Software development is undoubtedly a complex and laborious process. Software engineers really work hard to carry out a particular software. But now a European experiment is going on which will automate the building and testing phase of programming, thus reducing the time and efforts used in this process.
Software Development
First Ever Computer Program:
Computer programming has came a long way since days when Ada Lovelace wrote the first ever computer program in 1842. It was a small program written to calculate Bernoulli numbers. These days programming was not as complex and was not more than an individual effort.
Present day Scenario:
These days’ computer programs are getting more and more complex. A team of software developers works for years to develop a program, building the concept, coding, testing, debugging and then finally releasing and maintenance of programs.
Now if we need to reduce the time and effort in software development process, the only thing we can do is to “Automate the Process.”
The ETICS project:
ETICS project is a giant leap in the field of software development. It will automate the most of the software programming tasks thus helping software developers, managers and testers and will also help to obtain high quality. This will also help in reducing the cost of software and time taken in development.
The new system:
This new system will help software developers and users to automate the most of the process in development and testing execution. This amazing platform will use latest in “Grid” software and it can operate in multiple platforms. It can also be customized and developed further as it is an open source project.
Developers can install the client interface of system and then they can use results from round-the-clock builds. Tests can also be monitored via web and configuration metadata of software can also be browed and edited via a secure web application.
Mr. Alberto Di Meglio: Man behind this project
Mr. Alberto Di Meglio of CERN, the European organization for nuclear research is leading the research. In his words:
“By automating many of their day-to-day tasks, the ETICS system supports software managers, developers and testers in obtaining higher quality software.”
Development:
The ETICS platform has been developed in two phases over 3 years and has been continuously refined in collaboration with users. Some more new functions are being developed for ETICS 2 which will help software developers to run complex tests over distributed networks.
We must hope that this new system will surely bring a new revolution in the field of software development and testing.
Indus valley is one of the most important urban civilizations under research till date for its mysterious scripts. Archaeologists believe that Indus Valley was the beginning of Indian civilization that flourished around 2600 to 1900 B.C. in the area that is border of modern Pakistan and India. It was discovered in 1922 and since then a lot of work has been done on analyzing the language, but still that mysterious language of one of the earliest civilizations is an unbroken code.
The Mysterious Script of Indus Valley
The Mysterious Language:
The records of their language have been found on seals, small pieces of soft stones and on copper tablets. It is also proved that Harappans (that age was called Harappan Age) sailed to far countries for trading purposes as their seals have been recovered in Mesopotamia civilization that is Modern Iraq.
Around 400 different signs have been used in the language with the average length of text to 5 signs, while the longest text is of 14 signs.
According to some experts this language belongs to Dravidian family and it is logo-syllabic, but some think that these signs are just pictogram of political or religious icons instead of a language.
Latest Research on this Mystery:
A team of Indian and American scientist and archeologists are now using mathematics and computer science to break the mysterious code. The project is being funded by Packard Foundation, Sir Jamsedji Tata Trust, University of Washington and the Indus Research Center.
The study shows distinct patterns in the symbols’ placement in sequences and creates a statistical model for the unknown language.
“The statistical model provides insights into the underlying grammatical structure of the Indus script. Such a model can be valuable for decipherment, because any meaning ascribed to a symbol must make sense in the context of other symbols that precede or follow it.”
They are actually working on recognizing the mathematical patterns in the sequence of symbols. Calculations show that the order of symbols is meaningful; taking one symbol from a sequence found on an artifact and changing its position produces a new sequence that has a much lower probability of belonging to the hypothetical language.
Till now they are sure that this script is a language and there is a clear underlying logic in Indus Script.
As it is previously discussed that their seals have been recovered in Mesopotamia civilization in Modern Iraq it is sure that they used to trade with these civilizations and hence it is a firm belief that the language is not just a religious or political symbol, but a mode of representing different information in West Asia by Indus traders.
Rao says:
“The finding that the Indus script may have been versatile enough to represent different subject matter in West Asia is provocative. This finding is hard to reconcile with the claim that the script merely represents religious or political symbols.”
Markov Model of Research:
The researchers have used Markov statistical model that estimates the likelihood of a future event based on patterns seen in the past. It was developed a century ago by Andrey Markov, a Russian mathematician and is used in economics, genetics, speech-recognition and many other fields.
Researcher have used statistical model to fill missing symbols on damaged archeological artifacts. This will increase the pool of data available for encoding the scripts of that ancient civilization.
