Software Engineering Commons^™

Cedarlogic 2.0 Update, Colin Broberg, Julian Pernia, Tyler Drake, James Von Eiff

The Research and Scholarship Symposium

CedarLogic is the Cedarville University’s student-developed, digital logic simulator. Engineering and Computer Science students use this software for several of their classes. Our primary goal for this update is adding black boxes, buses, and cross-platform compatibility. Our additional improvements in user-friendliness and functionality will give students an improved CedarLogic experience.

The Chess Puzzle Lock Screen, Ryan J. Hayes

Student Scholar Showcase

The Chess Puzzle Lock Screen

Many times each day, owners of cellphones use their phone’s lock screen in order to access their device. The goal of this project has been to take advantage of the action of unlocking one’s device by incorporating an element of self-help into the process. Every time a user who is interested in learning a new field attempts to access their device, that user is faced with a problem pertaining to a subject they are interested in learning more about. After many repetitions of this scenario, the user will have increased their understanding of ...

Virtual Reality: Google Cardboard And Unity, Emma Elliott

Student Scholar Showcase

Virtual Reality is currently the hottest way for people to play video games because it provides an immersive and interactive world to explore. It uses computer software to create sounds, realistic images, and other effects to simulate a virtual setting. The current craze started on the Oculus Rift headset and has incited other companies to make their own, but most are expensive or require another system to play. Instead of buying an expensive headset, anyone with a smartphone can play in Virtual Reality with Google’s cheap alternative, the Google Cardboard. The goal of this project is to complete a ...

Prototype Software Assurance Framework (Saf): Introduction And Overview, Christopher J. Alberts, Carol Woody

Software Engineering Institute

Software is a growing component of modern business- and mission-critical systems. As organizations become more dependent on software, security-related risks to their organizational missions also increase. Traditional security-engineering approaches rely on addressing security risks during the operation and maintenance of software-reliant systems. The costs required to control security risks increase significantly when organizations wait until systems are deployed to address those risks. Field experiences of technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) indicate that few programs currently implement effective cybersecurity practices early in the acquisition lifecycle. Recent DoD directives are beginning to shift programs’ priorities regarding cybersecurity. As a ...

Network-On-Chip Based H.264 Video Decoder On A Field Programmable Gate Array, Ian Barge

Master's Theses (2009 -)

This thesis develops the first fully network-on-chip (NoC) based h.264 video decoder implemented in real hardware on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). This thesis starts with an overview of the h.264 video coding standard and an introduction to the NoC communication paradigm. Following this, a series of processing elements (PEs) are developed which implement the component algorithms making up the h.264 video decoder. These PEs, described primarily in VHDL with some Verilog and C, are then mapped to an NoC which is generated using the CONNECT NoC generation tool. To demonstrate the scalability of the proposed ...

Related-Key Secure Key Encapsulation From Extended Computational Bilinear Diffie–Hellman, Brandon Qin, Shengli Liu, Shifeng Sun, Robert H. Deng, Dawu Gu

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

As a special type of fault injection attacks, Related-Key Attacks (RKAs) allow an adversary to manipulate a cryptographic key and subsequently observe the outcomes of the cryptographic scheme under these modified keys. In the real life, related-key attacks are already practical enough to be implemented on cryptographic devices. To avoid cryptographic devices suffering from related-key attacks, it is necessary to design a cryptographic scheme that resists against such attacks. This paper proposes an efficient RKA-secure Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), in which the adversary can modify the secret key sk to any value f(sk), as long as, f is a ...

Characterizing Malicious Android Apps By Mining Topic-Specific Data Flow Signatures, Xinli Yang, David Lo, Li Li, Xin Xia, Tegawendé F. Bissyande, Jacques Klein

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

Context: State-of-the-art works on automated detection of Android malware have leveraged app descriptionsto spot anomalies w.r.t the functionality implemented, or have used data flow information as afeature to discriminate malicious from benign apps. Although these works have yielded promising performance,we hypothesize that these performances can be improved by a better understanding of maliciousbehavior.Objective: To characterize malicious apps, we take into account both information on app descriptions,which are indicative of apps’ topics, and information on sensitive data flow, which can be relevant todiscriminate malware from benign apps.Method: In this paper, we propose a topic-specific approach ...

