Software Engineering Commons^™

Powerpoint At 20: Back To Basics, Robert Gaskins

Robert Gaskins

Let simplicity inspire, and resist the lure of unreadable fonts, stock clip art, sound effects, and flying bullet points.

Location Update Versus Paging Trade-Off In Cellular Networks: An Approach Based On Vector Quantization, Abhishek Roy, Archan Misra, Sajal K. Das

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we propose two information-theoretic techniques for efficiently trading off the location update and paging costs associated with mobility management in wireless cellular networks. Previous approaches attempt to always accurately convey a mobile's movement sequence and hence, cannot reduce the signaling cost below the entropy bound. Our proposed techniques, however, exploit rate-distortion theory to arbitrarily reduce the update cost, at the expense of an increase in the corresponding paging overhead. To this end, we describe two location tracking algorithms, based on spatial quantization and temporal quantization, which first quantize the movement sequence into a smaller set of codewords, …

A Unit Of Information-Based Content Adaptation Method For Improving Web Content Accessibility In The Mobile Internet, Stephen Yang, Jia Zhang, Rick Chen, Norman Shao

Jia Zhang

No abstract provided.

Reasoning About The Behavior Of Aspect-Oriented Programs, Neelam Soundarajan, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Johan Dovland

Publications and Research

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has become increasingly popular over the last few years. At the same time, reasoning about the behavior of these programs poses serious challenges. In this paper, we present a rely-guarantee approach to such reasoning. The rely-guarantee approach has proven useful in reasoning about concurrent and distributed programs. We show that some of the key problems encountered in reasoning about aspect-oriented programs are similar to those encountered in reasoning about concurrent programs; and that the rely-guarantee approach, appropriately modified, helps address these problems. We illustrate our approach with a simple example.

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

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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 Modal Scenarios-Based Specifications From Execution Trace Of Reactive Systems, David Lo, Shahar Maoz, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification mining is a dynamic analysis process aimed at automatically inferring suggested specifications of a program from its execution traces. We describe a novel method, framework, and tool, for mining inter-object scenario-based specifications in the form of a UML2-compliant variant of Damm and Harels Live Sequence Charts (LSC). LSC extends the classical partial order semantics of sequence diagrams with temporal liveness and symbolic class level lifelines, in order to generate compact and expressive specifications. The output of our algorithm is a sound and complete set of statistically significant LSCs (i.e., satisfying given thresholds of support and confidence), mined from an …

Context-Aware Statistical Debugging: From Bug Predictors To Faulty Control Flow Paths, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effective bug localization is important for realizing automated debugging. One attractive approach is to apply statistical techniques on a collection of evaluation profiles of program properties to help localize bugs. Previous research has proposed various specialized techniques to isolate certain program predicates as bug predictors. However, because many bugs may not be directly associated with these predicates, these techniques are often ineffective in localizing bugs. Relevant control flow paths that may contain bug locations are more informative than stand-alone predicates for discovering and understanding bugs. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically generate such faulty control flow paths …

Machine-Assisted Proof Support For Validation Beyond Simulink, Chunqing Chen, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Simulink is popular in industry for modeling and simulating embedded systems. It is deficient to handle requirements of high-level assurance and timing analysis. Previously, we showed the idea of applying Timed Interval Calculus (TIC) to complement Simulink. In this paper, we develop machine-assisted proof support for Simulink models represented in TIC. The work is based on a generic theorem prover, Prototype Verification System (PVS). The TIC specifications of both Simulink models and requirements are transformed to PVS specifications automatically. Verification can be carried out at interval level with a high level of automation. Analysis of continuous and discrete behaviors is …

Advances And Challenges With Data Broadcasting In Wireless Mesh Networks, Chun Tung Chou, Junaid Qadir, Joo Ghee Lim, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless mesh networks have become a promising means to provide low-cost broadband access. Many WMN applications require broadcasting data (IPTV etc.) over the WMN. This article studies how efficient data broadcast, measured in terms of broadcast latency, can be realized by exploiting two features of WMNs: the use of multiple transmission rates at the link layer and the use of multiple radio interfaces on each node. We demonstrate that by exploiting these features, broadcast latency can be reduced severalfold compared to the current default practice in wireless LANs of using the lowest transmission rate for broadcast traffic. We also discuss …

A Two-Phase Approach To Interactivity Enhancement For Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Suiping Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed virtual environments (DVEs) are distributed systems that allow multiple geographically distributed clients (users) to interact simultaneously in a computer-generated, shared virtual world. Applications of DVEs can be seen in many areas nowadays, such as online games, military simulations, collaborative designs, etc. To support large-scale DVEs with real-time interactions among thousands or even more distributed clients, a geographically distributed server architecture (GDSA) is generally needed, and the virtual world can be partitioned into many distinct zones to distribute the load among the servers. Due to the geographic distributions of clients and servers in such architectures, it is essential to efficiently …

Transway® (Integrated Computerized Deployment System) Technical And Operational Description, Joshua Nibecker, Harmony Larsen, Shawn Pan, Clay Warren, Robert Chambers, Dennis Taylor, Ben Weber, James Delos Reyes, Craig Maas, Mark Porczak, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The TRANSWAY® software application is an adaptive, ontology-based toolset with collaborative agents, designed to assist the Deployment and Distribution Operations Center (DDOC) staff of the United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) with the performance of movement planning tasks. The principal focus of the TRANSWAY® toolset is re-planning. The objective of TRANSWAY® is to provide DDOC operators with an intelligent planning engine that receives data from GTN and JOPES, and utilizes the existing Integrated Computerized Deployment System (ICODES) and Joint Forces Collaborative Toolkit (JFCT®; -formerly known as SEAWAY) agent-based applications as functional extensions.

With its initial and immediate focus on the …

Mining Web-Functional Dependencies For Flexible Information Access, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present an approach to enhancing information access through Web structure mining in contrast to traditional approaches involving usage mining. Specifically, we mine the hardwired hierarchical hyperlink structure of Web sites to identify patterns of term-term co-occurrences we call Web functional dependencies (FDs). Intuitively, a Web FD ‘x y’ declares that all paths through a site involving a hyperlink labeled x also contain a hyperlink labeled y. The complete set of FDs satisfied by a site help characterize (flexible and expressive) interaction paradigms supported by a site, where a paradigm is the set of explorable sequences therein. …

Automated Refactoring Of Legacy Java Software To Enumerated Types, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Jason Sawin, Atanas Rountev

Publications and Research

Modern Java languages introduce several new features that offer significant improvements over older Java technology. In this article we consider the new enum construct, which provides language support for enumerated types. Prior to recent Java languages, programmers needed to employ various patterns (e.g., the weak enum pattern) to compensate for the absence of enumerated types in Java. Unfortunately, these compensation patterns lack several highly-desirable properties of the enum construct, most notably, type safety. We present a novel fully-automated approach for transforming legacy Java code to use the new enumeration construct. This semantics-preserving approach increases type safety, produces code that is …

Performance Of Network-Coding In Multi-Rate Wireless Environments For Multicast Applications, Luiz F. M. Viera, Archan Misra, Mario Gerla

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates the interaction between net-work coding and link-layer transmission rate diversity in multi-hop wireless networks. By appropriately mixing data packets at intermediate nodes, network coding allows a single multicast flow to achieve higher throughput to a set of receivers. Broadcast applications can also exploit link-layer rate diversity, whereby individual nodes can transmit at faster rates at the expense of corresponding smaller coverage area. We first demonstrate how combining rate-diversity with network coding can provide a larger capacity for data dissemination of a single multicast flow, and how consideration of rate diversity is critical for maximizing system throughput. We …

Mining Modal Scenarios From Execution Traces, David Lo, Shahar Maoz, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification mining is a dynamic analysis process aimed at automatically inferring suggested specifications of a program from its execution traces. We describe a method, a framework, and a tool, for mining inter-object scenario-based specifications in the form of a UML2-compliant variant of Damm and Harel's Live Sequence Charts (LSC), which extends the classical partial order semantics of sequence diagrams with temporal liveness and symbolic class level lifelines, in order to generate compact and expressive specifications. Moreover, we use previous research work and tools developed for LSC to visualize, analyze, manipulate, test, and thus evaluate the scenario-based specifications we mine. Our …

