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The Meerkat Vision
Publication . Costa Seco, João; Aldrich, Jonathan; Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (FCT); NOVALincs
The reactive programming paradigm has become ubiquitous for modern web and mobile app development. But despite its many benefits, today reactive programming is limited to data updates within the client, leaving to the programmer the tedious and error-prone tasks of managing updates to code and synchronizing data updates between reactive clients and a server database. In this paper, we lay out the vision for Meerkat, a tierless, reactive, and live programming language designed to scale to the needs of modern applications. We introduce the language through a chat application which runs on our prototype implementation. We then describe approaches for modularizing and scaling Meerkat programs, customizing tradeoffs between properties such as consistency and availability, supporting local-first software and rich data models, and scaling live updates to full DevOps in software organizations. The Meerkat research program will enable a new era of developing apps that are more responsive, reliable, and evolvable than ever before.
A Language-Based Version Control System for Python
Publication . Carvalho, Luís; Seco, João Costa; Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (FCT); NOVALincs; DI - Departamento de Informática
We extend prior work on a language-based approach to versioned software development to support versioned programs with mutable state and evolving method interfaces. Unlike the traditional approach of mainstream version control systems, where a textual diff represents each evolution step, we treat versions as programming elements. Each evolution step, merge operation, and version relationship is represented explicitly in a multifaceted code representation. This provides static guarantees for safe code reuse from previous versions and forward and backwards compatibility between versions, allowing clients to use newly introduced code without needing to refactor their program manually. By lifting versioning to the language level, we pave the way for tools that interact with software repositories to have more insight into a system’s behavior evolution. We instantiate our work in the Python programming language and demonstrate its applicability regarding common evolution and refactoring patterns found in different versions of popular Python packages.
What to Expect When You’re Accessing
Publication . Take, Kejsi; Young, Jordyn; Bhalerao, Rashika; Gallagher, Kevin; Forte, Andrea; McCoy, Damon; Greenstadt, Rachel; NOVALincs
People Search Websites, a category of data brokers, collect, catalog, monetize and often publicly display individuals' personally identifiable information (PII). We present a study of user privacy rights in 20 such websites assessing the usability of data access and data removal mechanisms. We combine insights from these two processes to determine connections between sites, such as shared access mechanisms or removal effects. We find that data access requests are mostly unsuccessful. Instead, sites cite a variety of legal exceptions or misinterpret the nature of the requests. By purchasing reports, we find that only one set of connected sites provided access to the same report they sell to customers. We leverage a multiple step removal process to investigate removal effects between suspected connected sites. In general, data removal is more streamlined than data access, but not very transparent; questions about the scope of removal and reappearance of information remain. Confirming and expanding the connections observed in prior phases, we find that four main groups are behind 14 of the sites studied, indicating the need to further catalog these connections to simplify removal.
Multi-trait User Simulation with Adaptive Decoding for Conversational Task Assistants
Publication . Ferreira, Rafael; Semedo, David; Magalhães, João; Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia (FCT); NOVALincs
Conversational systems must be robust to user interactions that naturally exhibit diverse conversational traits. Capturing and simulating these diverse traits coherently and efficiently presents a complex challenge. This paper introduces Multi-Trait Adaptive Decoding (mTAD), a method that generates diverse user profiles at decoding-time by sampling from various trait-specific Language Models (LMs). mTAD provides an adaptive and scalable approach to user simulation, enabling the creation of multiple user profiles without the need for additional fine-tuning. By analyzing real-world dialogues from the Conversational Task Assistant (CTA) domain, we identify key conversational traits and developed a framework to generate profile-aware dialogues that enhance conversational diversity. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach in modeling single-traits using specialized LMs, which can capture less common patterns, even in out-of-domain tasks. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that mTAD is a robust and flexible framework for combining diverse user simulators.
Exploring Virtual Reality in Exposure Therapy for Sensory Food Aversion
Publication . Marques, Gabriel; Nóbrega, Rui; Madeira, Rui Neves; NOVALincs
This paper presents research on how to use Virtual Reality with gamified exercises in a therapeutic context with children, focusing on the particular case of warning sensations triggered by sensory properties of food (sensory food aversion). To achieve this goal, we developed a tool featuring several food exposure challenges for patients to use. In the gamified system, the child explores a virtual environment while facing the food they have a problem with. These environments present tasks that resemble typical interactions performed in the real world to develop accommodation. The therapist also has an external system to control the system from outside. In addition, the system sends data collected during the session for the therapist to analyze. We researched how to keep a child engaged in therapeutic tasks and how a child perceives virtual interaction interfaces. The results suggest our system kept the users engaged. Moreover, data show a tendency for the users’ results (ease of use, presence, and performance) to remain the same when using controllers or hand tracking. The preliminary results are encouraging and allow us to apply the current system to a wider audience.
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Entidade financiadora
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
Programa de financiamento
Concurso de avaliação no âmbito do Programa Plurianual de Financiamento de Unidades de I&D (2017/2018) - Financiamento Programático
Número da atribuição
UIDP/04516/2020