Modeling Topics And Behavior Of Microbloggers: An Integrated Approach, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

Microblogging encompasses both user-generated content and behavior. When modeling microblogging data, one has to consider personal and background topics, as well as how these topics generate the observed content and behavior. In this article, we propose the Generalized Behavior-Topic (GBT) model for simultaneously modeling background topics and users' topical interest in microblogging data. GBT considersmultiple topical communities (or realms) with different background topical interests while learning the personal topics of each user and the user's dependence on realms to generate both content and behavior. This differentiates GBT from other previous works that consider either one realm only or content ...

Real-Time Vision-Based Lane Detection With 1d Haar Wavelet Transform On Raspberry Pi, Vikas Reddy Sudini

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rapid progress is being made towards the realization of autonomous cars. Since the technology is in its early stages, human intervention is still necessary in order to ensure hazard-free operation of autonomous driving systems. Substantial research efforts are underway to enhance driver and passenger safety in autonomous cars. Toward that end GreedyHaarSpiker, a real-time vision-based lane detection algorithm is proposed for road lane detection in different weather conditions. The algorithm has been implemented in Python 2.7 with OpenCV 3.0 and tested on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B ARMv8 1GB RAM coupled to a Raspberry Pi camera board ...

Metafork: A Compilation Framework For Concurrency Models Targeting Hardware Accelerators, Xiaohui Chen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Parallel programming is gaining ground in various domains due to the tremendous computational power that it brings; however, it also requires a substantial code crafting effort to achieve performance improvement. Unfortunately, in most cases, performance tuning has to be accomplished manually by programmers. We argue that automated tuning is necessary due to the combination of the following factors. First, code optimization is machine-dependent. That is, optimization preferred on one machine may be not suitable for another machine. Second, as the possible optimization search space increases, manually finding an optimized configuration is hard. Therefore, developing new compiler techniques for optimizing applications ...

A Scalable Approach For Lightweight Pointer Analysis, Vlas Zyrianov

Undergraduate Research Symposium

A lightweight, flow-insensitive pointer analysis tool called srcPtr is presented. The research investigates various methods for pointer analysis to determine which are scalable to large scale software systems. Pointers are variable that indirectly reference other variables within a source code program. Pointer analysis is a non-trivial activity for determining what variables are being pointed by which pointer and how these indirect references can alter program behavior. Pointer analysis is critical for compiler optimization, impact analysis, fact extraction, debugging, and program comprehension. A prototype tool is being constructed as a test bed for determining what analysis approaches are scalable while simultaneously ...

Privacy In Context-Aware Mobile Crowdsourcing Systems, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

Mobile crowd-sourcing can become as a strategy to perform time-sensitive urban tasks (such as municipal monitoring and last mile logistics) by effectively coordinating smartphone users. The success of the mobile crowd-sourcing platform depends mainly on its effectiveness in engaging crowd-workers, and recent studies have shown that compared to the pull-based approach, which relies on crowd-workers to browse and commit to tasks they would want to perform, the push-based approach can take into consideration of worker’s daily routine, and generate highly effective recommendations. As a result, workers waste less time on detours, plan more in advance, and require much less ...

Whole-System Analysis For Understanding Publicly Accessible Functions In Android, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Lingxiao Jiang, Thanh Tho Quan

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

Android has become the most popular mobile operating system. Millions of applications, including many malwares, haven been developed for it. Android itself evolves constantly with changing features and higher complexities. It is challenging for application developers to keep up with the changes and maintain the compatibility of their apps across Android versions. Therefore, there are many challenges for application analysis tools to accurately model and analyze app behaviors across Android versions. Even though the overall system architecture of Android and many APIs are documented, many other APIs and implementation details are not, not to mention potential bugs and vulnerabilities. Techniques ...

