Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Collaboration And Health Care Diagnostics: An Agent Based Model Simulation, Sebastian Linde, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

This paper presents a simple ABM simulation that seeks to provide insight into the public health benefits that derive from greater collaboration among health care professionals. In particular, the paper compares the efficiency, delivery and timeliness of health care diagnostics under two contrasting paradigms–one in which collaboration is encouraged, and an- other where it is not. The preliminary results of this study suggest that while the effect of cooperation on aggregate public health depends on the patient search algorithm employed, its effect on overall efficiency and timeliness of health care diagnostics and treatment is significant and pos- itive. Since the …

Software Metrics And Dashboard, Shilpika Shilpika, George K. Thiruvathukal, Saulo Aguiar, Konstantin Läufer, Nicholas J. Hayward

George K. Thiruvathukal

Software metrics are a critical tool which provide continuous insight to products and processes and help build reliable software in mission critical environments. Using software metrics we can perform calculations that help assess the effectiveness of the underlying software or process. The two types of metrics relevant to our work is complexity metrics and in-process metrics. Complexity metrics tend to focus on intrinsic code properties like code complexity. In-process metrics focus on a higher-level view of software quality, measuring information that can provide insight into the underlying software development process.

Our aim is to develop and evaluate a metrics dashboard …

Innovation Mashups: Academic Rigor Meets Social Networking Buzz, Dejan Milojicic, Martin Arlitt, Dorée Seligmann, George Thiruvathukal, Christian Timmerer

George K. Thiruvathukal

Exploring new options for publishing and content delivery offers an enormous opportunity to improve the state of the art and further modernize academic and professional publications. Traditional organizations such as the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, and Usenix have been encountering increasing competition from new ways of rapid publishing and dissemination, including social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+), blogs with enabled commenting, video posting (YouTube), Slashdot, and many other types of media. "Liking" is replacing traditional impact factors, comments left on authors' webpages or blogs are replacing formal reviews, and site visits have more relevance than the number of article …

Software Engineering Need Not Be Difficult, Jeffrey Carver, George Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

"Progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of software at all levels" (the overall premise of the workshop). We argue that true progress depends on embracing the best traditional--and emergent-- practices in software engineering, especially agile practices that intersect with the tradition of software engineering. Software engineering as practiced today is more than the stereotypical monolithic lifecycle processes (e.g. waterfall, spiral, etc.) that historically have impeded progress for small/medium sized development efforts. In addition, the discipline and practice of software engineering includes software quality (with an established tradition of software metrics). Software processes can be …

Filesystems: Addressing The Last-Mile “Problem” In Services-Oriented/Cloud Computing, George K. Thiruvathukal, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer

George K. Thiruvathukal

We have designed and implemented RestFS, a software framework that provides a uniform, configurable connector layer for mapping remote web-based resources to local filesystem-based resources, recognizing the similarity between these two types of resources. Such mappings enable programmatic access to a resource, as well as composition of two or more resources, through the local operating system’s standard filesystem application programming interface (API), script-able file-based command-line utilities, and interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms. The framework supports automatic and manual authentication.

As part of this talk, we demonstrate a new filesystem that interfaces to the SketchFab.com service to support 3D model visualization. For …

Introduction To Computer Science In C#, Andrew Harrington, George Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

Drs. Harrington and Thiruvathukal created a living textbook to introduce computer science and programming principles (using the C# language from Microsoft, read C-sharp, as in music) to computer science at Loyola University Chicago (and beyond). This book is a work in progress but has been used since AY 2012 to teach COMP 170 at Loyola University Chicago.

An Object-Oriented Framework For Userland Filesystem Development, George K. Thiruvathukal, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer

George K. Thiruvathukal

Userland filesystems (also known as virtual/installable filesystems) represent a promising direction for interfacing the traditional filesystem concept to specific domain instances (e.g. finance, bioinformatics, astronomy, photo sharing services, etc.) One might initially be inclined to think of filesystems as “old school” or “so 1980s” but their use remains an established practice in computational science and in many business domains, owing to the stability of filesystems interfaces and the continued perception of having great overall performance. While the promise of building one’s own userland filesystems is great, the approach has seen little adoption, owing to the complexity of working with low-level …

Gendered Jobs And The New Gender Gap, George K. Thiruvathukal, Jon Ross

George K. Thiruvathukal

This presentation discusses how to address 21st Century employment challenges by dismantling gender-specific barriers to entry. We take an interdisciplinary approach by focusing on areas such as education, public policy, culture, and media (among others).