Sketchwizard: Wizard Of Oz Prototyping Of Pen-Based User Interfaces, Richard C. Davis, T. Scott Saponas, Michael Shilman, James A. Landay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

SketchWizard allows designers to create Wizard of Oz prototypes of pen-based user interfaces in the early stages of design. In the past, designers have been inhibited from participating in the design of pen-based interfaces because of the inadequacy of paper prototypes and the difficulty of developing functional prototypes. In SketchWizard, designers and end users share a drawing canvas between two computers, allowing the designer to simulate the behavior of recognition or other technologies. Special editing features are provided to help designers respond quickly to end-user input. This paper describes the SketchWizard system and presents two evaluations of our approach. The …

The Effect Of A New Version Of Software On Its Use: A Case Study Of A Course Management System, John Beckett

Faculty Works

Course Management Systems (CMS) are used to support the growing trend of colleges and universities to offer classes at a distance, and to use technology to provide resources and communication with and for students in traditional classroom settings. Actual use and success of these systems has been mixed in practice, however, for reasons which are not entirely clear.

The theory of Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) described and codified by Everett M. Rogers in 1962 is used to describe how innovations are selected, adopted, and brought to bear on the needs of people with jobs to do. Gary C. Moore and …

Enabling The Interoperability Of Large-Scale Legacy Systems, Kalyan Moy Gupta, Michael A. Zang, Adam Gray, David W. Aha, Joe Kriege, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Legacy system data models can interoperate only if their syntactic and semantic differences are resolved. To address this problem, we have developed the Intelligent Mapping Toolkit (IMT), which enables mixed-initiative mapping of meta-data and instances between relational data models. IMT employs a distributed multi-agent architecture so that, unlike many other efforts, it can perform mapping tasks that involve thousands of schema elements. This architecture includes a novel federation of matching agents that leverage case-based reasoning methods. As part of our pre-deployment evaluation for USTRANSCOM and other DoD agencies, we evaluated IMT’s mapping performance and scalability. We show that combinations of …

Application Of Triz Principles In Software Concepts, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The Inventive Principles of TRIZ are not only applicable to mechanical or technical field; they are also applicable to Software solutions. Most of the 40 principles are easy to learn, but the question arises where to apply and how to apply. This article shows some simple examples of applying TRIZ principles.

Some people may ask, the solutions in this article are all known, what is the use of trying out TRIZ Principles on them. My answer is the art of problem solving is like learning a bicycle. If you are capable of riding the cycle on a known road, there …

Context-Based Detection Of Clone-Related Bugs, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su, Edwin Chiu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Studies show that programs contain much similar code, commonly known as clones. One of the main reasons for introducing clones is programmers' tendency to copy and paste code to quickly duplicate functionality. We commonly believe that clones can make programs difficult to maintain and introduce subtle bugs. Although much research has proposed techniques for detecting and removing clones to improve software maintainability, little has considered how to detect latent bugs introduced by clones. In this paper, we introduce a general notion of context-based inconsistencies among clones and develop an efficient algorithm to detect such inconsistencies for locating bugs. We have …

Globally Distributed Software Development Project Performance: An Empirical Analysis, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software firms are increasingly distributing their software development effort across multiple locations. In this paper we present the results of a two year field study that investigated the effects of dispersion on the productivity and quality of distributed software development. We first develop a model of distributed software development. We then use the model, along with our empirically observed data, to understand the consequences of dispersion on software project performance. Our analysis reveals that, even in high process maturity environments, a) dispersion significantly reduces development productivity and has effects on conformance quality, and b) these negative effects of dispersion can …

Realizing Live Sequence Charts In System Verilog, Hai H. Wang, Shengchao Qin, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The design of an embedded control system starts with an investigation of properties and behaviors of the process evolving within its environment, and an analysis of the requirement for its safety performance. In early stages, system requirements are often specied as scenarios of behavior using sequence charts for different use cases. This specication must be precise, intuitive and expressive enough to capture different aspects of embedded control systems. As a rather rich and useful extension to the classical message sequence charts, Live Sequence Charts (LSC), which provide a rich collection of constructs for specifying both possible and mandatory behaviors, are …

Century: Automated Aspects Of Patient Care, Marion Blount, John Davis, Maria Ebling, Ji Hyun Kim, Kyun Hyun Kim, Kang Yoon Lee, Archan Misra, Se Hun Park, Daby Sow, Young Ju Tak, Min Wang, Karen Witting

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Remote health monitoring affords the possibility of improving the quality of health care by enabling relatively inexpensive out-patient care. However, remote health monitoring raises new a problem: the potential for data explosion in health care systems. To address this problem, the remote health monitoring systems must be integrated with analysis tools that provide automated trend analysis and event detection in real time. In this paper, we propose an overview of Century, an extensible framework for analysis of large numbers of remote sensor-based medical data streams.

Pre-Conference Proceedings Of The Focus Symposium On Representation Of Context In Software Data → Information → Knowledge, Collaborative Agent Design Research Center

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

For the past 20 years commercial corporations and government agencies have suffered under the limitations of stove-piped computer software applications that function as discrete entities within a fragmented data-processing environment. In the United States of America (US) military services, lack of interoperability has been identified by numerous think tanks, advisory boards, and studies, as the primary information systems problem (e.g., Army Science Board 2000, Air Force SAB 2000 Command and Control Study, and NSB Network-Centric Naval Forces 2000). Yet, despite this level of attention, all attempts to achieve interoperability within the current data-centric information systems environment have proven to be …

Alternative Paths To Intelligent Systems, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This paper examines the three prevalent approaches to Artificial Intelligence (AI), namely symbolic reasoning systems, connectionist systems, and emergent systems based on the principles of the subsumption theory. Distinguished by their top-down and bottom-up mechanisms all three approaches have strengths and weaknesses. While the logical reasoning approach is precise and well supported by mathematical theories and procedures, it is constrained by a largely predefined representational model. Connectionist systems, on the other hand, are able to recognize patterns even if these patterns are only similar and not identical to the patterns that they have been trained to recognize, but they have …

Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (Kmes): Concepts And Implementation Principles, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The purpose of this paper is to present concepts and implementation principles related to the design and development of reusable software services that are capable of assisting users at the operational level. Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (KMES) are an implementation of the service-oriented architecture paradigm, with a focus on the exchange of data within the meaningful context of a particular application (i.e., knowledge) domain. This requires a KMES service to incorporate a high level representation of this knowledge domain in the form of an ontology that is shared among all collaborating services within the application environment and at the same …

Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (Kmes): Concepts And Implementation Principles, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The purpose of this paper is to present concepts and implementation principles related to the design and development of reusable software services that are capable of assisting users at the operational level. Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (KMES) are an implementation of the service-oriented architecture paradigm, with a focus on the exchange of data within the meaningful context of a particular application (i.e., knowledge) domain. This requires a KMES service to incorporate a high level representation of this knowledge domain in the form of an ontology that is shared among all collaborating services within the application environment and at the same …

Enhancing The Face Of Service-Oriented Capabilities, Kym J. Pohl, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

With today’s focus toward discoverable web services, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) are becoming increasingly prevalent. To support an effective interaction between services and their clientele, the sophistication of the interface, or face, such services present is of critical importance. Without a rich, expressive nature, such services struggle to satisfy the industry promises of reuse, composability, and reduced inter-component dependencies. Especially relevant for domain-oriented applications, services must present sufficient levels of expression to allow for an effective exchange of relevant context. Further, such communication should be offered in an asynchronous manner to promote both work flow efficiency and limited coupling.

This paper …

Entrepreneurial Opportunities And Market Analysis Of The Information Technology And Software Development Sector Of Pakistan, Toshio Fujita, Hassan Tajuddin

Business Review

This study investigates the Information Technology and the Software Development sector of Pakistan. It discusses the reasons for the lack of trust in Pakistani IT companies and different problems faced by an entrepreneur starting an IT company in Pakistan. The data was analyzed by qualitative content analysis. The findings are discussed with reference to previous research, and implications for entrepreneurial setups are noted.

A Service Supporting Universal Access To Mobile Internet With Unit Of Information-Based Intelligent Content Adaptation, Stephen Yang, Jia Zhang, Norman Shao, Rick Chen

Jia Zhang

No abstract provided.