recurrent events, and Davidson s events. The results point to an underlying meaning that can lead to a unifying event concept.
This paper introduces the Simulated Jet Engine Bracket Dataset (SimJEB): a new, public collection of crowdsourced mechanical brackets and accompanying structural simulations. SimJEB is applicable to a wide range of geometry processing tasks; the complexity of the shapes in SimJEB offer a challenge to automated geometry cleaning and meshing, while categorical labels and structural simulations facilitate classification and regression (i.e. engineering surrogate modeling). In contrast to existing shape collections, SimJEB's models are all designed for the same engineering function and thus have consistent structural loads and support conditions. On the other hand, SimJEB models are more complex, diverse, and realistic than the synthetically generated datasets commonly used in parametric surrogate model evaluation. The designs in SimJEB were derived from submissions to the GrabCAD Jet Engine Bracket Challenge: an open engineering design competition with over 700 hand-designed CAD entries from 320 designers representing 56 countries. Each model has been cleaned, categorized, meshed, and simulated with finite element analysis according to the original competition specifications. The result is a collection of 381 diverse, high-quality and application-focused designs for advancing geometric deep learning, engineering surrogate modeling, automated cleaning and related geometry processing tasks.
Modern technological advancements have a significant role in the evolution of contemporary science. For instance, series of mysteries have been resolved and some are in queue. So far, the best invention in the history of humankind is computer as it has the ability in its current form to solve many complex problems for which a normal human brain can take centuries to solve. Many scientific problems that are difficult to solve through analytical methods, can be solved now through well-defined computational methods without difficulty. Therefore, it is essential to have good knowledge of computational techniques. In the book Computational Acoustics: Theory and Implementation, the author has efficiently introduced the basics of computational methods and software tools for their implementation. Moreover, the author has covered a series of problems from basics to advance, in the field of acoustics. In the introduction chapter, the author states: ‘The key feature of the presentation contained in this text is that it serves to bridge the gap between theory and implementation’. I agree that this book provides interesting and intellectually stimulating perspectives on computational acoustics. Author has covered the various computationalmethods such as the finite difference (FD) technique in the frequency domain, the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method, finite element method (FEM), and beam element method (BEM). The book invites the reader to think, how to design and analyse complex acoustic problems through computational methods. The book can be used as a textbook at advanced undergraduate level. In addition, the book can also be considered as a reference by both instructors and scientific research students for numerically solving the research problems. Apparently, author has covered the problems of acoustics however; the book can be used by researchers who are working on the problems of waves that involve similar analytical differential equations, e.g. electromagnetics, thermodynamics etc. Furthermore, as a positive suggestion, I would suggest the author to include more examples and their solutions with graphical illustrations, which would help to train the students and researchers in short time. The author has offered a unique collection of reference at the end of each chapter, which helps the reader to understand the concepts with more details. Computational Acoustics: Theory and Implementation, is a stimulating read that will train the readers in the field of computational acoustics and fluid dynamics. Overall, the current edition of the book is well-illustrated, and worthful to be considered as a reference book for early career researchers and tutors who are keen to expand their expertise in the field of computational methods for solving complex engineering problems. Muhammad Mahmood Ali Centre for Precision Engineering, Materials and Manufacturing Research, Institute of Technology Sligo, Co. Sligo, Ireland Ali.Muhammadmahmood@itsligo.ie; dr.mahmoodnaz@gmail.com
Development of scientific and engineering software is usually different and could be more challenging than the development of conventional enterprise software. The authors were involved in a technology-transfer project between academia and industry which focused on engineering, development and testing of a software for optimization of pumping energy costs for oil pipelines. Experts with different skillsets (mechanical, power and software engineers) were involved. Given the complex nature of the software (a sophisticated underlying optimization model) and having experts from different fields, there were challenges in various software engineering aspects of the software system (e.g., requirements and testing). We report our observations and experience in addressing those challenges during our technology-transfer project, and aim to add to the existing body of experience and evidence in engineering of scientific and engineering software. We believe that our observations, experience and lessons learnt could be useful for other researchers and practitioners in engineering of other scientific and engineering software systems.
In immersive augmented reality (IAR), users can wear a head-mounted display to see computer-generated images superimposed to their view of the world. IAR was shown to be beneficial across several domains, e.g., automotive, medicine, gaming and engineering, with positive impacts on, e.g., collaboration and communication. We think that IAR bears a great potential for software engineering but, as of yet, this research area has been neglected. In this vision paper, we elicit potentials and obstacles for the use of IAR in software engineering. We identify possible areas that can be supported with IAR technology by relating commonly discussed IAR improvements to typical software engineering tasks. We further demonstrate how innovative use of IAR technology may fundamentally improve typical activities of a software engineer through a comprehensive series of usage scenarios outlining practical application. Finally, we reflect on current limitations of IAR technology based on our scenarios and sketch research activities necessary to make our vision a reality. We consider this paper to be relevant to academia and industry alike in guiding the steps to innovative research and applications for IAR in software engineering.
