Safe Programming Research Articles

Interleaved programming of subthalamic deep brain stimulation to avoid adverse effects and preserve motor benefit in Parkinson's disease.

Subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) is the most common surgical treatment for managing motor complications in Parkinson's disease (PD). Ultimately, outcomes depend on a variety of factors including lead location, access and expertize in programming and PD medical management. Nevertheless, achieving ideal programming settings can be difficult in certain patients, leading to suboptimal control of symptoms and stimulation-induced side effects, notably dysarthria and dyskinesia. Interleaved stimulation (ILS) is a newer programming technique that attempts to optimize the stimulation field, improving control of symptoms while minimizing stimulation-induced adverse effects. A retrospective chart review was performed on PD patients receiving STN DBS over the past 12 months. Clinical and demographic data were collected from patients identified as having received ILS. The rationale and clinical efficacy of ILS was analyzed. Nine patients received ILS due to incomplete PD symptom control or stimulation-induced side effects after attempting multiple programming options. Appropriate lead location was confirmed with postoperative MRI except in one case. Following ILS, patients reported improvement in symptoms and resolution of side effects, while preserving adequate control in Parkinsonism with a mean improvement in UPDRS-MOTOR scores of 51.2 %. ILS continues to emerge as a safe and effective programming strategy for maximizing symptom control in PD while diminishing stimulation-induced side effects.

Session details: Safe programming languages for the multicore era (I)

Session details: Safe programming languages for the multicore era (I)

Session details: Safe programming languages for the multicore era (II)

Session details: Safe programming languages for the multicore era (II)

Safe parallel programming in ada with language extensions

The increased presence of parallel computing platforms brings concerns to the general purpose domain that were previously prevalent only in the specific niche of high-performance computing. As parallel programming technologies become more prevalent in the form of new emerging programming languages and extensions of existing languages, additional safety concerns arise as part of the paradigm shift from sequential to parallel behaviour. In this paper, we propose various syntax extensions to the Ada language, which provide mechanisms whereby the compiler is given the necessary semantic information to enable the implicit and explicit parallelization of code. The model is based on earlier work, which separates parallelism specification from concurrency implementation, but proposes an updated syntax with additional mechanisms to facilitate the development of safer parallel programs.

Characterization of aerobically fit individuals with cardiovascular disease

With an ageing population there is an increased prevalence of individuals living with cardiovascular disease (CVD). Characteristics of older aerobically fit individuals with previously diagnosed CVD have not been studied. Therefore, our knowledge is limited as to how, or if, aerobically fit individuals with CVD attempt to adapt their physical activity and the intensity of their training programmes. The objective of this paper is to characterise the physical activity habits and behaviours of older aerobically fit individuals with CVD. We identified 28 aerobically fit patients with CVD from those who completed a minimum of 15 and 12 min of the Bruce treadmill protocol for men and women, respectively. Consenting participants responded to questionnaires regarding physical activity levels, competitive event participation and self-monitoring since diagnosis of heart disease. Average age and treadmill time of participants were 56 and 49 years and 15.6 and 13.0 min for males and females, respectively. Data were obtained regarding recent medical history (medical diagnoses, surgeries/procedures). Despite the majority of individuals participating in the same or more activity since their diagnosis, 25% indicated that their condition limited their activity and 39% reported having symptoms during activity. Nearly all participants (93%) indicated that they monitored their heart rate during exercise. However, only 14% of participants stated that their physician advised them on how to exercise safely. It is necessary for physicians and cardiac rehabilitation programmes to be involved in safe and effective exercise programming to allow individuals to return to sport after CVD.

Safe Space Programs in K-12 Schools: Creating a Visible Presence of LGBTQ Allies

Safe Space Programs can provide school staff with critical knowledge and skills to create a supportive learning milieu for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth in K-12 schools. The literature related to Safe Space Programs suggests that they may be instrumental in helping alter anti-LGBTQ climates in schools. This article illustrates how Seattle University's Graduate Counseling program developed a student advocacy organization to provide Safe Space programming to school personnel in local area schools.

Математическая модель многопоточной программы и правила безопасного многопоточного программирования

Математическая модель многопоточной программы и правила безопасного многопоточного программирования

A linear type system for multicore programming in ATS

In this day and age of multicore architectures, programming language support is in urgent need for constructing programs that can take great advantage of machines with multiple cores. We present in this paper an approach to safe multicore programming in ATS, a recently developed functional programming language that supports both linear and dependent types. In particular, we formalize a type system capable of guaranteeing safe manipulation of resources on multicore machines and establish its soundness. We also provide concrete examples as well as experimental results in support of the practicality of the presented approach to multicore programming.

