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Despite strong evidence of widespread errors, spreadsheet developers rarely subject their spreadsheets to post-development testing to reduce errors. This may be because spreadsheet developers are overconfident in the accuracy of their…
Contemporary spreadsheets are plagued by a profusion of errors, auditing difficulties, lack of uniform development methodologies, and barriers to easy comprehension of the underlying business models they represent. This paper presents a…
Systematic differences in experimental materials, methods, measurements, and data handling between labs, over time, and among personnel can sabotage experimental reproducibility. Uncovering such differences can be difficult and time…
The risks of spreadsheet use do not just come from the misuse of formulae. As such, training needs to go beyond this technical aspect of spreadsheet use and look at the spreadsheet in its full business context. While standard training is by…
Refactoring is a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing its observable behaviour. A database refactoring is a small change to the database schema which…
Things can go spectacularly wrong when clustering timeseries data that has been preprocessed with a sliding window. We highlight three surprising failures that emerge depending on how the window size compares with the timeseries length. In…
Spreadsheets offer a supremely successful democratisation platform, placing the manipulation and presentation of numbers within the grasp of users that have little or no mathematical expertise or IT experience. What appears to be almost…
Most spreadsheet surveys both for reporting use and error focus on the practical application of the spreadsheet in a particular industry. Typically these studies will illustrate that a particular percentage of spreadsheets are used for…
[Spreadsheet] Models are invaluable tools for strategic planning. Models help key decision makers develop a shared conceptual understanding of complex decisions, identify sensitivity factors and test management scenarios. Different…
It is widely accepted that traditional modular structures suffer from the dominant decomposition problem. Therefore, to improve current modularity views, it is important to investigate the impact of design decisions concerning modularity in…
It has been hypothesized that some form of "modular" structure in artificial neural networks should be useful for learning, compositionality, and generalization. However, defining and quantifying modularity remains an open problem. We cast…
We present a widely-used operations management model used in supply and distribution planning, that is typically embedded in a periodic business process that necessitates model modification and reuse. We consider three alternative…
The humble spreadsheet is the most widely used data storage, manipulation and modelling tool. Its ubiquity over the past 30 years has seen its successful application in every area of life. Surprisingly the spreadsheet has remained…
Multimodal learning has seen remarkable progress, particularly with the emergence of large-scale pre-training across various modalities. However, most current approaches are built on the assumption of a deterministic, one-to-one alignment…
Modularity is a general principle present in many fields. It offers attractive advantages, including, among others, ease of conceptualization, interpretability, scalability, module combinability, and module reusability. The deep learning…
In this paper, we report some on-going focused research, but are further keen to set it in the context of a proposed bigger picture, as follows. There is a certain depressing pattern about the attitude of industry to spreadsheet error…
A popular approach in combinatorial optimization is to model problems as integer linear programs. Ideally, the relaxed linear program would have only integer solutions, which happens for instance when the constraint matrix is totally…
Spreadsheets are widely used in industry, because they are flexible and easy to use. Often, they are even used for business-critical applications. It is however difficult for spreadsheet users to correctly assess the maintainability of…
The paper examines in the context of financial reporting, the controls that organisations have in place to manage spreadsheet risk and errors. There has been widespread research conducted in this area, both in Ireland and internationally.…
Recent research has highlighted the high incidence of errors in spreadsheet models used in industry. In an attempt to reduce the incidence of such errors, a teaching approach has been devised which aids students to reduce their likelihood…