Cláudio Belo Lourenço

Este artigo propõe a criação de uma arquitetura que permita ao utilizador efetuar uma gestão dos seus dispositivos de comunicação por forma a aceder aos serviços contratados e proporcionar a mobilidade de sessão e identidade. Neste sentido foi desenvolvida uma arquitetura que oferece ao utilizador uma visão unificada de todos os seus dispositivos de comunicação e assim, disponibilizar uma forma simples e inovadora de gerir os dispositivos e a informação pessoal de cada utilizador. Esta
arquitetura proporciona a mobilidade de terminal, bem como a mobilidade de identidade no mesmo dispositivo e entre dispositivos diferentes, oferecendo assim uma utilização mais eficiente dos recursos disponíveis. Com o propósito de testar a arquitetura elaborada, foram efetuados testes funcionais que demonstram que as especificações inicialmente propostas foram cumpridas. Com base nos testes efetuados, foi realizada uma avaliação do impacto no utilizador que a arquitetura induz, concluindo-se que esta solução é uma mais valia para o utilizador, tanto nas funcionalidades como na usabilidade.

We report on a case study investigating current practice in the use of a programmable infusion pump. We start by formalising an existing description of the procedure followed by nurses for setting up a commercial infusion pump obtained via observation and interview. We then compare and contrast this procedure with a formal description of the sequence of actions reported in the pump's user manual. Mismatches were validated by a training manager. The aim of this comparison is to point out how minor mismatches between the two descriptions can be used to reveal major safety issues. Our contributions are: first, we analyse a real-world system and show the importance of having a clear and consistent specification of the procedures; second, we show how a graph-based notation can be conveniently used for building non-ambiguous and intuitive specifications. We argue that this can provide support to an investigator when building a description of actual practice in that it can help focus attention on areas to observe more closely and questions to ask to understand why procedures, as followed, are the way they are.

We define the predictability of a user interface as the property that an idealised user can predict with sufficient certainty the effect of any action in a given state in a system, where state information is inferred from the perceptible output of the system. In our definition, the user is not required to have full knowledge of a history of actions from an initial state to the current state. Typically such definitions rely on cognitive and knowledge assumptions; in this paper we explore the notion in the situation where the user is an idealised expert and understands perfectly how the device works. In this situation predictability concerns whether the user can tell what state the device is in and accurately predict the consequences of an action from that state simply by looking at the device; normal human users can certainly do no better. We give a formal definition of predictability in higher order logic and explore how real systems can be verified against the property. We specify two real number entry interfaces in the healthcare domain (drug infusion pumps) as case studies of predictable and unpredictable user interfaces. We analyse the specifications with respect to our formal definition of predictability and thus show how to make unpredictable systems predictable.

Model-based analysis is a well-established method to assess the dependability of a system before deployment. It is well known that, in highly dynamic contexts, the accuracy of the analysis results can be limited because unpredictable phenomena may affect the system during its operation. In such contexts, the analysis typically needs to be refined with data obtained from real system executions. In this paper we tackle the issue of refining model-based dependability analysis in automated systems through monitoring. Specifically, we report on our preliminary results on the development of a system that exploits the synergic use of an automated approach for model-based dependability analysis and a flexible monitoring architecture.

We propose a constructive procedure for building a distribut-ed cognition model of a system out of contextual / ethnographic data. We then show how such a model can be conveniently used for studying, in a repeatable and justifiable way, if a system correctly implements selected user-centred design principles. Our approach thus complements user studies in that it enables reasoning about the situated use of a teamwork system even before direct user involvement. We have applied our procedure to a healthcare case study. In particular, we have re-analysed a well-known adverse incident that led to a fatality and for which a comprehensive investigation report is in the public domain. By reasoning about the distributed cognition model, we identified several issues that were not addressed in the incident report nor in other subsequent analyses.

Parallel corpora are resources used in Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. They are defined as a set of texts, in different languages, that are translations of each other. Note that these translations do not need to cover the full document, as we might have sentences translated just on some of the languages. When dealing with the process of sharing resources, recent years have bet on the use of XML formats. This is no different when talking about parallel corpora sharing. When visiting different projects in the web that release parallel corpora for download, we can find at least three different formats. In fact, this abundance of formats has led some projects to adopt all the three formats. This article discusses these three main formats: XML Corpus Encoding Standard, Translation Memory Exchange format and the Text Encoding Initiative. We will compare their formal definition and their XML schema.