Other Computer Engineering Commons^™

Inventions On Selecting Gui Elements, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Selecting an object or element is a fundamental operation in any graphic user interface. It is necessary to select an object before doing any operation (such as, dragging, copying, opening, deleting etc.) on that object. The GUI may provide features to select any single object or even multiple objects. The feature of selecting multiple objects can provides tremendous power to the GUI as the user can do complex operations on multiple objects in one go. However, the process of selection is not as simple as it appears to the user of a GUI. The internal logic of a selection mechanism …

Inventions On Displaying And Resizing Windows, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Windows are used quite frequently in a GUI environment. The greatest advantage of using windows is that each window creates a virtual screen space. Hence, although the physical screen space is limited to a few inches, use of windows can create unlimited screen space to display innumerable items. The use of windows facilitates the user to open and interact with multiple programs or documents simultaneously in different windows. Sometimes a single program may also open multiple windows to display various items. The user can resize the windows and move their location time to time as desired. However, there are several …

Inventions On Drag And Drop In Gui, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Drag and drop operation is one of the key capabilities of any Graphical User Interface. The user can do quite complex operations simply by visually dragging and dropping objects from one location to another. It saves user from remembering and typing a lot of commands. The result of a drag and drop operation may vary depending the type of source object and type of destination object. For example dragging a file and dropping on a folder may copy or move the file to the destination folder, dropping that file to a remote ftp location may upload that file using internet, …

Inventions On Color Selections In Graphical User Interfaces, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Color is an important aspect of any graphical user interface. Color is used to make a GUI attractive and meaningful. But, there are difficulties in using colors too. Improper use of color can give adverse effects. Wrong colors at wrong place make the GUI look clumsy and confusing. Besides the aesthetics issues there are many other issues involved with colors. One of the contradictions relating to usage of color is “The color of the GUI should be customizable to suit user preference. But at the same time it should not be customizable, as that will cause annoyance and confusion to …

Inventions On Gui Aesthetics, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Aesthetics or “look and feel” is one of the most important features of any graphical user interface. Better aesthetics makes the interface user-friendlier and more popular. Better aesthetics helps the user to understand the meaning of various components and memorize the navigation paths. A better look and feel ultimately makes a GUI more efficient and effective. Various methods are adopted to improve the aesthetics of a GUI, such as, by using colors, using 3D graphics, using pictorial icons, using sound etc.

It is important to provide links to all the features on the desktop or a quick access panel. But …

Inventions On Using Sound And Speech In Gui, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Voice recognition facilitates a human interaction with the machine. VR may be used to replace the manual task of pushing buttons on a wireless telephone keypad. This is particularly useful when the hands of the user are busy with other activities like driving a car.

However, the VRS system has several limitations. The VRS requires lot of training and customization in order to be effectively used by individual users as each individual falls into different voice patterns. Besides the voice interface is complex and is not as reliable as the keyboard or mouse. This article illustrates some interesting inventions on …

Inventions On Presenting Textual Items In Graphical User Interface, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Although a GUI largely replaces textual descriptions by graphical icons, the textual items are not completely removed. The textual items are inevitably used in window titles, message boxes, help items, menu items and popup items. Textual items are necessary for communicating messages that are beyond the limitation of graphical messages. However, it is necessary to harness the textual items on the graphical interface in such a way that they complement each other to produce the best effect. One has to keep various considerations in mind while applying textual items in Graphical User Interface. This article illustrates a few inventions on …

Inventions On Dialog Boxes Used In Gui, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The dialog boxes are useful in case of displaying warnings, errors, confirmations etc. in special situations. A typical dialog box is displayed in a small window with some text message along with a few options for the user to select. However, there are certain difficulties associated in programming and implementing a conventional dialog box, such as, severe programming effort, rigidity of the hard coded message, obscuring screen space and so on. There is a need to overcome these difficulties of the dialog box to make them more efficient and useful. The modality of the dialog boxes also creates some limitations. …

Inventions On Tree Navigators Used In Graphical User Interface, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

A tree view or tree navigator is used to display hierarchical data organized in the form of a tree. In a tree structure there are parent and child nodes. The child nodes may further have descendants to n levels. There are many methods to make the navigation easy. Some of these are expanding and collapsing branches, splitting the tree, displaying a parent node in a separate tree, zooming branches, scrolling in various directions etc. It is still a difficult exercise to handle large trees efficiently. The effort still continues to manage large number of nodes with faster speed, greater control, …

10 Inventions On Scrolling And Scrollbars In Graphical User Interface, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Scrolling mechanism is used to display and edit large documents in a limited screen space or window. The scrolling mechanism may include a vertical scroll bar or a horizontal scroll bar or both to move the contents of the documents up and down or left and right. There may be navigation buttons on the screen representing the navigation keys on the keyboard. The user can click these buttons to scroll the screen. There may be very different methods of scrolling such as by using the “thumb”, as popularly used with a pdf document. Scrolling may be achieved through eyeball tracking …

A Case-Based Technique For Tracking Concept Drift In Spam Filtering, Sarah Jane Delany, Padraig Cunningham, Alexey Tsymbal, Lorcan Coyle

Articles

Spam filtering is a particularly challenging machine learning task as the data distribution and concept being learned changes over time. It exhibits a particularly awkward form of concept drift as the change is driven by spammers wishing to circumvent spam filters. In this paper we show that lazy learning techniques are appropriate for such dynamically changing contexts. We present a case-based system for spam filtering that can learn dynamically. We evaluate its performance as the case-base is updated with new cases. We also explore the benefit of periodically redoing the feature selection process to bring new features into play. Our …

Jess – A Java Security Scanner For Eclipse, Russell Spitler

Honors Theses

Secure software is the responsibility of every developer. In order to help a developer with this responsibility there are many automated source code security auditors. These tools perform a variety of functions, from finding calls to insecure functions to poorly generated random numbers. These programs have existed for years and perform the security audit with varying degrees of success.

Largely missing in the world of programming is such a security auditor for the Java programming language. Currently, Fortify Software produces the only Java source code security auditor; this is a commercially available package.

This void is what inspired JeSS, Java …

Information Delivery On Mobile Devices Using Contour Icon Sonification, Charlie Cullen, Eugene Coyle

Conference papers

This paper examines the use of musical patterns to convey information, specifically in the context of mobile devices. Existing mechanisms (such as the popularity of the Morse code SMS alert) suggest that the use of musical patterns on mobile devices can be a very efficient and powerful method of data delivery. Unique musical patterns based on templates known as Contour Icons are used to represent specific data variables, with the output rendering of these patterns being referred to as a Sonification of that data. Contour Icon patterns mimic basic shapes and structures, thus providing listeners with a means of categorising …

Trioson: A Graphical User Interface For Pattern Sonification, Charlie Cullen, Eugene Coyle

Conference papers

The TrioSon software allows users to map musical patterns to input data variables via a graphical user interface (GUI). The application is a Java routine designed to take input files of standard Comma Separated Values (CSV) format and output Standard Midi Files (SMF) using the internal Java Sound API. TrioSon renders output Sonifications from input data files for up to 3 user-defined parameters, allocated as bass, chord and melody instruments for the purposes of arrangement. In this manner each parameter concerned is distinguished by its individual instrumental timbre, with the option of rendering any combination of 1 to 3 parameters …

Information Delivery On Mobile Devices Using Boolean Sonification Patterns, Charlie Cullen, Eugene Coyle

Conference papers

Sonification is the means by which non-speech audio can be used to convey information. Existing work has produced methods for delivering information in a wide range of fields, and recent work has considered the huge potential of mobile devices for Sonification. Boolean Sonification is a method of defining two related musical patterns as boolean conditions (true/false, yes/no etc.), such that one is considered contrary to the other by the listener. The final pattern set ideally comprises of two musical events that are closely enough related as to be considered a group, yet distinct enough to be perceived as separate entities. …

Software Development Project Risk Management: A Literature Review, Kevin Macg. Adams, C. Ariel Pinto

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The rapid and unprecedented growth in software has brought with it some of the most spectacular and costly project failures in modern history. How risk management is presented in the scholarly journals may give insight into the risk management methods and techniques in use on software development projects. This paper provides a glimpse into the risk management methods, methodologies and techniques available to those who are responsible for software development projects by conducting a non-experimental content analysis. The findings reveal that risk management has not received sufficient attention and does not appear to be widely accepted within the software engineering …

Weak Factorizations, Fractions And Homotopies, Alexander Kurz, Jiří Rosický

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We show that the homotopy category can be assigned to any category equipped with a weak factorization system. A classical example of this construction is the stable category of modules. We discuss a connection with the open map approach to bisimulations proposed by Joyal, Nielsen and Winskel.