Publications

Two relevant recent developments in the area of science and technology (S&T) and related policy-making motivate this article: First, bibliometric data on a specific research area’s performance becomes an increasingly relevant source for S&T policy-making and evaluation. This trend is embedded in wider discussions on evidence-based policy-making. Secondly, the scientific output of Southeast Asian countries is rising, as is the number of international research collaborations with the second area of our interest: Europe. Against this background, we employ basic bibliometric methodology in order to draw a picture of Southeast Asian research strengths as well the amount and focus of S&T cooperation between the countries in Southeast Asia and the European Union. The results can prove useful for an interested public as well as for the scientific community and science, technology and innovation policy-making.

In the last two decades, hand-in-hand with strong economic growth, Southeast Asia has experienced a strengthened academic community as well as an increase in public and private research and development. But, because the level of research activity and maturity of the research environment in Southeast Asian countries is varied and has been changing rapidly in recent years, public perceptions of the amount and relevance of the research output can often be inaccurate. This gives particular emphasis to the need for data to support decisions concerning collaborative research programmes.

Independent intellectual creative capacity developed through research is essential in enabling countries to take control of exploring, planning, and implementing their own most appropriate sustainable development paths. Given the scarce financial resources in many countries, areas of research focus must be carefully chose so as to achieve maximum value from investment at a level that will have noticeable positive impact upon society. In pursuit of its core mission of providing countries and other stakeholders with the tools they need to better assess and develop their own research capacity, making the most of scarce resources, United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST) has launched programs to support this. Among these programs, a key project is the Global Research Benchmarking System (GRBS) which provides objective data and analyses to benchmark research performance in traditional disciplinary subject areas and in interdisciplinary areas for the purpose of strengthening the quality and impact of research. This paper presents case studies to illustrate the use of GRBS. The case studies show that the GRBS can help the universities to identify niche areas in which they can excel, to make more rational strategic resource allocation decisions, and to publicize program strengths. Finally the paper discusses that how a university can improve its position among its peers by using the research quality and output indicators proposed by the GRBS.

We propose a new methodology to discover the relationship between authors and research domains. The methodology utilizes the classic author-topic model to find the probabilistic relationships among authors, topics and papers. A distance matrix is used to find authors close to the authors obtained from the classic author-topic model for a given topic. In addition, the relationship of selected authors is examined with a co-authorship network model. We compare the performance of our methodology with that of the classic author-topic model. The experimental results on the DBLP database show that the proposed methodology discovers more precise relationships between authors and research domains than does the classic author-topic model, with a 36% increase in performance.

This paper discovers the research themes of institutes’ research work using analysis of scientific literature. The proposed methodology creates research profiles of the institutes  y aggregating citations of highly cited works and then clusters the documents that cite those works to determine the impact, in that area of the research. Research themes are identified by clustering author defied keywords. The approach is demonstrated on several Japanese institutes in the field of Nanotechnology. The analytical techniques discussed in this paper can discover niche focus of institutes’ research. This information can be very useful for the research administrators, funding agencies, and institutes leaders to understand the research structure of institutes in order to support resource allocation decisions.

We introduce a new quantitative measure of international scholarly impact of countries by using bibliometric techniques based on publication and citation data. We present a case study to illustrate the use of our proposed measure in the subject area Energy during 1996 to 2009. We also present geographical maps to visualize knowledge flows among countries. Finally, using correlation analysis between publication output and international scholarly impact, we study the explanatory power of the applied measure.

 Fault-based testing is a technique where testers anticipate errors in a system under test in order to assess or generate test cases. The idea is to have enough test cases capable of detecting these anticipated errors. This work presents a method of fault-based test case generation for pre- and postcondition specifications. Here, errors are anticipated on the specification level by mutating the pre- and postconditions. We present the underlying theory by giving test cases a formal semantics and translate this general testing theory to a constraint satisfaction problem. A prototype test case generator serves to demonstrate the automatization of the method. It works on OCL specifications.

 In this report, we define a semantics for operations as timed designs using UTP approach, and present some algebraic laws for them. We show that our semantics is consistent with the operational semantics. Also, we represent some concepts and properties concerning the formalisation of real-time component based systems. We also present an ITL semantics for timed designs to support the verification of real-time component based systems

Information systems in different public agencies need to seamlessly collaborate to support the delivery of public services through a one-stop government portal. For such collaboration to be successful, the systems must be organizationally, semantically and technically interoperable. In this paper, we illustrate the need for semantic interoperability services in electronic government and present a solution - semantic interoperability middleware (SIM) that provides such services. Three case studies are drawn from the context of the delivery of welfare benefits involving the collaboration of different public and private organizations. Each case presents a need that is addressed through a SIM service - mediation, validation and discovery. The paper also presents the requirements and architecture of SIM and highlights how SIM services address generic semantic differences and associated conflicts.

