Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Evaluation Of Potential Technologies For A Web Based Development Environment For Cs1 Students, Manuel Garcia

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to design a web-based integrated development environment that would incorporate Web-CAT. Web-CAT is an automated testing tool designed by Stephen Edwards at Virginia Tech University, to help beginning students learn test-driven development. This tool runs on a server where a professor assigns usernames and passwords to students so they can submit code. This program can assist professors in grading, and students in showing errors in code. The development environment design waskept simple to create less confusion for beginning programming students. This development environment will be online to give all students universal access and …

Altruistic Task Allocation Despite Unbalanced Relationships Within Multi-Robot Communities, Ryan Morton, George A. Bekey, Christopher M. Clark

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Typical Multi-Robot Systems consist of robots cooperating to maximize global fitness functions. However, in some scenarios, the set of interacting robots may not share common goals and thus the concept of a global fitness function becomes invalid. This work examines Multi-Robot Communities(MRC), in which individual robots have independent goals. Within the MRC context, we present a task allocation architecture that optimizes individual robot fitness functions over long time horizons using reciprocal altruism.

Previous work has shown that reciprocating altruistic relationships can evolve between two willing robots, using market-based task auctions, while still protecting against selfish robots aiming to exploit …

Toward Automating Requirements Satisfaction Assessment, E. Ashlee Holbrook, Jane Huffman Hayes, Alex Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper introduces the automation of satisfaction assessment: the process of determining the satisfaction mapping of natural language textual requirements to natural language design elements. Satisfaction assessment is useful because it assists in discovering unsatisfied requirements early in the lifecycle when such issues can be corrected with lower cost and impact than later. We define the basic terms and concepts for this process and explore the feasibility of developing baseline methods for its automation. This paper describes the satisfaction assessment approach algorithmically and then evaluates the effectiveness of two proposed information retrieval (IR) methods in two industrial studies - one …

Proceedings Of The Scheme And Functional Programming Workshop, John Clements (Editor)

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This volume contains the papers of the tenth annual Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming, held August 22nd at Northeastern University in close proximity to the Symposium in honor of Mitchell Wand.

Towards Traceable Test-Driven Development, Jane Huffman Hayes, Alex Dekhtyar, David S. Janzen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Key among the grand challenges in traceability are those that lead to achieving traceability as a by-product of the natural software development life cycle. This position paper profiles test-driven development (TDD), an emerging software development practice, in which automated tests and code satisfying them are developed in rapid succession over multiple iterations. Our position is that the nature of TDD offers unique opportunities for collecting traceability information throughout the TDD life cycle and that the provision of traceability information to the software developers during TDD will improve the process and the resulting software. We discuss the opportunities, challenges, and plans …

Evaluating Test-Driven Development In An Industry-Sponsored Capstone Project, John Huan Vu, Niklas Frojd, Clay Shenkel-Therolf, David S. Janzen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an agile development process wherein automated tests are created before production code is designed or constructed in short, rapid iterations. This paper discusses an experiment conducted with undergraduate students in a year-long software engineering capstone course. In this course the students designed, implemented, deployed, and maintained a software system to meet the requirements of an industry sponsor who served as the customer. The course followed an incremental process in which features were added incrementally under the direction of the industry sponsor and the professor. The fourteen students observed in the study were divided into three teams. …

Design Patterns Go To Hollywood: Teaching Patterns With Multimedia, Adam Dukovich, David S. Janzen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Studies indicate that understanding the contexts in which design patterns are to be used is one of the most (if not the most) difficult challenge in applying design patterns, yet little research on the topic attempts to solve the problem of better teaching the contexts. This paper discusses a new paradigm through which the teaching of design patterns can be viewed, one which focuses on conceptual examples and contexts as the key elements in teaching design patterns. We created several multimedia learning modules that use this approach and we evaluated the modules by comparing them to other methods of instruction …

Implications Of Integrating Test-Driven Development Into Cs1/Cs2 Curricula, Chetan Desai, David S. Janzen, John Clements

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Many academic and industry professionals have called for more testing in computer science curricula. Test-driven development (TDD) has been proposed as a solution to improve testing in academia. This paper demonstrates how TDD can be integrated into existing course materials without reducing topic coverage. Two controlled experiments were conducted in a CS1/CS2 course in Winter 2008. Following a test-driven learning approach, unit testing was introduced at the beginning of the course and reinforced through example. Results indicate that while student work loads may increase with the incorporation of TDD, students are able to successfully develop unit tests while learning to …

Decentralized Robust Control Of Robot Manipulators With Harmonic Drive Transmission And Application To Modular And Reconfigurable Serial Arms, Z. Li, W. W. Melek, Christopher M. Clark

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In this paper, we propose a decentralized robust control algorithm for modular and reconfigurable robots (MRRs) based on Lyapunov’s stability analysis and backstepping techniques. In using decentralized control schemes with robot manipulators, each joint is considered as an independent subsystem, and the dynamical effects from the other links and joints are treated as disturbance. However, there exist many uncertainties due to unmodeled dynamics, varying payloads, harmonic drive (HD) compliance, HD complex gear meshing mechanisms, etc. Also, while the reconfigurability of MRRs is advantageous, modifying the configuration will result in changes to the robot dynamics parameters, thereby making it challenging to …

Planning For Success: The Interdisciplinary Approach To Building Bayesian Models, Alex Dekhtyar, Judy Goldsmith, Beth Goldstein, Krol Kevin Mathias, Cynthia Isenhour

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper describes a process by which anthropologists, computer scientists, and social welfare case managers collaborated to build a stochastic model of welfare advising in Kentucky. In the process of collaboration,the research team rethought the Bayesian network model of Markov decision processes and designed a new knowledge elicitation format. We expect that this model will have wide applicability in other domains.

The Theory Of Interval Probabilistic Logic Programs, Alex Dekhtyar, Michael I. Dekhtyar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Two approaches to logic programming with probabilities emerged over time: Bayesian reasoning and probabilistic satisfiability (PSAT). The attractiveness of the former is in tying the logic programming research to the body of work on Bayes networks. The second approach ties, from the point of view of computation, reasoning about probabilities to linear programming, and allows for natural expression of imprecision in probabilities via the use of intervals. In this paper we construct precise semantics for one PSAT-based formalism for reasoning with interval probabilities: disjunctive probabilistic logic programs (dp-programs). It has two origins: (1) disjunctive logic programs, a powerful language for …

Energetic Path Finding Across Massive Terrain Data, Andrew Tsui, Zoë J. Wood

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Throughout history, the primary means of transportation for humans has been on foot. We present a software tool which can help visualize and predict where historical trails might lie through the use of a human-centered cost metric, with an emphasis on the ability to generate paths which traverse several thousand kilometers. To accomplish this, various graph simplification and path approximation algorithms are explored. We show that it is possible to restrict the search space for a path finding algorithm while not sacrificing accuracy. Combined with a multi-threaded variant of Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm, we present a tool capable of computing …