Programming Languages and Compilers Commons^™

Tests As Maintainable Assets Via Auto-Generated Spies: A Case Study Involving The Scala Collections Library's Iterator Trait, Konstantin Läufer, John O'Sullivan, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

In testing stateful abstractions, it is often necessary to record interactions, such as method invocations, and express assertions over these interactions. Following the Test Spy design pattern, we can reify such interactions programmatically through additional mutable state. Alternatively, a mocking framework, such as Mockito, can automatically generate test spies that allow us to record the interactions and express our expectations in a declarative domain-specific language. According to our study of the test code for Scala’s Iterator trait, the latter approach can lead to a significant reduction of test code complexity in terms of metrics such as code size (in some …

Space Operations In The Suborbital Space Flight Simulator And Mission Control Center: Lessons Learned With Xcor Lynx, Pedro Llanos, Christopher Nguyen, David Williams, Kim O. Chambers Ph.D., Erik Seedhouse, Robert Davidson

Pedro J. Llanos (www.AstronauticsLlanos.com)

This study was conducted to better understand the performance of the XCOR Lynx vehicle. Because the Lynx development was halted, the best knowledge of vehicle dynamics can only be found through simulator flights. X-Plane 10 was chosen for its robust applications and accurate portrayal of dynamics on a vehicle in flight. The Suborbital Space Flight Simulator (SSFS) and Mission Control Center (MCC) were brought to the Applied Aviation Sciences department in fall 2015 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach campus. This academic and research tool is a department asset capable of providing multiple fields of data about suborbital simulated flights. …

Internet Enabled Remote Driving Of A Combat Hybrid Electric Power System For Duty Cycle Measurement, Jarrett Goodell, Marc Compere, Wilford Smith, Mark Brudnak, Mike Pozolo, Et Al.

Marc Compere

This paper describes a human-in-the-loop motion-based simulator interfaced to hybrid-electric power system hardware, both of which were used to measure the duty cycle of a combat vehicle in a virtual simulation environment. The project discussed is a greatly expanded follow-on to the experiment published in [1,7]. This paper is written in the context of [1,7] and therefore highlights the enhancements. The most prominent of these enhancements is the integration (in real-time) of the Power & Energy System Integration Lab (P&E SIL) with a motion base simulator by means of a “long haul” connection over the Internet (a geographical distance of …

Experiences With Scala Across The College-Level Curriculum, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal, Mark C. Lewis

Konstantin Läufer

Various hybrid-functional languages, designed to balance compile-time error detection, conciseness, and performance, have emerged. Scala, e.g., is interoperable with Java and has become an early leader in adoption, especially in the start-up and open-source spaces. As educators, we have recognized Scala’s value as a teaching language across the CS curriculum. In CS1, the read-eval-print loop and simple, uniform syntax aid programming in the small. In CS2, higher-order methods allow concise, efficient manipulation of collections. In a programming languages course, advanced constructs facilitate the separation of concerns, program representation and interpretation, and concurrent programming. In advanced applied courses, language mechanisms and …

Spring­11: Pdc In Cs1/2 And A Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Software Design Course, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, Chandra N. Sekharan, George K. Thiruvathukal

Konstantin Läufer

Recent changes in the environment of Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Computer Science include a better differentiation of our four undergraduate majors, growing interest in computing among science majors, and an increased demand for graduates with mobile and cloud skills. In our continued effort to incorporate parallel and distributed computing topics into the undergraduate curriculum, we are focusing on these three existing courses: CS1: In response to a request from the physics department, we started to offer a CS1 section aimed at majors in physics and other hard sciences this spring semester. This section includes some material on numerical methods …

Building Capable, Energy-Efficient, Flexible Visualization And Sensing Clusters From Commodity Tablets, Thomas Delgado Dias, Xian Yan, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Konstantin Läufer

We explore the application of clusters of commodity tablet devices to problems spanning a “trilogy” of concerns: visualization, sensing, and computation. We conjecture that such clusters provide a low-cost, energy-efficient, flexible, and ultimately effective platform to tackle a wide range of problems within this trilogy. This is a work in progress, and we now elaborate our position and give a preliminary status report. A wide range of Android tablet devices are available in terms of price and capabilities. “You get what you pay for” w.r.t. display resolution, sensors, and chipset---corresponding to the trilogy. $200 gets one a 1280x800-pixel touch display, …

Network Technologies Used To Aggregate Environmental Data, Paul Stasiuk, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Konstantin Läufer

The goal of the Loyola Weather Service (lws) project is to design and build a system of functioning environmental monitoring widgets that can intelligently and autonomously control the environment around them based on set thresholds and triggers. The widgets will also have the ability to aggregate their data and easily display this data in various ways: through a user interface in the room that the widget is placed, via a web application, and programmatically via a RESTful web service.