Using Intel Realsense Depth Data For Hand Tracking In Unreal Engine 4, Granger Lang

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

This project describes how to build a hand tracking method for VR/AR using the raw data from a depth sensing camera.

Empath-D: Empathetic Design For Accessibility, Choo Tsu Wei, Kenny, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Kiat Wee Tan, Archan Misra, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

We describe our vision for Empath-D, our system to enable Empathetic User Interface Design. Our key idea is to leverage Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR / AR) displays to provide an Immersive Reality environment, where developers/designers can emulate impaired interactions by elderly or disabled users while testing the usability of their applications. Our early experiences with the Empath-D prototype show that Empath-D can emulate a cataract vision impairment of the elderly and guide designers to create accessible web pages with less mental workload.

Decentralized Planning In Stochastic Environments With Submodular Rewards, Rajiv Ranjan Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

Decentralized Markov Decision Process (Dec-MDP) providesa rich framework to represent cooperative decentralizedand stochastic planning problems under transition uncertainty.However, solving a Dec-MDP to generate coordinatedyet decentralized policies is NEXP-Hard. Researchershave made significant progress in providing approximate approachesto improve scalability with respect to number ofagents. However, there has been little or no research devotedto finding guarantees on solution quality for approximateapproaches considering multiple (more than 2 agents)agents. We have a similar situation with respect to the competitivedecentralized planning problem and the StochasticGame (SG) model. To address this, we identify models in thecooperative and competitive case that rely on submodular rewards ...

Collaboration Trumps Homophily In Urban Mobile Crowd-Sourcing, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Randy Tandriansyah Daratan

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

This paper establishes the power of dynamic collaborative task completion among workers for urban mobile crowdsourcing. Collaboration is defined via the notion of peer referrals, whereby a worker who has accepted a location-specific task, but is unlikely to visit that location, offloads the task to a willing friend. Such a collaborative framework might be particularly useful for task bundles, especially for bundles that have higher geographic dispersion. The challenge, however, comes from the high similarity observed in the spatiotemporal pattern of task completion among friends. Using extensive real-world crowd-sourcing studies conducted over 7 weeks and 1000+ workers on a campus-based ...

Detecting Similar Repositories On Github, Yun Zhang, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Xin Xia, Quanlai Li, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

GitHub contains millions of repositories among which many are similar with one another (i.e., having similar source codes or implementing similar functionalities). Finding similar repositories on GitHub can be helpful for software engineers as it can help them reuse source code, build prototypes, identify alternative implementations, explore related projects, find projects to contribute to, and discover code theft and plagiarism. Previous studies have proposed techniques to detect similar applications by analyzing API usage patterns and software tags. However, these prior studies either only make use of a limited source of information or use information not available for projects on ...

Clcminer: Detecting Cross-Language Clones Without Intermediates, Xiao Cheng, Zhiming Peng, Lingxiao Jiang, Hao Zhong, Haibo Yu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

The proliferation of diverse kinds of programming languages and platforms makes it a common need to have the same functionality implemented in different languages for different platforms, such as Java for Android applications and C# forWindows phone applications. Although versions of code written in different languages appear syntactically quite different from each other, they are intended to implement the same software and typically contain many code snippets that implement similar functionalities, which we call cross-language clones. When the version of code in one language evolves according to changing functionality requirements and/or bug fixes, its cross-language clones may also need ...

Competency Analytics Tool: Analyzing Curriculum Using Course Competencies, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

The applications of learning outcomes and competency frameworks have brought better clarity to engineering programs in many universities. Several frameworks have been proposed to integrate outcomes and competencies into course design, delivery and assessment. However, in many cases, competencies are course-specific and their overall impact on the curriculum design is unknown. Such impact analysis is important for analyzing, discovering gaps and improving the curriculum design. Unfortunately, manual analysis is a painstaking process due to large amounts of competencies across the curriculum. In this paper, we propose an automated method to analyze the competencies and discover their impact on the overall ...