An Integrated Framework to Evaluate Information Systems Performance in High-Risk Settings: Experiences from the iTRACK Project

Evaluation and testing are significant steps in developing any information system. More attention must be devoted to these steps if the system is to be used in high-risk contexts, such as the response to conflict disasters. Several testing methodologies are designed to guarantee that software fulfills technology requirements; others will assure...

An embodied conversational agent coach to support societal participation learning by low-literate users

People of low literacy could benefit from automated support when learning about societal participation. We design an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) ‘coach’ that can provide effective learning support to low-literate learners, develop a prototype virtual learning environment, and evaluate this prototype with low-literate end users. First,...

Multi-Level Fairness Framework: A Socio-Technical framework for Fairness Requirements Engineering in Machine Learning

Machine Learning models are begin increasingly used within the industry such as by financial institutions, governments and commercial companies. In the past few years, there have been several incidents where these ML models show discriminatory behavior towards particular groups of people, leading to unfair decisions that can have negative...

Location-Based Games For Social Interaction In Public Space

This thesis broadens current understanding of how location-based games can promote meaningful social interaction in citizens' own neighbourhoods. It investigates social cohesion and the role of social interaction to its promotion, delves into which requirements users have for playing in their neighbourhood and with its citizens, and takes a...

A virtual coach for low-literates to practice societal participation

This thesis presents the research, design, and evaluation of the learning support system VESSEL: Virtual Environment to Support the Societal participation Education of Low-literates. The project was started from the premise that people of low literacy in the Netherlands participate in society less often and less effectively than literate people...

Towards Engineering AI Software for Fairness: A framework to help design fair, accountable and transparent algorithmic decision-making systems

Algorithmic decision-making (ADM) is becoming increasingly prevalent in society, due to the rapid technological developments in Artificial Intelligence. ADM make substantially impactful decisions about people: diagnosing whether we have a disease, what news and which ads we get to see, whether we<br/>are eligible for a job, benefits, a college...

Using scaffolding to formalize digital coach support for low-literate learners

In this study, we attempt to specify the cognitive support behavior of a previously designed embodied conversational agent coach that provides learning support to low-literates. Three knowledge gaps are identified in the existing work: an incomplete specification of the behaviors that make up ‘support,’ an incomplete specification of how this...

Designing context-aware systems: A method for understanding and analysing context in practice

Context-aware systems are systems that have the ability to sense and adapt to the environment. To operate in large-scale multi-stakeholder environments, systems often require context awareness. The context elements that systems in such environments should take into account are becoming ever more complex and go beyond elements like geographic...

Feasibility of a Knowledge-Based Engineering framework for the AEC industries

This paper presents the development of a novel computational framework with which expert analysis knowledge can be captured, stored and dynamically retrieved when required to determine the performance of a building design with respect to user-defined requirements. By subdividing the engineer's and designer's knowledge into discrete steps, and...

Requirements Engineering Practices in Global Software Engineering Organizations: A Study in the Banking Industry

In this thesis we report on our investigation of requirements engineering (RE) practices and challenges in global software engineering (GSE) settings. We conducted a literature survey and a series of interviews/surveys to reach our goal. The subject of the research is the banking industry in the Netherlands actively involved in GSE. More...

The uses of norms

This chapter presents a variety of applications of norms. These applications include governance in sociotechnical systems, data licensing and data collection, understanding software development teams, requirements engineering, assurance, natural resource allocation, wireless grids, autonomous vehicles, serious games, and virtual worlds.

Transparency in actions on requirements

The combination between agile software engineering and distributed engineering is gaining a growing interest. Combining these however creates an interesting paradox. Where agile clearly states that documentation is not the most important thing, from the field of globally distributed engineering a higher focus on documentation is observed. In...

Using Enterprise Ontology as a basis for Requirements for Cross-Organizationally Usable Applications

Developing cross-organizationally usable applications is becoming increasingly important. However, actually re-using business applications has been hindered in practice often by implicit assumptions about organizational and IT implementation. We propose a method to gather requirements for cross- organizationally usable applications that, taking...

Architecture-Driven Integration of Modeling Languages for the Design of Software-Intensive Systems

In the research that led to this thesis a multi-disciplinary approach, combining Traffic Engineering and Software Engineering, was used. Traffic engineers come up with new control strategies and algorithms for improving traffic. Once new solutions are defined from a Traffic Engineering point of view, there is the problem of obtaining operational...

Customer Involvement in Distributed Requirements Engineering

The graduation project is run as an internship at software company Exact. The company wants to reduce the time to market for their products. To achieve this objective, Exact wants to adopt agile development and is aiming towards the implementation of a development process that is both globally distributed and Scrum-like. The project’s goal in...