Software engineers have significant expertise to offer when building intelligent systems, drawing on decades of experience and methods for building systems that are scalable, responsive and robust, even when built on unreliable components. Systems with artificial-intelligence or machine-learning (ML) components raise new challenges and require careful engineering. We designed a new course to teach software-engineering skills to students with a background in ML. We specifically go beyond traditional ML courses that teach modeling techniques under artificial conditions and focus, in lecture and assignments, on realism with large and changing datasets, robust and evolvable infrastructure, and purposeful requirements engineering that considers ethics and fairness as well. We describe the course and our infrastructure and share experience and all material from teaching the course for the first time.
The research on the Cistercian legacy in Portugal is an innovative multidisciplinary study. Consequently, the results achieved in this research have many different approaches: the former monasteries and their architecture are the main subjects concerning morphology, architectonic rehabilitation but also acoustics, thermal comfort, or natural light. This research, carried out at the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture of the University of Beira Interior (DECA-UBI), was developed in connection with two other research centres - Lab2PT (Landscape, Heritage and Territory Laboratory) and CIDEHUS (Interdisciplinary Centre for History, Culture and Societies). In 2015, the curriculum of the Integrated Master Degree in Architecture of the University of Beira Interior underwent revision. Consequently, it was needed to allocate more time to the teaching of History of Architecture and the requirement to assign specific syllabus to the Portuguese History of Architecture, which is emphasized by the specific and multidisciplinary research performed linking with other sciences of engineering. The natural light in the Cistercian churches is closely linked not only with the liturgical requirements at the officium but also with the canonical hours based on the “ora et labora” dictated by the Rule of St. Benedict. The Cistercian Monastery of São Bento de Cástris (13th-19th centuries), in Évora, Portugal, includes a church, at the south-eastern corner. This church presents an unusual space setting with two choirs which seems to favour different positions for coral groups supporting liturgical and musical expression activities within the research scope of a Research Project. As the light in the Cistercian Monasteries, mainly, in their churches, is mostly related to the fulfilment of liturgical needs, this paper analyses the relationship between daylight conditions within the monastic choirs located within the monastic church. The chant was a very important way of oration and thus of the liturgy. This was the ORFEUS Project – “The Tridentine Reform and music in the cloistral silence: The Monastery of S. Bento de Cástris” which was based on a multidisciplinary approach around the Tridentine Reform with reflexes in the musical Cistercian feminine matrix between the 16th and 18th centuries on Cistercian Monasteries. This paper describes the objectives and methodology applied to the case study thus linking Built Heritage Research and History of Architecture, i.e., Research and Education.
Strategy 1 (task-based measurements), described in the PN-EN ISO 9612: 2011 standard "Acoustics - Determination of occupational noise exposure - Engineering method " not always brings fully reliable results of noise measurements. This happens in conditions where the measured noise is significantly variable because of changes in the intensity of work or changes in the duration of particular technological cycles. The same applies to short-term acoustic events characterized by high sound levels and various types of interruptions in activities performed by a worker. These reasons, as well as mathematical simplifications adopted in Strategy 1, often cause significant errors. For such situations, in order to improve the accuracy of analyzes and to reduce time consumption of measurements, the following methods have been proposed for noise examination in work environment: 1) The method of measuring individual acoustic events (used in external environment research for traffic noise measurements) - which was adapted to work environment by deriving mathematical formulas applied in it directly from the aforementioned Strategy 1, providing rules of measuring and deriving formulas for estimating their uncertainty. 2) The method of input data conditioning - which, after appropriate adjustment of input data, allows for calculation of accuracy of the final results (and their uncertainties) with preservation of accuracy, using the mathematical formulas given in Strategy 1. The proposed methods allow to determine all the values and acoustic data obtained as a result of the application of Strategy 1. They are also suitable to be applied simultaneously at the same work station - which is included in the presented measurement model. This article discusses the problems of occupational safety and health, which are covered by health sciences and environmental engineering.
Students of software engineering struggle to develop a systems perspective because most of the software engineering methodologies focus on developing a particular aspect of a system. Lack of unified coverage to the topic of systems modelling is identified as the root cause behind this problem. The paper explains the role of ontology in building systems perspective. A case for the necessity of ontology training as a means to overcome this problem is presented. The course content for a typical course on ontology is also described in the paper.