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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Its Training Update, Veronica Trammell Dec 2011

Its Training Update, Veronica Trammell

Veronica O. Trammell

No abstract provided.


Finding Relevant Answers In Software Forums, Swapna Gottopati, David Lo, Jing Jiang Dec 2011

Finding Relevant Answers In Software Forums, Swapna Gottopati, David Lo, Jing Jiang

David LO

Online software forums provide a huge amount of valuable content. Developers and users often ask questions and receive answers from such forums. The availability of a vast amount of thread discussions in forums provides ample opportunities for knowledge acquisition and summarization. For a given search query, current search engines use traditional information retrieval approach to extract webpages containing relevant keywords. However, in software forums, often there are many threads containing similar keywords where each thread could contain a lot of posts as many as 1,000 or more. Manually finding relevant answers from these long threads is a painstaking task to …


Mining Top-K Large Structural Patterns In A Massive Network, Feida Zhu, Qiang Qu, David Lo, Xifeng Yan, Jiawei Han, Philip S. Yu Dec 2011

Mining Top-K Large Structural Patterns In A Massive Network, Feida Zhu, Qiang Qu, David Lo, Xifeng Yan, Jiawei Han, Philip S. Yu

David LO

With ever-growing popularity of social networks, web and bio-networks, mining large frequent patterns from a single huge network has become increasingly important. Yet the existing pattern mining methods cannot offer the efficiency desirable for large pattern discovery. We propose Spider- Mine, a novel algorithm to efficiently mine top-K largest frequent patterns from a single massive network with any user-specified probability of 1 − ϵ. Deviating from the existing edge-by-edge (i.e., incremental) pattern-growth framework, SpiderMine achieves its efficiency by unleashing the power of small patterns of a bounded diameter, which we call “spiders”. With the spider structure, our approach adopts a …


Towards Succinctness In Mining Scenario-Based Specifications, David Lo, Shahar Maoz Dec 2011

Towards Succinctness In Mining Scenario-Based Specifications, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

David LO

Specification mining methods are used to extract candidate specifications from system execution traces. A major challenge for specification mining is succinctness. That is, in addition to the soundness, completeness, and scalable performance of the specification mining method, one is interested in producing a succinct result, which conveys a lot of information about the system under investigation but uses a short, machine and human-readable representation. In this paper we address the succinctness challenge in the context of scenario-based specification mining, whose target formalism is live sequence charts (LSC), an expressive extension of classical sequence diagrams. We do this by adapting three …


Automated Detection Of Likely Design Flaws In Layered Architectures, Aditya Budi, - Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Shaowei Wang Dec 2011

Automated Detection Of Likely Design Flaws In Layered Architectures, Aditya Budi, - Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Shaowei Wang

David LO

Layered architecture prescribes a good principle for separating concerns to make systems more maintainable. One example of such layered architectures is the separation of classes into three groups: Boundary, Control, and Entity, which are referred to as the three analysis class stereotypes in UML. Classes of different stereotypes are interacting with one another, when properly designed, the overall interaction would be maintainable, flexible, and robust. On the other hand, poor design would result in less maintainable system that is prone to errors. In many software projects, the stereotypes of classes are often missing, thus detection of design flaws becomes non-trivial. …


Effective Security By Obscurity, John Christian Smith Dec 2011

Effective Security By Obscurity, John Christian Smith

John Christian Smith

"Security by obscurity" is a bromide which is frequently applied to undermine the perceived value of a certain class of techniques in security. This usage initially stemmed from applications and experience in the areas of cryptographic theory, and the open vs. closed source debate. Through the perceived absence of true security, the field of security by obscurity has not coalesced into a viable or recognizable approach for security practitioners. Consequently, this has resulted in these techniques going under-used and under-appreciated by defenders, while they continue to provide value to attackers, which creates an unfortunate information asymmetry. Exploring effective methods for …


Efficient Mining Of Iterative Patterns For Software Specification Discovery, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu Nov 2011

Efficient Mining Of Iterative Patterns For Software Specification Discovery, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu

David LO

Studies have shown that program comprehension takes up to 45% of software development costs. Such high costs are caused by the lack-of documented specification and further aggravated by the phenomenon of software evolution. There is a need for automated tools to extract specifications to aid program comprehension. In this paper, a novel technique to efficiently mine common software temporal patterns from traces is proposed. These patterns shed light on program behaviors, and are termed iterative patterns. They capture unique characteristic of software traces, typically not found in arbitrary sequences. Specifically, due to loops, interesting iterative patterns can occur multiple times …


Smartic: Specification Mining Architecture With Trace Filtering And Clustering, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo Nov 2011

Smartic: Specification Mining Architecture With Trace Filtering And Clustering, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

David LO

Improper management of software evolution, compounded by imprecise, and changing requirements, along with the "short time to market" requirement, commonly leads to a lack of up-to-date specifications. This can result in software that is characterized by bugs, anomalies and even security threats. Software specification mining is a new technique to address this concern by inferring specifications automatically. In this paper, we propose a novel API specification mining architecture called SMArTIC Specification Mining Architecture with Trace fIltering and Clustering) to improve the accuracy, robustness and scalability of specification miners. This architecture is constructed based on two hypotheses: (1) Erroneous traces should …


Mining Software Specifications, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo Nov 2011

Mining Software Specifications, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

David LO

No abstract provided.