A Polyglot Approach To Bioinformatics Data Integration: Phylogenetic Analysis Of Hiv-1, Steven Reisman, Catherine Putonti, George K. Thiruvathukal, Konstantin Läufer

Konstantin Läufer

RNA-interference has potential therapeutic use against HIV-1 by targeting highly-functional mRNA sequences that contribute to the virulence of the virus. Empirical work has shown that within cell lines, all of the HIV-1 genes are affected by RNAi-induced gene silencing. While promising, inherent in this treatment is the fact that RNAi sequences must be highly specific. HIV, however, mutates rapidly, leading to the evolution of viral escape mutants. In fact, such strains are under strong selection to include mutations within the targeted region, evading the RNAi therapy and thus increasing the virus’ fitness in the host. Taking a phylogenetic approach, we …

A Polyglot Approach To Bioinformatics Data Integration: Phylogenetic Analysis Of Hiv-1, Steven Reisman, Catherine Putonti, George K. Thiruvathukal, Konstantin Läufer

Catherine Putonti

RNA-interference has potential therapeutic use against HIV-1 by targeting highly-functional mRNA sequences that contribute to the virulence of the virus. Empirical work has shown that within cell lines, all of the HIV-1 genes are affected by RNAi-induced gene silencing. While promising, inherent in this treatment is the fact that RNAi sequences must be highly specific. HIV, however, mutates rapidly, leading to the evolution of viral escape mutants. In fact, such strains are under strong selection to include mutations within the targeted region, evading the RNAi therapy and thus increasing the virus’ fitness in the host. Taking a phylogenetic approach, we …

Experiences With Scala Across The College-Level Curriculum, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal, Mark C. Lewis

George K. Thiruvathukal

Various hybrid-functional languages, designed to balance compile-time error detection, conciseness, and performance, have emerged. Scala, e.g., is interoperable with Java and has become an early leader in adoption, especially in the start-up and open-source spaces. As educators, we have recognized Scala’s value as a teaching language across the CS curriculum. In CS1, the read-eval-print loop and simple, uniform syntax aid programming in the small. In CS2, higher-order methods allow concise, efficient manipulation of collections. In a programming languages course, advanced constructs facilitate the separation of concerns, program representation and interpretation, and concurrent programming. In advanced applied courses, language mechanisms and …

User Interface Design, Moritz Stefaner, Sebastien Ferre, Saverio Perugini, Jonathan Koren, Yi Zhang

Saverio Perugini

As detailed in Chap. 1, system implementations for dynamic taxonomies and faceted search allow a wide range of query possibilities on the data. Only when these are made accessible by appropriate user interfaces, the resulting applications can support a variety of search, browsing and analysis tasks. User interface design in this area is confronted with specific challenges. This chapter presents an overview of both established and novel principles and solutions.

Intelligent Systems Development In A Non Engineering Curriculum, Emily Brand, William Honig, Matthew Wojtowicz

William L Honig

Much of computer system development today is programming in the large - systems of millions of lines of code distributed across servers and the web. At the same time, microcontrollers have also become pervasive in everyday products, economical to manufacture, and represent a different level of learning about system development. Real world systems at this level require integrated development of custom hardware and software.

How can academic institutions give students a view of this other extreme - programming on small microcontrollers with specialized hardware? Full scale system development including custom hardware and software is expensive, beyond the range of any …

An Immersive Telepresence System Using Rgb-D Sensors And Head-Mounted Display, Xinzhong Lu, Ju Shen, Saverio Perugini, Jianjun Yang

Saverio Perugini

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to effectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The …

Modeling Heterogeneous User Churn And Local Resilience Of Unstructured P2p Networks, Zhongmei Yao, Derek Leonard, Dmitri Loguinov, Xiaoming Wang

Zhongmei Yao

Previous analytical results on the resilience of unstructured P2P systems have not explicitly modeled heterogeneity of user churn (i.e., difference in online behavior) or the impact of in-degree on system resilience. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a generic model of heterogeneous user churn, derive the distribution of the various metrics observed in prior experimental studies (e.g., lifetime distribution of joining users, joint distribution of session time of alive peers, and residual lifetime of a randomly selected user), derive several closed-form results on the transient behavior of in-degree, and eventually obtain the joint in/out degree isolation probability as a simple …

Automatically Discovering The Number Of Clusters In Web Page Datasets, Zhongmei Yao

Zhongmei Yao

Clustering is well-suited for Web mining by automatically organizing Web pages into categories, each of which contains Web pages having similar contents. However, one problem in clustering is the lack of general methods to automatically determine the number of categories or clusters. For the Web domain in particular, currently there is no such method suitable for Web page clustering. In an attempt to address this problem, we discover a constant factor that characterizes the Web domain, based on which we propose a new method for automatically determining the number of clusters in Web page data sets. We discover that the …

Personalizing Interactions With Information Systems, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Saverio Perugini

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms and technologies necessary to customize information access to the end-user. It can be defined as the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to the individual. In this chapter, we study personalization from the viewpoint of personalizing interaction. The survey covers mechanisms for information-finding on the web, advanced information retrieval systems, dialog-based applications, and mobile access paradigms. Specific emphasis is placed on studying how users interact with an information system and how the system can encourage and foster interaction. This helps bring out the role of the personalization system as a facilitator which reconciles …

Staging Transformations For Multimodal Web Interaction Management, Michael Narayan, Christopher Williams, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Saverio Perugini

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations – …

Personalizing Software Development Practice Using Mastery-Based Coaching, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch

Chris BOESCH

The authors previously developed a system to facilitate the self-directed learning and practicing of software languages in Singapore. One of the goals of this self-directed learning was to enable the development of student mentors who would then be able to assist other students during classroom sessions. Building on this work, the authors extended the platform to support personalized coaching with the goals of further enabling and preparing students to mentor their peers. This paper covers the challenges, insights, and features that were developed in order to develop and deploy this mastery-based coaching feature.

Popularity, Interoperability, And Impact Of Programming Languages In 100,000 Open Source Projects, Tegawende F. Bissyande, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Laurent Réveillère

David LO

Programming languages have been proposed even before the era of the modern computer. As years have gone, computer resources have increased and application domains have expanded, leading to the proliferation of hundreds of programming languages, each attempting to improve over others or to address new programming paradigms. These languages range from procedural languages like C, object oriented languages like Java, and functional languages such as ML and Haskell. Unfortunately, there is a lack of large scale and comprehensive studies that examine the “popularity”, “interoperability”, and “impact” of various programming languages. To fill this gap, this study investigates a hundred thousands …

Spring­11: Pdc In Cs1/2 And A Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Software Design Course, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, Chandra N. Sekharan, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

Recent changes in the environment of Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Computer Science include a better differentiation of our four undergraduate majors, growing interest in computing among science majors, and an increased demand for graduates with mobile and cloud skills. In our continued effort to incorporate parallel and distributed computing topics into the undergraduate curriculum, we are focusing on these three existing courses: CS1: In response to a request from the physics department, we started to offer a CS1 section aimed at majors in physics and other hard sciences this spring semester. This section includes some material on numerical methods …

Network Technologies Used To Aggregate Environmental Data, Paul Stasiuk, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

The goal of the Loyola Weather Service (lws) project is to design and build a system of functioning environmental monitoring widgets that can intelligently and autonomously control the environment around them based on set thresholds and triggers. The widgets will also have the ability to aggregate their data and easily display this data in various ways: through a user interface in the room that the widget is placed, via a web application, and programmatically via a RESTful web service.

A Polyglot Approach To Bioinformatics Data Integration: Phylogenetic Analysis Of Hiv-1, Steven Reisman, Catherine Putonti, George K. Thiruvathukal, Konstantin Läufer

George K. Thiruvathukal

RNA-interference has potential therapeutic use against HIV-1 by targeting highly-functional mRNA sequences that contribute to the virulence of the virus. Empirical work has shown that within cell lines, all of the HIV-1 genes are affected by RNAi-induced gene silencing. While promising, inherent in this treatment is the fact that RNAi sequences must be highly specific. HIV, however, mutates rapidly, leading to the evolution of viral escape mutants. In fact, such strains are under strong selection to include mutations within the targeted region, evading the RNAi therapy and thus increasing the virus’ fitness in the host. Taking a phylogenetic approach, we …

