Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Domain Specific Analysis Of Privacy Practices And Concerns In The Mobile Application Market, Fahimeh Ebrahimi Meymand

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Mobile applications (apps) constantly demand access to sensitive user information in exchange for more personalized services. These-mostly unjustified-data collection tactics have raised major privacy concerns among mobile app users. Existing research on mobile app privacy aims to identify these concerns, expose apps with malicious data collection practices, assess the quality of apps' privacy policies, and propose automated solutions for privacy leak detection and prevention. However, existing solutions are generic, frequently missing the contextual characteristics of different application domains. To address these limitations, in this dissertation, we study privacy in the app store at a domain level. Our objective is to …

Optimizing The Performance Of Parallel And Concurrent Applications Based On Asynchronous Many-Task Runtimes, Weile Wei

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Nowadays, High-performance Computing (HPC) scientific applications often face per- formance challenges when running on heterogeneous supercomputers, so do scalability, portability, and efficiency issues. For years, supercomputer architectures have been rapidly changing and becoming more complex, and this challenge will become even more com- plicated as we enter the exascale era, where computers will exceed one quintillion cal- culations per second. Software adaption and optimization are needed to address these challenges. Asynchronous many-task (AMT) systems show promise against the exascale challenge as they combine advantages of multi-core architectures with light-weight threads, asynchronous executions, smart scheduling, and portability across diverse architectures.

In …

Performance Analysis And Improvement For Scalable And Distributed Applications Based On Asynchronous Many-Task Systems, Nanmiao Wu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

As the complexity of recent and future large-scale data and exascale systems architectures grows, so do productivity, portability, software scalability, and efficient utilization of system resources challenges presented to both industry and the research community. Software solutions and applications are expected to scale in performance on such complex systems. Asynchronous many-task (AMT) systems, taking advantage of multi-core architectures with light-weight threads, asynchronous executions, and smart scheduling, are showing promise in addressing these challenges.

In this research, we implement several scalable and distributed applications based on HPX, an exemplar AMT runtime system. First, a distributed HPX implementation for a parameterized benchmark …

Digital Discrimination In The Sharing Economy: Evidence, Policy, And Feature Analysis, Miroslav Tushev

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Applications (apps) of the Digital Sharing Economy (DSE), such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit, have become a main facilitator of economic growth and shared prosperity in modern-day societies. However, recent research has revealed that the participation of minority groups in DSE activities is often hindered by different forms of bias and discrimination. Evidence of such behavior has been documented across almost all domains of DSE, including ridesharing, lodging, and freelancing. However, little is known about the under- lying design decisions of DSE systems which allow certain demographics of the market to gain unfair advantage over others. To bridge this knowledge …

Distributed Load Testing By Modeling And Simulating User Behavior, Chester Ira Parrott

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Modern human-machine systems such as microservices rely upon agile engineering practices which require changes to be tested and released more frequently than classically engineered systems. A critical step in the testing of such systems is the generation of realistic workloads or load testing. Generated workload emulates the expected behaviors of users and machines within a system under test in order to find potentially unknown failure states. Typical testing tools rely on static testing artifacts to generate realistic workload conditions. Such artifacts can be cumbersome and costly to maintain; however, even model-based alternatives can prevent adaptation to changes in a system …

Information Retrieval-Based Optimization Approaches For Requirement Traceability Recovery, Danissa Victoria Rodriguez Caraballo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Requirements traceability provides support for important software engineering activities. Requirements traceability recovery (RTR) is becoming increasingly important due to the numerous benefits to the overall quality of software. Improving the RTR problem has become an active topic of research for software engineers; researchers have proposed a number of approaches for improving and automating RTR across the requirements and the source code of the system. Textual analysis and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been applied to the RTR problem for many years; however, most of the existing IR-based methodologies applied to the RTR problem are semiautomatic or time-consuming, even though many …

Finding Music In Chaos: Designing And Composing With Virtual Instruments Inspired By Chaotic Equations, Landon P. Viator

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Using chaos theory to design novel audio synthesis engines has been explored little in computer music. This could be because of the difficulty of obtaining harmonic tones or the likelihood of chaos-based synthesis engines to explode, which then requires re-instantiating of the engine to proceed with sound production. This process is not desirable when composing because of the time wasted fixing the synthesis engine instead of the composer being able to focus completely on the creative aspects of composition. One way to remedy these issues is to connect chaotic equations to individual parts of the synthesis engine instead of relying …

High-Performance Computing Frameworks For Large-Scale Genome Assembly, Sayan Goswami

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Genome sequencing technology has witnessed tremendous progress in terms of throughput and cost per base pair, resulting in an explosion in the size of data. Typical de Bruijn graph-based assembly tools demand a lot of processing power and memory and cannot assemble big datasets unless running on a scaled-up server with terabytes of RAMs or scaled-out cluster with several dozens of nodes. In the first part of this work, we present a distributed next-generation sequence (NGS) assembler called Lazer, that achieves both scalability and memory efficiency by using partitioned de Bruijn graphs. By enhancing the memory-to-disk swapping and reducing the …

Mobile Music Development Tools For Creative Coders, Daniel Stuart Holmes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project is a body of work that facilitates the creation of musical mobile artworks. The project includes a code toolkit that enhances and simplifies the development of mobile music iOS applications, a flexible notation system designed for mobile musical interactions, and example apps and scored compositions to demonstrate the toolkit and notation system.

The code library is designed to simplify the technical aspect of user-centered design and development with a more direct connection between concept and deliverable. This sim- plification addresses learning problems (such as motivation, self-efficacy, and self-perceived understanding) by bridging the gap between idea and functional prototype …

Modeling Crowd Feedback In The Mobile App Market, Grant S. Williams

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Mobile application (app) stores, such as Google Play and the Apple App Store, have recently emerged as a new model of online distribution platform. These stores have expanded in size in the past five years to host millions of apps, offering end-users of mobile software virtually unlimited options to choose from. In such a competitive market, no app is too big to fail. In fact, recent evidence has shown that most apps lose their users within the first 90 days after initial release. Therefore, app developers have to remain up-to-date with their end-users’ needs in order to survive. Staying close …