Maternal morbidity: Neglected dimension of safe motherhood in the developing world

In safe motherhood programming in the developing world, insufficient attention has been given to maternal morbidity, which can extend well beyond childbirth. For every woman who dies of pregnancy-related causes, an estimated 20 women experience acute or chronic morbidity. Maternal morbidity adversely affects families, communities and societies. Maternal morbidity has multiple causes, with duration ranging from acute to chronic, severity ranging from transient to permanent and with a range of diagnosis and treatment options. This article addresses six selected relatively neglected aspects of maternal morbidity to illustrate the range of acute and chronic morbidities that can affect women related to pregnancy and childbearing that are prevalent in developing countries: anaemia, maternal depression, infertility, fistula, uterine rupture and scarring and genital and uterine prolapse. Based on this review, recommendations to reduce maternal morbidity include: expand the focus of safe motherhood to explicitly include morbidity; improve data on incidence and prevalence of maternal morbidity; link mortality and morbidity outcomes and programming; increase access to facility- and community-based maternal health care and reproductive health care; and address the antecedents to poor maternal health through a lifecycle approach.

Towards the Safe Programming of Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are rather challenging to deploy, program, and debug. Current programming languages for these platforms suffer from a significant semantic gap between their specifications and underlying implementations. This fact precludes the development of (type-)safe applications, which would potentially simplify the task of programming and debugging deployed networks. In this paper we define a core calculus for programming sensor networks and propose to use it as an assembly language for developing type-safe, high-level programming languages.

Design and Proof of a Safe Programming Language PointerC

The safety property of programming languages plays a fundamental role in the design and implementation of safety-critical software systems. And the authors have made investigation towards the design and proof of safe languages suitable for system programming. This paper presents the design of a C-like imperative programming language PointerC. One novelty of PointerC is that typing rules in its type system are accompanied by logic propositions which are called side conditions. And this paper proves PointerC is safe—The executions of programs will not violate the safety policy of the language, if these side conditions hold. A pointer logic, as an extension of Hoare logic, has been designed for the purpose of proving pointer-related side conditions statically. This paper presents the soundness proof for the pointer logic.

Safe functional reactive programming through dependent types

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is an approach to reactive programming where systems are structured as networks of functions operating on signals. FRP is based on the synchronous data-flow paradigm and supports both continuous-time and discrete-time signals (hybrid systems). What sets FRP apart from most other languages for similar applications is its support for systems with dynamic structure and for higher-order reactive constructs. Statically guaranteeing correctness properties of programs is an attractive proposition. This is true in particular for typical application domains for reactive programming such as embedded systems. To that end, many existing reactive languages have type systems or other static checks that guarantee domain-specific properties, such as feedback loops always being well-formed. However, they are limited in their capabilities to support dynamism and higher-order data-flow compared with FRP. Thus, the onus of ensuring such properties of FRP programs has so far been on the programmer as established static techniques do not suffice. In this paper, we show how dependent types allow this concern to be addressed. We present an implementation of FRP embedded in the dependently-typed language Agda, leveraging the type system of the host language to craft a domain-specific (dependent) type system for FRP. The implementation constitutes a discrete, operational semantics of FRP, and as it passes the Agda type, coverage, and termination checks, we know the operational semantics is total, which means our type system is safe.

The Cedar Project: Historical trauma, sexual abuse and HIV risk among young Aboriginal people who use injection and non-injection drugs in two Canadian cities

