Sep 2026· Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Abstract
BMO is an offline, voice-to-voice French tutoring agent designed to run entirely on consumer CPU hardware, built to test how far AI language tutoring can move away from centralized cloud APIs toward local, sovereign computation. This paper asks a specific empirical question: how small can a language model be shrunk before it loses its ability to teach effectively? Three configurations, spanning 3.4B to 7.6B parameters, are evaluated on identical hardware for teaching quality, response naturalness, energy per turn, and latency, using a documented LLM-as-judge protocol adopted after an automated scoring method was shown to have no real discriminative power. The paper introduces the Sovereign Utility Score, an original metric combining teaching quality and resource cost into a single number, and reports its central finding: the cheapest, fastest configuration is also the one most likely to silently confirm a learner's grammatical error as correct, while the best teacher costs roughly twice as much to run. Framed through the French concept of sobriété numérique (digital sobriety), the paper connects this trade-off to environmental justice, accessibility, and linguistic-justice concerns beyond pure computational efficiency.
The results are packaged in the Greenfield Startup Model (GSM), which explains the priority of startups to release the product as quickly as possible, and the need to shorten time-to-market, by speeding up the development through low-precision engineering activities.
Carmine Giardino, Nicolò Paternoster, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· IEEE Transactions on Softwar...· 178 citations· ⚡14
Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited timeframes and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models.
M. Unterkalmsteiner, P. Abrahamsson, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· e-Informatica Software Engin...· 157 citations· ⚡17
This study conducts a case survey study based on the secondary data of the major pivots happened in 49 software startups, and demonstrates that customer need pivot is the most common among all pivot types.
Sohaib Shahid Bajwa, Xiaofeng Wang, Anh Nguyen-Duc et al.· Empirical Software Engineeri...· 127 citations· ⚡15
The comparison of adopter and non-adopter sample reveals three potential adoption inhibitor, security, data privacy, and portability, which underlines the importance of the technical and security perspectives for research investigating the adoption of technology.
Nattakarn Phaphoom, Xiaofeng Wang, S. Samuel et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 111 citations· ⚡8
This study investigates how Lean internal startup facilitates software product innovation in large companies and identifies its enablers and inhibitors, and shows the potential of the method-in-action framework to investigate the Lean startup approach in non-startup context.
Henry Edison, Nina M. Smørsgård, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 78 citations· ⚡6
The application of agile software methods and more recently the integration of Lean practices contribute to the trend of continuous improvement in the software industry. One such area warranting proper empirical evidence is a project’s operational efficiency when using the Kanban method. This short paper takes a new angle and explores waste in the Kanban-driven software development project context. A preliminary research model is presented for helping the consequent replication of the study. The results from the empirical analysis suggest Kanban can be an effective method in visualizing and organizing the current work, but does not prevent waste from creeping in, although the overall project outcome may be successful.
Marko Ikonen, Petri Kettunen, Nilay V. Oza et al.· EUROMICRO Conference on Soft...· 67 citations· ⚡9
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