Matching Dependence-Related Queries In The System Dependence Graph., Xiaoyin Wang, David Lo, Jiefeng Cheng, Lu Zhang, Hong Mei, Jeffrey Xu Yu Nov 2011

Matching Dependence-Related Queries In The System Dependence Graph., Xiaoyin Wang, David Lo, Jiefeng Cheng, Lu Zhang, Hong Mei, Jeffrey Xu Yu

David LO

In software maintenance and evolution, it is common that developers want to apply a change to a number of similar places. Due to the size and complexity of the code base, it is challenging for developers to locate all the places that need the change. A main challenge in locating the places that need the change is that, these places share certain common dependence conditions but existing code searching techniques can hardly handle dependence relations satisfactorily. In this paper, we propose a technique that enables developers to make queries involving dependence conditions and textual conditions on the system dependence graph …


Mining Iterative Generators And Representative Rules For Software Specification Discovery, David Lo, Jinyan Li, Limsoon Wong, Siau-Cheng Khoo Nov 2011

Mining Iterative Generators And Representative Rules For Software Specification Discovery, David Lo, Jinyan Li, Limsoon Wong, Siau-Cheng Khoo

David LO

Billions of dollars are spent annually on software-related cost. It is estimated that up to 45 percent of software cost is due to the difficulty in understanding existing systems when performing maintenance tasks (i.e., adding features, removing bugs, etc.). One of the root causes is that software products often come with poor, incomplete, or even without any documented specifications. In an effort to improve program understanding, Lo et al. have proposed iterative pattern mining which outputs patterns that are repeated frequently within a program trace, or across multiple traces, or both. Frequent iterative patterns reflect frequent program behaviors that likely …


Mining Past-Time Temporal Rules: A Dynamic Analysis Approach, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu Nov 2011

Mining Past-Time Temporal Rules: A Dynamic Analysis Approach, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu

David LO

No abstract provided.


Mining Antagonistic Communities From Social Networks, Kuan Zhang, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim Nov 2011

Mining Antagonistic Communities From Social Networks, Kuan Zhang, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

David LO

During social interactions in a community, there are often sub-communities that behave in opposite manner. These antagonistic sub-communities could represent groups of people with opposite tastes, factions within a community distrusting one another, etc. Taking as input a set of interactions within a community, we develop a novel pattern mining approach that extracts for a set of antagonistic sub-communities. In particular, based on a set of user specified thresholds, we extract a set of pairs of sub-communities that behave in opposite ways with one another. To prevent a blow up in these set of pairs, we focus on extracting a …


Efficient Mining Of Recurrent Rules From A Sequence Database, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu Nov 2011

Efficient Mining Of Recurrent Rules From A Sequence Database, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu

David LO

We study a novel problem of mining significant recurrent rules from a sequence database. Recurrent rules have the form "whenever a series of precedent events occurs, eventually a series of consequent events occurs". Recurrent rules are intuitive and characterize behaviors in many domains. An example is in the domain of software specifications, in which the rules capture a family of program properties beneficial to program verification and bug detection. Recurrent rules generalize existing work on sequential and episode rules by considering repeated occurrences of premise and consequent events within a sequence and across multiple sequences, and by removing the "window" …


Efficient Topological Olap On Information Networks, Qiang Qu, Feida Zhu, Xifeng Yan, Jiawei Han, Philip Yu, Hongyan Li Nov 2011

Efficient Topological Olap On Information Networks, Qiang Qu, Feida Zhu, Xifeng Yan, Jiawei Han, Philip Yu, Hongyan Li

David LO

We propose a framework for efficient OLAP on information networks with a focus on the most interesting kind, the topological OLAP (called “T-OLAP”), which incurs topological changes in the underlying networks. T-OLAP operations generate new networks from the original ones by rolling up a subset of nodes chosen by certain constraint criteria. The key challenge is to efficiently compute measures for the newly generated networks and handle user queries with varied constraints. Two effective computational techniques, T-Distributiveness and T-Monotonicity are proposed to achieve efficient query processing and cube materialization. We also provide a T-OLAP query processing framework into which these …