 This work examines algebraic-specification based testing with particular attention to the approach reported by Gilles Bernot, Marie Claude Gaudel and Bruno Marre, and defines a framework to apply this approach in a development using RAISE (Rigorous Approach to Industrial Software Development). We consider the generation of test cases, not only from the initial specification but also additions and revisions to them arising from development. We also investigate planning issues and development of test drivers.

Emergent behaviour - system behaviour not determined by the behaviours of system components when considered in isolation - is commonplace in multi-agent systems, particularly when agents adapt to environmental change. This article considers the manner in which Formal Methods may be used to authenticate the trustworthiness of such systems. Techniques are considered for capturing emergent behaviour in the system specification and then the incremental refinement method is applied to justify design decisions embodied in the implementation. To demonstrate the approach, one and tw0-dimensional versions of Conway’s Game of Life are studied, and in particular an incremental refinement of ‘the glider’ is given from its specification

 This paper proposes a notion, the `ambit' of an action, that allows the degree of distribution of an action in a multi-agent system to be quantied without regard to its functionality. It demonstrates the use of that notion in the design, analysis and implementation of dynamicallyrecon gurable multi-agent systems. It distinguishes between the extensional (or system) view and intensional (or agent-based) view of such a system and shows how, using the notion of ambit, the step-wise derivation paradigm of Formal Methods can be used to derive the latter from the former. In closing it addresses the manner in which these ideas inform studies in the ethics of systems of articial agents.

 The purpose of the UNU-IIST Research Day (28-ii-2008) was for us to tell each other about our research: the ideas behing it, why they are important and where there are leading. The 'metascience' was as important as the science and provided UNU-IIST fellows with the opportinuity to be trained in that aspect of the management of research. Judging by amount of discussion it provoked, the day was a success. This paper is an elaboration of the talk given by the author, providing more detail than it was possible to give in the talk, but which is necessary if the reader is to evaluate the case being made. This paper makes the case for the incremental approach to program semantics using Galois connections. It considers a sustained case study, that of sequential programs and their related (specifications) commands, with the final addition of probabilistic choice. 'Structural' decisions are discussed throughout and the conclusion reflects on several issues that arose from the day.

Systems which exhibit emergent behaviour, i.e., behaviour not determined by the behaviours of the con- stituents when considered in isolation, are becoming more common due to increasing use of distributed and decentralised designs. There have been claims that formal methods, and particularly refinement, can not be used to derive systems with emergent behaviour. In this paper, however, we argue that they can. To prove the point, we perform a refinement of an oft-cited example of emergence: the ‘glider’ pattern from Conway’s Game of Life.

The important notion of adaptivity of a distributed information system is formalised, following Dijkstra’s idea of self stabilisation. Moreover the formalisation quantifies the extent to which a system adapts, enabling degrees of adaptivity to be specified and hence assured of an implementation. The ideas are expressed without commitment to any particular semantic formalism and demonstrated on the cluster-based routing of messages in mobile ad hoc networks.

 The recovery of behaviour from its approximation over substructures is fraught with pathology. Here the extent is considered to which the behaviour of a continuous function on a locally compact Abelian group can be approximated by its behaviour on proper closed subgroups. Known results are summarised when the behaviour concerns integrability and the group is the circle; then boundedness and other limiting behaviour "at infinity" are considered for more general groups. It is shown that if a continuous function is bounded on each proper closed subgroup of a connected locally compact Abelian group then it is bounded on the whole group. As befits this Festschrift, the techniques are predominantly topological. In passing we reflect on criteria for the difficult problem of identifying "substructures" in Computer Science.

 The 'ensembles' identified by the InterLink working group on Software Intensive Systems comprise vast numbers of components adapting and interacting in complex and even unforeseen ways. If the analysis of ensembles is difficult, their synthesis, or engineering, is downright intimidating. We show, following a recent three-level approach to agent-oriented software engineering, that it is possible to specialise that intimidating task to three levels of abstraction (the 'micro', 'macro' and 'meso' levels), each potentially manageable by interesting extensions of standard formal software engineering. The result provides challenges for formal software engineering but opportunities for ensemble engineering.

The important notion of adaptivity of a distributed information system is formalised, extending Dijkstra’s idea of self stabilisation. The formalisation quantifies the extent to which a system adapts, enabling degrees of adaptivity to be specified and hence assured in an implementation. The ideas are expressed without commitment to any particular formal notation and demonstrated on a cluster formation algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks.