Systems Architecture Commons^™

An Empirical Study Of Refactorings And Technical Debt In Machine Learning Systems, Yiming Tang, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Rhia Singh, Ajani Stewart, Anita Raja

Publications and Research

Machine Learning (ML), including Deep Learning (DL), systems, i.e., those with ML capabilities, are pervasive in today's data-driven society. Such systems are complex; they are comprised of ML models and many subsystems that support learning processes. As with other complex systems, ML systems are prone to classic technical debt issues, especially when such systems are long-lived, but they also exhibit debt specific to these systems. Unfortunately, there is a gap of knowledge in how ML systems actually evolve and are maintained. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying refactorings, i.e., source-to-source semantics-preserving program transformations, performed in real-world, open-source …

Functional Programming For Systems Software: Implementing Baremetal Programs In Habit, Donovan Ellison

University Honors Theses

Programming in a baremetal environment, directly on top of hardware with very little to help manage memory or ensure safety, can be dangerous even for experienced programmers. Programming languages can ease the burden on developers and sometimes take care of entire sets of errors. This is not the case for a language like C that will do almost anything you want, for better or worse. To operate in a baremetal environment often requires direct control over memory, but it would be nice to have that capability without sacrificing safety guarantees. Rust is a new language that aims to fit this …

Achieving Obfuscation Through Self-Modifying Code: A Theoretical Model, Heidi Waddell

Senior Honors Theses

With the extreme amount of data and software available on networks, the protection of online information is one of the most important tasks of this technological age. There is no such thing as safe computing, and it is inevitable that security breaches will occur. Thus, security professionals and practices focus on two areas: security, preventing a breach from occurring, and resiliency, minimizing the damages once a breach has occurred. One of the most important practices for adding resiliency to source code is through obfuscation, a method of re-writing the code to a form that is virtually unreadable. …

Storage Management Strategy In Mobile Phones For Photo Crowdsensing, En Wang, Zhengdao Qu, Xinyao Liang, Xiangyu Meng, Yongjian Yang, Dawei Li, Weibin Meng

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In mobile crowdsensing, some users jointly finish a sensing task through the sensors equipped in their intelligent terminals. In particular, the photo crowdsensing based on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) collects pictures for some specific targets or events and uploads them to nearby edge servers, which leads to richer data content and more efficient data storage compared with the common mobile crowdsensing; hence, it has attracted an important amount of attention recently. However, the mobile users prefer uploading the photos through Wifi APs (PoIs) rather than cellular networks. Therefore, photos stored in mobile phones are exchanged among users, in order to …

Demand-Driven Execution Using Future Gated Single Assignment Form, Omkar Javeri

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation discusses a novel, previously unexplored execution model called Demand-Driven Execution (DDE), which executes programs starting from the outputs of the program, progressing towards the inputs of the program. This approach is significantly different from prior demand-driven reduction machines as it can execute a program written in an imperative language using the demand-driven paradigm while extracting both instruction and data level parallelism. The execution model relies on an executable Single Assignment Form which serves both as the internal representation of the compiler as well as the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of the machine. This work develops the instruction set …

Building Something With The Raspberry Pi, Richard Kordel

Presidential Research Grants

In 2017 Ryan Korn and I submitted a grant proposal in the annual Harrisburg University President’s Grant process. Our proposal was to partner with a local high school to install a classroom of 20 Raspberry Pi’s, along with the requisite peripherals. In that classroom students would be challenged to design something that combined programming with physical computing. In our presentation to the school we suggested that this project would give students the opportunity to be “amazing.”

As part of the grant, the top three students would be given scholarships to HU and the top five finalists would all be permitted …