Comprehensive Evaluation Of Association Measures For Fault Localization, Lucia Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Aditya Budi Nov 2011

Comprehensive Evaluation Of Association Measures For Fault Localization, Lucia Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Aditya Budi

David LO

In statistics and data mining communities, there have been many measures proposed to gauge the strength of association between two variables of interest, such as odds ratio, confidence, Yule-Y, Yule-Q, Kappa, and gini index. These association measures have been used in various domains, for example, to evaluate whether a particular medical practice is associated positively to a cure of a disease or whether a particular marketing strategy is associated positively to an increase in revenue, etc. This paper models the problem of locating faults as association between the execution or non-execution of particular program elements with failures. There have been …


Towards Better Quality Specification Miners, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo Nov 2011

Towards Better Quality Specification Miners, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

David LO

Softwares are often built without specification. Tools to automatically extract specification from software are needed and many techniques have been proposed. One type of these specifications – temporal API specification – is often specified in the form of automaton (i.e., FSA/PFSA). There have been many work on mining software temporal specification using dynamic analysis techniques; i.e., analysis of software program traces. Unfortunately, the issues of scalability, robustness and accuracy of these techniques have not been comprehensively addressed. In this paper, we describe a framework that enables assessments of the performance of a specification miner in generating temporal specification of software …


Mining Interesting Link Formation Rules In Social Networks, Cane Wing-Ki Leung, Ee Peng Lim, David Lo, Jianshu Weng Nov 2011

Mining Interesting Link Formation Rules In Social Networks, Cane Wing-Ki Leung, Ee Peng Lim, David Lo, Jianshu Weng

David LO

Link structures are important patterns one looks out for when modeling and analyzing social networks. In this paper, we propose the task of mining interesting Link Formation rules (LF-rules) containing link structures known as Link Formation patterns (LF-patterns). LF-patterns capture various dyadic and/or triadic structures among groups of nodes, while LF-rules capture the formation of a new link from a focal node to another node as a postcondition of existing connections between the two nodes. We devise a novel LF-rule mining algorithm, known as LFR-Miner, based on frequent subgraph mining for our task. In addition to using a support-confidence framework …


Mining Closed Discriminative Dyadic Sequential Patterns, David Lo, Hong Cheng, - Lucia Nov 2011

Mining Closed Discriminative Dyadic Sequential Patterns, David Lo, Hong Cheng, - Lucia

David LO

A lot of data are in sequential formats. In this study, we are interested in sequential data that goes in pairs. There are many interesting datasets in this format coming from various domains including parallel textual corpora, duplicate bug reports, and other pairs of related sequences of events. Our goal is to mine a set of closed discriminative dyadic sequential patterns from a database of sequence pairs each belonging to one of the two classes +ve and -ve. These dyadic sequential patterns characterize the discriminating facets contrasting the two classes. They are potentially good features to be used for the …


Mining Patterns And Rules For Software Specification Discovery, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo Nov 2011

Mining Patterns And Rules For Software Specification Discovery, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

David LO

Software specifications are often lacking, incomplete and outdated in the industry. Lack and incomplete specifications cause various software engineering problems. Studies have shown that program comprehension takes up to 45% of software development costs. One of the root causes of the high cost is the lack-of documented specification. Also, outdated and incomplete specification might potentially cause bugs and compatibility issues. In this paper, we describe novel data mining techniques to mine or reverse engineer these specifications from the pool of software engineering data. A large amount of software data is available for analysis. One form of software data is program …


Mining Specifications In Diversified Formats From Execution Traces, David Lo Nov 2011

Mining Specifications In Diversified Formats From Execution Traces, David Lo

David LO

Software evolves; this phenomenon causes increase in maintenance efforts, problem in comprehending the ever-changing code base and difficulty in verifying software correctness. As software changes, often the documented specification is not updated. Outdated specification adds challenge to the understanding of the code base during maintenance tasks. Also, software changes might induce bugs, anomalies and even security threats. To address the above issues, we propose an array of specification mining techniques to mine software specifications in diversified formats from program execution traces. Case studies on various systems show that the extracted specifications shed light on the behaviors of systems under analysis. …


Data Mining For Software Engineering, Tao Xie, Suresh Thummalapenta, David Lo, Chao Liu Nov 2011

Data Mining For Software Engineering, Tao Xie, Suresh Thummalapenta, David Lo, Chao Liu

David LO

To improve software productivity and quality, software engineers are increasingly applying data mining algorithms to various software engineering tasks. However, mining SE data poses several challenges. The authors present various algorithms to effectively mine sequences, graphs, and text from such data.