Recent Indigenist scholarship has situated high rates of traumatic life experiences, including sexual abuse, among Indigenous peoples of North America within the larger context of their status as colonized peoples. Sexual abuse has been linked to many negative health outcomes including mental, sexual and drug-related vulnerabilities. There is a paucity of research in Canada addressing the relationship between antecedent sexual abuse and negative health outcomes among Aboriginal people including elevated risk of HIV infection. The primary objectives of this study were to determine factors associated with sexual abuse among participants of the Cedar Project, a cohort of young Aboriginal people between the ages of 14 and 30 years who use injection and non-injection drugs in two urban centres in British Columbia, Canada; and to locate findings through a lens of historical and intergenerational trauma. We utilized post-colonial perspectives in research design, problem formulation and the interpretation of results. Multivariate modeling was used to determine the extent to which a history of sexual abuse was predictive of negative health outcomes and vulnerability to HIV infection. Of the 543 eligible participants, 48% reported ever having experienced sexual abuse; 69% of sexually abused participants were female. The median age of first sexual abuse was 6 years for both female and male participants. After adjusting for sociodemographic variables and factors of historical trauma, sexually abused participants were more likely to have ever been on the streets for more than three nights, to have ever self-harmed, to have suicide ideation, to have attempted suicide, to have a diagnosis of mental illness, to have been in the emergency department within the previous 6 months, to have had over 20 lifetime sexual partners, to have ever been paid for sex and to have ever overdosed. The prevalence and consequences of sexual abuse among Cedar Project participants are of grave concern. Sexual trauma will continue to impact individuals, families and communities until unresolved historical trauma is meaningfully addressed in client-driven, culturally safe programming.

Contextual effects for version-consistent dynamic software updating and safe concurrent programming

This paper presents a generalization of standard effect systems that we call contextual effects . A traditional effect system computes the effect of an expression e . Our system additionally computes the effects of the computational context in which e occurs. More specifically, we computethe effect of the computation that has already occurred(the prior effect ) and the effect of the computation yet to take place (the future effect ). Contextual effects are useful when the past or future computation of the program is relevant at various program points. We present two substantial examples. First, we show how prior and future effects can be used to enforce transactional version consistency (TVC), a novel correctness property for dynamic software updates. TV Censures that programmer-designated transactional code blocks appear to execute entirely at the same code version, even if a dynamic update occurs in the middle of the block. Second, we show how future effects can be used in the analysis of multi-threaded programs to find thread-shared locations. This is an essential step in applications such as data race detection.

Dynamically extending the Corral with native code for high-speed packet processing

By combining the Open Kernel Environment, a Click-like software model known as Corral and basic concepts of active networking, we allow third-party code to control the code organisation of a network node at any level, including kernel and network card. We show how an active network environment was implemented and how this environment allows slow active code to control the code organisation of the fast path. The underlying code is structured much like components in a 'Click'-router that may be connected or disconnected at runtime. Not only are active packets permitted to reconfigure predefined native components in the networking code, by using the safe programming model of the open kernel environment they are also able to load and link their own native components at any place in the datapath and at any level in the processing hierarchy.

Langages et formalismes synchrones. Fondements

Synchronous Languages are special purpose languages dedicated to safe programming of real-time and reactive systems. There are now also used in high-level modeling and analysis of complex digital circuits and embedded systems. Synchronous languages and formalisms rely on sound mathematical models. Thus, they are amenable to formal verifications and analysis. This paper presents the foundations of the synchronous approach. The syntax, semantics, and model of computation associated with various languages are illustrated by a simple example.

Using key informant monitoring in safe motherhood programming in Nepal

This article discusses the methodology and application of the Key Informant Monitoring (KIM) tool as used by the Nepal Safer Motherhood Project (NSMP). NSMP aims to achieve a sustained increase in the uptake of midwifery and essential obstetric care services by addressing, among other things, constraints on access to such services. Data collected by community-based Key Informant Researchers (KIRs) are synthesised and used by NSMP and key project partners for monitoring and planning purposes. NSMP has used KIM findings to modify its main interventions at the local level. International and Nepali NGOs have adopted KIM in their safe motherhood and other development programmes. Village Development Committees, with support from NGOs and NSMP, have responded to issues raised by KIM by running maternal health awareness-raising campaigns, working with traditional healers, improving the quality of care, and facilitating local emergency transport and funding schemes. KIRs have proved effective as sources of information and as change agents, spreading safe motherhood messages to promote behaviour change.

17.7 A pragmatic approach for a safe programming of biventricular stimulators: Preliminary data of a prospective study

17.7 A pragmatic approach for a safe programming of biventricular stimulators: Preliminary data of a prospective study

17.7 A pragmatic approach for a safe programming of biventricular stimulators: Preliminary data of a prospective study

17.7 A pragmatic approach for a safe programming of biventricular stimulators: Preliminary data of a prospective study

17.7 A pragmatic approach for a safe programming of biventricular stimulators: Preliminary data of a prospective study

17.7 A pragmatic approach for a safe programming of biventricular stimulators: Preliminary data of a prospective study