Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Lang2views Capstone: The Importance Of A Conscientious Team Lead, Joseph D. Wornath

University Honors Theses

This review essay reflects the Lang2views capstone project from the perspective of a team lead. The Lang2views capstone project was a web-based user interface designed to simplify how the Lang2views corporation localizes videos into other languages for their clients. Our capstone group was split into three subgroups: front-end, back-end, and DevOps. The strategy for completing the project went through a major change midway through development wherein we changed our software development methodology from a more rigid Waterfall-type approach to a more flexible Agile methodology. Because of this, many of the initially planned features had to be reevaluated as out of …

Code Generation Based On Inference And Controlled Natural Language Input, Howard R. Dittmer

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Over time the level of abstraction embodied in programming languages has continued to grow. Paradoxically, most programming languages still require programmers to conform to the language's rigid constructs. These constructs have been implemented in the name of efficiency for the computer. However, the continual increase in computing power allows us to consider techniques not so limited. To this end, we have created CABERNET, a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) based approach to program creation. CABERNET allows programmers to use a simple outline-based syntax. This syntax enables increased programmer efficiency.

CNLs have previously been used to document requirements. We have taken this …

Automated Statistical Structural Testing Techniques And Applications, Yang Shi

Dissertations and Theses

Statistical structural testing(SST) is an effective testing technique that produces random test inputs from probability distributions. SST shows superiority in fault-revealing power over random testing and deterministic approaches since it heritages the merits from both of them. SST ensures testing thoroughness by setting up a probability lower-bound criterion for each structural cover element and test inputs that exercise a structural cover element sampled from the probability distribution, ensuring testing randomness. Despite the advantages, SST is not a widely used approach in practice. There are two major limitations. First, to construct probability distributions, a tester must understand the underlying software's structure, …

Attendio: Attendance Tracking Made Simple, Benjamin L. Greenberg, Spencer L. Howell, Tucker R. Miles, Vicki Tang, Daniel N. Troutman

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Software Engineering In Bioinformatics, Brendan Sean Lawlor

Theses

This thesis proposes that by applying state-of-the-art software engineering tools, techniques and frameworks to currently recognised challenges in bioinformatics, improved outcomes can be attained in that field. It begins by decomposing software engineering into two categories, namely process and architecture, and choosing two key challenges in the practice of bioinformatics: reproducibility and scalability. The body of the thesis is an exploration of the intersection between these two software engineering categories and these two bioinformatics challenges. The question is asked: Can best practices in professional software engineering be applied to address key issues in the bioinformatics domain, creating positive outcomes? And …

Analytic Provenance For Software Reverse Engineers, Wayne C. Henry

Theses and Dissertations

Reverse engineering is a time-consuming process essential to software-security tasks such as malware analysis and vulnerability discovery. During the process, an engineer will follow multiple leads to determine how the software functions. The combination of time and possible explanations makes it difficult for the engineers to maintain a context of their findings within the overall task. Analytic provenance tools have demonstrated value in similarly complex fields that require open-ended exploration and hypothesis vetting. However, they have not been explored in the reverse engineering domain. This dissertation presents SensorRE, the first analytic provenance tool designed to support software reverse engineers. A …

Novel Deep Learning Methods Combined With Static Analysis For Source Code Processing, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

It is desirable to combine machine learning and program analysis so that one can leverage the best of both to increase the performance of software analytics. On one side, machine learning can analyze the source code of thousands of well-written software projects that can uncover patterns that partially characterize software that is reliable, easy to read, and easy to maintain. On the other side, the program analysis can be used to define rigorous and unique rules that are only available in programming languages, which enrich the representation of source code and help the machine learning to capture the patterns better. …

Detecting Saliency By Combining Speech And Object Detection In Indoor Environments, Kiran Thapa

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Describing scenes such as rooms, city streets, or routes, is a very common human task that requires the ability to identify and describe the scene sufficiently for a hearer to develop a mental model of the scene. When people talk about such scenes, they mention some objects of the scene at the exclusion of others. We call the mentioned objects salient objects as people consider them noticeable or important in comparison to other non-mentioned objects. In this thesis, we look at saliency of visual scenes and how visual saliency informs what can and should be said about a scene when …

Practical Attacks On Cryptographically End-To-End Verifiable Internet Voting Systems, Nicholas Chang-Fong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cryptographic end-to-end verifiable voting technologies concern themselves with the provision of a more trustworthy, transparent, and robust elections. To provide voting systems with more transparency and accountability throughout the process while preserving privacy which allows voters to express their true intent.

