Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Software connectors encapsulate interaction patterns between services in complex, distributed service-oriented applications. Such patterns encode the interconnection between the architectural elements in a system, which is not necessarily fixed, but often evolves dynamically. This may happen in response to faults, degrading levels of QoS, new enforced requirements or the re-assessment of contextual conditions. To be able to characterise and reason about such changes became a major issue in the project of trustworthy software. This paper discusses what reconfiguration means within coordination-based models of software design. In these models computation and interaction are kept separate: components and services interact anonymously through specific connectors encoding the coordination protocols. In such a setting, of which Reo is a paradigmatic illustration, the paper introduces a model for connector reconfigurations, from both a structural and a behavioural perspective.

Abstract
The Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (iSAX) is widely used in time series data mining. Its popularity arises from the fact that it largely reduces time series size, it is symbolic, allows lower bounding and is space efficient. However, it requires setting two parameters: the symbolic length and alphabet size, which limits the applicability of the technique. The optimal parameter values are highly application dependent. Typically, they are either set to a fixed value or experimentally probed for the best configuration. In this work we propose an approach to automatically estimate iSAX's parameters. The approach - AutoiSAX - not only discovers the best parameter setting for each time series in the database, but also finds the alphabet size for each iSAX symbol within the same word. It is based on simple and intuitive ideas from time series complexity and statistics. The technique can be smoothly embedded in existing data mining tasks as an efficient sub-routine. We analyze its impact in visualization interpretability, classification accuracy and motif mining. Our contribution aims to make iSAX a more general approach as it evolves towards a parameter-free method.

Abstract
Understanding the underlying differences between groups or classes in certain contexts can be of the utmost importance. Contrast set mining relies on discovering significant patterns by contrasting two or more groups. A contrast set is a conjunction of attribute-value pairs that differ meaningfully in its distribution across groups. A previously proposed technique is rules for contrast sets, which seeks to express each contrast set found in terms of rules. This work extends rules for contrast sets to a temporal data mining task. We define a set of temporal patterns in order to capture the significant changes in the contrasts discovered along the considered time line. To evaluate the proposal accuracy and ability to discover relevant information, two different real-life data sets were studied using this approach.

Abstract
PTCRIS (Portuguese Current Research Information System) is a program aiming at the creation and sustained development of a national integrated information ecosystem, to support research management according to the best international standards and practices. This paper reports on the experience of designing and prototyping a synchronization framework for PTCRIS based on ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). This framework embraces the "input once, re-use often" principle, and will enable a substantial reduction of the research output management burden by allowing automatic information exchange between the various national systems. The design of the framework followed best practices in rigorous software engineering, namely well-established principles in the research field of consistency management, and relied on formal analysis techniques and tools for its validation and verification. The notion of consistency between the services was formally specified and discussed with the stakeholders before the technical aspects on how to preserve said consistency were explored. Formal specification languages and automated verification tools were used to analyze the specifications and generate usage scenarios, useful for validation with the stakeholder and essential to certificate compliant services.