Specification Mining: A Concise Introduction, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu, Jiawei Han Nov 2011

Specification Mining: A Concise Introduction, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu, Jiawei Han

David LO

No abstract provided.


Terapixel Imaging Of Cosmological Simulations, Yu Feng, Rupert Croft, Tiziana Di Matteo, Nishikanta Khandai, Randy Sargent, Illah Nourbakhsh, Paul Dille, Chris Bartley, Volker Springel, Anirban Jana, Jeffrey Gardner Nov 2011

Terapixel Imaging Of Cosmological Simulations, Yu Feng, Rupert Croft, Tiziana Di Matteo, Nishikanta Khandai, Randy Sargent, Illah Nourbakhsh, Paul Dille, Chris Bartley, Volker Springel, Anirban Jana, Jeffrey Gardner

Randy Sargent

The increasing size of cosmological simulations has led to the need for new visualization techniques. We focus on smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) simulations run with the GADGET code and describe methods for visually accessing the entire simulation at full resolution. The simulation snapshots are rastered and processed on supercomputers into images that are ready to be accessed through a Web interface (GigaPan). This allows any scientist with a Web browser to interactively explore simulation data sets in both spatial and temporal dimensions and data sets which in their native format can be hundreds of terabytes in size or more. We …


Waldo In The Light Of Austerity And Federal Debt Crisis, Part 2, Jan Kallberg Aug 2011

Waldo In The Light Of Austerity And Federal Debt Crisis, Part 2, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

Waldo’s predictions about the future for public administration describe five areas that would be problematic in the future: legitimacy, authority, knowledge, control, and confidence. Legitimacy includes not only that the government is legally legitimized but capable and focused on an intention to deliver the “good society.” Authority, according to Waldo, is the ability to implement policy with the acceptance of the people based on rationalism, expectations of public good, ethics, superior knowledge, and institutional contexts. Knowledge is institutional knowledge, the ability to arrange and utilize knowledge within the bureaucracy since coordination is the major challenge in knowledge management. Government has …


Waldo In The Light Of Austerity And Federal Debt Crisis, Part 1, Jan Kallberg Aug 2011

Waldo In The Light Of Austerity And Federal Debt Crisis, Part 1, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

Dwight Waldo wrote The Enterprise of Public Administration in 1979 looking back on a long and fruitful academic career, but also as a reflection about the future for public administration. Can a 30 year old book still be relevant? You bet. Today, the public sector is increasingly facing fiscal challenges. Federal, state, and local governments throughout the country have major budget deficits followed by austerity measures that undermine the ability to deliver the good life of the future. In this day and age rereading Dwight Waldo’s The Enterprise of Public Administration is an intellectual exercise worth pursuing. Several of Dwight …


Panopto Is Now Available For Lecture Capture, Veronica Trammell Jul 2011

Panopto Is Now Available For Lecture Capture, Veronica Trammell

Veronica O. Trammell

The Distance Learning Center has purchased a new lecture delivery option for faculty who teach online. Panopto is a lecture capture application which allows faculty to capture their lectures using a simple webcam or a sophisticated video classroom.


Diagnosis Of Skin Diseases Using Online Expert System, Dr. Muhammad Zubair Asghar, Muhammad Junaid Asghar Jun 2011

Diagnosis Of Skin Diseases Using Online Expert System, Dr. Muhammad Zubair Asghar, Muhammad Junaid Asghar

Dr. Muhammad Zubair Asghar

This paper describes Expert System (ES) for diagnosis and management of skin diseases. More than 13 types of skin diseases can be diagnosed and treated by our system. It is rule based web-supported expert system, assisting skin specialists, medical students doing specialization in dermatology, researchers as well as skin patients having computer know-how. System was developed with Java Technology. The expert rules were developed on the symptoms of each type of skin disease, and they were presented using tree-graph and inferred using forward-chaining with depth-first search method. User interaction with system is enhanced with efficient user interfaces. The web based …


Publishing Survey Articles On Information Retrieval Topics, Douglas Oard, Fabrizio Sebastiani, Jonathan Furner, Gary Marchionini May 2011

Publishing Survey Articles On Information Retrieval Topics, Douglas Oard, Fabrizio Sebastiani, Jonathan Furner, Gary Marchionini

Jonathan Furner

Survey articles are an important way of sharing knowledge among interested researchers and contributing to the growth of a field. This brief note identifies several outlets for survey articles on information retrieval, and identifies some reasons to write articles of this type.


Ipv6 Security Basics, John Christian Smith Jan 2011

Ipv6 Security Basics, John Christian Smith

John Christian Smith

Overview of security considerations in adopting IPv6