Helios Voting is one of these systems---an online platform where anyone can easily host their own cryptographically end-to-end verifiable election, aiming to bring verifiable voting to the masses. Helios does this by providing explicit cryptographic checks that an election was counted correctly, checks that any member of the public can independently verify. All of this while still protecting one …

Capturing, Eliciting, And Prioritizing (Cep) Non-Functional Requirements Metadata During The Early Stages Of Agile Software Development, Richard Rabin Maiti

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Agile software engineering has been a popular methodology to develop software rapidly and efficiently. However, the Agile methodology often favors Functional Requirements (FRs) due to the nature of agile software development, and strongly neglects Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). Neglecting NFRs has negative impacts on software products that have resulted in poor quality and higher cost to fix problems in later stages of software development.

This research developed the CEP “Capture Elicit Prioritize” methodology to effectively gather NFRs metadata from software requirement artifacts such as documents and images. Artifact included the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) artifact which gathered metadata from images. The …

Variation In Human-Intensive Systems: A Conceptual Framework For Characterizing, Modeling, And Analyzing Families Of Systems, Borislava I. Simidchieva

Doctoral Dissertations

A system model---namely a formal definition of the coordination of people, hardware devices, and software components performing activities, using resources and artifacts, and producing various outputs---can aid understanding of the real-world system it models. Complex real-world systems, however, exhibit considerable amounts of variation that can be difficult or impossible to represent within a single model. This dissertation evaluates the hypothesis that the careful characterization and representation of system variation can aid in the generation and analysis of concrete system instances related to one another in specified ways and manifesting different kinds of variation. When a set of closely related systems …

Software Application And Mobile Optimization, Timothy Yu

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

Most software applications have yet to be optimized for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Such is the case with Gallaudet University’s enterprise information systems, Bison, the university’s administration system, including all records except for finances and Blackboard, the university’s learning management system. A two-part project addressed this lack of mobile optimization with Bison. The first part was the Residence Life Sticker Project intended to familiarize the developer with Gallaudet’s internal IT systems. It involved developing a web form for the Office of Residence Life to record receipt of ID card stickers, handbooks, and release room consent information. The …

Multimodal Code Search, Shaowei Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Today’s software is large and complex, consisting of millions of lines of code. New developers of a software project always face significant challenges in finding code related to their development or maintenance tasks (e.g., implementing features, fixing bugs and adding new features). In fact, research has shown that developers typically spend more time on locating and understanding code than modifying it. Thus, we can significantly reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by reducing the time to search and understand code relevant to a software development or maintenance task. In order to reduce the time of searching and understanding …

A Mathematical Framework Of Human Thought Process: Rectifying Software Construction Inefficiency And Identifying Characteristic Efficiencies Of Networked Systems Via Problem-Solution Cycle, Jonathan Sarbah-Yalley

Master's Theses

Problem

The lack of a theory to explain human thought process latently affects the general perception of problem solving activities. This present study was to theorize human thought process (HTP) to ascertain in general the effect of problem solving inadequacy on efficiency.

Method

To theorize human thought process (HTP), basic human problem solving activities were investigated through the vein of problem-solution cycle (PSC). The scope of PSC investigation was focused on the inefficiency problem in software construction and latent characteristic efficiencies of a similar networked system. In order to analyze said PSC activities, three mathematical quotients and a messaging wavefunction …

Missing Requirements Information And Its Impact On Software Architectures: A Case Study, Md Rounok Salehin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

[Context & motivation] In the development of large, software-intensive systems, the system’s requirements are seldom, if ever, concluded upon prior to commencing with systems architecture. Research shows that, in order to manage development and domain complexities, instances of requirements engineering (RE) and systems architecting (SA) processes tend to inter-weave. [Question/problem] However, missing requirements information can cause one to create (or recreate) the needed information during different SA activities. While backtracking in the software development process is known to be costly, the costs associated with missing requirements in the SA process have not been investigated empirically. [Principal ideas/results] We …