Building Capable, Energy-Efficient, Flexible Visualization And Sensing Clusters From Commodity Tablets, Thomas Delgado Dias, Xian Yan, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

We explore the application of clusters of commodity tablet devices to problems spanning a “trilogy” of concerns: visualization, sensing, and computation. We conjecture that such clusters provide a low-cost, energy-efficient, flexible, and ultimately effective platform to tackle a wide range of problems within this trilogy. This is a work in progress, and we now elaborate our position and give a preliminary status report. A wide range of Android tablet devices are available in terms of price and capabilities. “You get what you pay for” w.r.t. display resolution, sensors, and chipset---corresponding to the trilogy. $200 gets one a 1280x800-pixel touch display, …

Precis: A Design-Time Precision Analysis Tool, Mark L. Chang, Scott Hauck

Mark L. Chang

Currently, few tools exist to aid the FPGA developer in translating an algorithm designed for a general-purpose-processor into one that is precision-optimized for FPGAs. This task requires extensive knowledge of both the algorithm and the target hardware. We present a design-time tool, Precis, which assists the developer in analyzing the precision requirements of algorithms specified in MATLAB. Through the combined use of simulation, user input, and program analysis, we demonstrate a methodology for precision analysis that can aid the developer in focusing their manual precision optimization efforts.

Kb-Anonymity: A Model For Anonymized Behavior-Preserving Test And Debugging Data, Aditya Budi, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Lucia Lucia

David LO

It is often very expensive and practically infeasible to generate test cases that can exercise all possible program states in a program. This is especially true for a medium or large industrial system. In practice, industrial clients of the system often have a set of input data collected either before the system is built or after the deployment of a previous version of the system. Such data are highly valuable as they represent the operations that matter in a client's daily business and may be used to extensively test the system. However, such data often carries sensitive information and cannot …

Model Checking In The Absence Of Code, Model And Properties, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

David LO

Model checking is a major approach in ensuring software correctness. It verifies a model converted from code against some formal properties. However, difficulties and programmers ’ reluctance to formalize formal properties have been some hurdles to its widespread industrial adoption. Also, with the advent of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components provided by third party vendors, model checking is further challenged as often only a binary version of the code is provided by vendors. Interestingly, latest instrumentation tools like PIN and Valgrind have enable execution traces to be collected dynamically from a running program. In this preliminary study, we investigate what can …

Mining Scenario-Based Specifications With Value-Based Invariants, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

David LO

There have been a number of studies on mining candidate specifications from execution traces. Some extract specifications corresponding to value-based invariants, while others work on inferring ordering constraints. In this work, we merge our previous work on mining scenario-based specifications, extracting ordering constraints in the form of live sequence charts (LSC), a visual specification language, with Daikon, a tool for mining value-based invariants. The resulting approach strengthens the expressive power of the mined scenarios by enriching them with scenario-specific value-based invariants. The concept is illustrated using a preliminary case study on a real application.

Enhanced Indoor Locationing In A Congested Wi-Fi Environment, Hsiuping Lin, Ying Zhang, Martin Griss, Ilya Landa

Martin L Griss

Many context-aware mobile applications require a reasonably accurate and stable estimate of a user’s location. While the Global Positioning System (GPS) works quite well world-wide outside of buildings and urban canyons, locating an indoor user in a real-world environment is much more problematic. Several different approaches and technologies have been explored, some involving specialized sensors and appliances, and others using increasingly ubiquitous Wi- Fi and Bluetooth radios. In this project, we want to leverage existing Wi-Fi access points (AP) and seek efficient approaches to gain usefully high room-level accuracy of the indoor location prediction of a mobile user. The Redpin …

Overseer: A Mobile Context-Aware Collaboration And Task Management System For Disaster Response, Faisal B. Luqman, Martin L. Griss

Martin L Griss

Efficient collaboration and task management is challenging in distributed, dynamically-formed organizations such as ad hoc disaster response teams. Ineffective collaboration may result in poor performance and possible loss of life. In this paper, we present an open multi-agent system, called Overseer, that leverages context information in a mobile setting to facilitate collaboration and task allocation for disaster response. We describe our system architecture, deployment, evaluation metrics, challenges and proposed solutions. We also show how mobile context can be used to create dynamic rolebased assignments to support collaboration and effective task management

Software Reuse: Architecture, Process And Organization For Business Success, Ivar Jacobson, Martin Griss, Patrik Jonsson

Martin L Griss

No abstract provided.