Maps Of Lessons Learnt In Requirements Engineering, Ibtehal Noorwali

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Both researchers and practitioners have emphasized the importance of learning from past experiences and its consequential impact on project time, cost, and quality. However, from the survey we conducted of requirements engineering (RE) practitioners, over 70\% of the respondents stated that they seldom use RE lessons in the RE process, though 85\% of these would use such lessons if readily available. Our observation, however, is that RE lessons are scattered, mainly implicitly, in the literature and practice, which obviously, does not help the situation. We, therefore, present ``maps” of RE lessons which would highlight weak (dark) and strong (bright) areas …

Online Assistance, Imran Khan

All Capstone Projects

From the introduction: "This project entitled Online Assistance is efficient and designed to do only one thing, facilitate communications between help desk staff and end users. The overriding design goal is to be as simple and frictionless for both users and help desk staff as is possible. It can leverage SQL server for membership and role based security or integrate with windows authentication and Active Directory groups.

Software Engineering occurs as a consequence of a process called “System Engineering”. Instead of concentrate solely on software, system-engineering focuses on a variety of elements like Analyzing, Designing and organizing these elements into …

Models, Techniques, And Metrics For Managing Risk In Software Engineering, Andriy Miranskyy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The field of Software Engineering (SE) is the study of systematic and quantifiable approaches to software development, operation, and maintenance. This thesis presents a set of scalable and easily implemented techniques for quantifying and mitigating risks associated with the SE process. The thesis comprises six papers corresponding to SE knowledge areas such as software requirements, testing, and management. The techniques for risk management are drawn from stochastic modeling and operational research.

The first two papers relate to software testing and maintenance. The first paper describes and validates novel iterative-unfolding technique for filtering a set of execution traces relevant to a …

Revision Of Remote (Recursively Estimating Multi-Threaded Observation Tool Enterprise) For Commercialization, Jeongtaek Hong

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study is to have ReMoTe be commercialized or released as open source at some future date to the general public. ReMoTe will provide an enhanced user interface that will allow users easy to use functions and setup their projects and define their thread and phases. ReMoTe will have the ability to handle muliple projects, and specify any number of phases for any thread.

Sub-Circuit Selection And Replacement Algorithms Modeled As Term Rewriting Systems, Eric D. Simonaire

Theses and Dissertations

Intent protection is a model of software obfuscation which, among other criteria, prevents an adversary from understanding the program’s function for use with contextual information. Relating this framework for obfuscation to malware detection, if a malware detector can perfectly normalize a program P and any obfuscation (variant) of the program O(P), the program is not intent protected. The problem of intent protection on programs can also be modeled as intent protection on combinational logic circuits. If a malware detector can perfectly normalize a circuit C and any obfuscation (variant) O(C) of the circuit, the circuit is not intent protected. In …

Obfuscation Framework Based On Functionally Equivalent Combinatorial Logic Families, Moses C. James

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to be a few building blocks in the bridge between theoretical and practical software obfuscation that researchers will one day construct. We provide a method for random uniform selection of circuits based on a functional signature and specific construction specifiers. Additionally, this thesis includes the first formal definition of an algorithm that performs only static analysis on a program; that is analysis that does not rely on the input and output behavior of the analyzed program. This is analogous to some techniques used in real-world software reverse engineering. Finally, this thesis uses the equivalent circuit library to …

Moops: A Web Implementation Of The Personal Software Process Reporting System, Thomas Russell Gigler Iii.

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of Moops is to bridge the gap between PSP Scriber, geared very specifically to the CSCI655 class, and other available PSP implications which are so general they are difficult to use immediately without valuable time spent learning the software. Moops is a PHP/MySQL based web application designed to provide the students taking the CSCI655 graduate software engineering course at CSUSB with an intuitive, easy to use tool to implement the Personal Software Process (PSP). Moops eliminates the possibility of errors in calculations by completing all calculations for the user.

Remote: A Complete Tool To Support Software Process Management, Darrion Todd Demelo

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of the project is to provide the Department of Computer Science at California State University, San Bernardino with a software project management tool that will help companies in their software development. ReMoTe (Recursively Estimating Multi-Threaded Observation Technology Enterprise) will assist software engineering teams with defining their scheduled delivery dates, life-cycle definitions, team hierarchy, and communication. Using the object-oriented approach, ReMoTe can support any software life cycle model. ReMoTe can help manage and control the software process over the Web. It also allows people to manage software artifacts using database systems such as mySQL, Microsoft Access, or Oracle.

An Improved Software Process Management Tool: Remote (Recursively Estimating Multi-Threaded Observation Tool Enterprise), Shujiang Xia

Theses Digitization Project

The principal purpose of the project is to enable ReMoTe support for multi-databases. ReMoTe stands for the Recursively Estimating Multi-Threaded Observation Technology Enterprise, which is a web-based computer aided software engineering tool for monitoring software development process. Development of ReMoTe is based on the RMT (Recursive Multi-Threaded) software life cycle developed by Scott Simon, a CSUSB alum, in his master's thesis in 1997. ReMoTe enables the monitoring of projects that use different databases in various locations. Central management can view the progress information of each project using a web browser no matter where the database or project team is located. …

Inquisitive Pattern Recognition, Amy L. Magnus

Theses and Dissertations

The Department of Defense and the Department of the Air Force have funded automatic target recognition for several decades with varied success. The foundation of automatic target recognition is based upon pattern recognition. In this work, we present new pattern recognition concepts specifically in the area of classification and propose new techniques that will allow one to determine when a classifier is being arrogant. Clearly arrogance in classification is an undesirable attribute. A human is being arrogant when their expressed conviction in a decision overstates their actual experience in making similar decisions. Likewise given an input feature vector, we say …

The Generalizability Of Private Sector Research On Software Project Management In Two Usaf Organizations: An Exploratory Study, Michael R. Garman

Theses and Dissertations

Project managers typically set three success criteria for their projects: meet specifications, be on time, and be on budget. However, software projects frequently fail to meet these criteria. Software engineers, acquisition officers, and project managers have all studied this issue and made recommendations for achieving success. But most of this research in peer reviewed journals has focused on the private sector. Researchers have also identified software acquisitions as one of the major differences between the private sector and public sector MIS. This indicates that the elements for a successful software project in the public sector may be different from the …

Visual Execution Analysis For Multiagent Systems, Chong Kil

Theses and Dissertations

Multiagent systems have become increasingly important in developing complex software systems. Multiagent systems introduce collective intelligence and provide benefits such as flexibility, scalability, decentralization, and increased reliability. A software agent is a high-level software abstraction that is capable of performing given tasks in an environment without human intervention. Although multiagent systems provide a convenient and powerful way to organize complex software systems, developing such system is very complicated. To help manage this complexity this research develops a methodology and technique for analyzing, monitoring and troubleshooting multiagent systems execution. This is accomplished by visualizing a multiagent system at multiple levels of …

Suitability Of Unidata Metapps For Incorporation In Platform-Independent User-Customized Aviation Weather Products Generation Software, Harmen P. Visser

Theses and Dissertations

The Air Force Combat Climatology Center (AFCCC) is tasked to provide long-range seasonal forecasts for worldwide locations. Currently, the best long-range temperature forecasts the weather community has are the climatological standard normals. This study creates a stepping-stone into the solution of long-range forecasting by finding a process to predict temperatures better than those using climatological standard normals or simple frequency distributions of occurrences. Northern Hemispheric teleconnection indices and the standardized Southern Oscillation index are statistically compared to three-month summed Heating Degree Days (HDDs) and Cooling Degree Days (CDDs) at 14 U.S. locations. First, linear regression was accomplished. The results showed …

Selecting A Software Engineering Methodology Using Multiobjective Decision Analysis, Scott A. O'Malley

Theses and Dissertations

With the emergence of agent-oriented software engineering methodologies, software developers have a new set of tools to solve complex software requirements. One problem software developers face is to determine which methodology is the best approach to take to developing a solution. A number of factors go into the decision process. This thesis defines a decision making process that can be used by a software engineer to determine whether or not a software engineering approach is an appropriate system development strategy. This decision analysis process allows the software engineer to classify and evaluate a set of methodologies while specifically considering the …

Design And Specification Of Dynamic, Mobile And Reconfigurable Multiagent Systems, Athie L. Self

Theses and Dissertations

Multiagent Systems use the power of collaborative software agents to solve complex distributed problems. There are many Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies available to assist system designers to create multiagent systems. However, none of these methodologies can specify agents with dynamic properties such as cloning, mobility or agent instantiation. This thesis starts the process to bridge the gap between AOSE methodologies and dynamic agent platforms by incorporating mobility into the current Multiagent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology. Mobility was specified within all components composing a mobile agent class. An agent component was also created that integrated the behavior of the components …