Software Engineering Commons^™

A Hybrid Model For Identity Obfuscation By Face Replacement, Qianru Sun, Ayush Tewari, Weipeng Xu, Mario Fritz, Christian Theobalt, Bernt Schiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As more and more personal photos are shared and tagged in social media, avoiding privacy risks such as unintended recognition, becomes increasingly challenging. We propose a new hybrid approach to obfuscate identities in photos by head replacement. Our approach combines state of the art parametric face synthesis with latest advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for data-driven image synthesis. On the one hand, the parametric part of our method gives us control over the facial parameters and allows for explicit manipulation of the identity. On the other hand, the data-driven aspects allow for adding fine details and overall realism as …

Bilock: User Authentication Via Dental Occlusion Biometrics, Yongpan Zou, Meng Zhao, Zimu Zhou, Jiawei Lin, Mo Li, Kaishun Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User authentication on smart devices is indispensable to keep data privacy and security. It is especially significant for emerging wearable devices such as smartwatches considering data sensitivity in them. However, conventional authentication methods are not applicable for wearables due to constraints of size and hardware, which makes present wearable devices lack convenient, secure and low-cost authentication schemes. To tackle this problem, we reveal a novel biometric authentication mechanism which makes use of sounds of human dental occlusion (i.e., tooth click). We demonstrate its feasibility by comprehensive measurement study, and design a prototype-BiLock with two Android platforms. Extensive real-world experiments have …

Cloud Service Reliability And Usability Measurement, Abdullah Bokhary

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Cloud computing has become a major resource for fulfilling people's computational and storage needs. Investing in these services requires measuring and assuring its quality in general, and reliability and usability are primary concerns. However, using traditional reliability models can be challenging because of the environmental constraints and limited data availability due to the heterogeneous environment and diverse stakeholders. Also, the quality of cloud service Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) has a direct impact on the usability and reliability of the service.

We developed a framework to measure reliability with alternative available information that most cloud providers offer in three stages: 1) …

Exploring Confidentiality Issues In Hyperledger Fabric Business Applications, Shivam Bajpayi, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Donghang Lu, Sihao Yin

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The rise of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies over the last decade have made its underlying technology (blockchain) come into the spotlight. Blockchain is a secure ledger of linked records called blocks. These records are cryptographically immutable and any tampering with the block is evident through a change in the cryptographic signature of the block. Among the blockchains deployed in practice today, Hyperledger Fabric is a platform that allows businesses to make use of blockchains in their applications. However, confidentiality issues arise with respects to the blocks in this blockchain network due to the fact that blocks might contain sensitive information accessible …

Visualization Of Geospatial Data As An Analytical And Educational Tool, Richard A. Vu

STAR Program Research Presentations

World Wind is an open-source API developed for Java, Android, and browsers that is designed to visualize and interact with geospatial data. The Web World Wind client is composed of four major components: the HTML template, the globe, geospatial features, and application features. The template was implemented using Bootstrap and hosts the globe provided by World Wind. This globe draws its data from multiple imagery sources, including the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service and Web Map Tile Service. This enables the application to perform and visualize complex calculations with multiple types of data such as weather and terrain. …

Formal Verification Of A Modern Boot Loader, Scott D. Constable, Rob Sutton, Arash Sahebolamri, Steve Chapin

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Technical Reports

We introduce the Syracuse Assured Boot Loader Executive (SABLE), a trustworthy secure loader. A trusted boot loader performs a cryptographic measurement (hash) of program code and executes it unconditionally, allowing later-stage software to verify the integrity of the system through local or remote attestation. A secure loader differs from a trusted loader in that it executes subsequent code only if measurements of that code match known-good values. We have applied a rigorous formal verification technique recently demonstrated in practice by NICTA in their verification of the seL4 microkernel. We summarize our design philosophy from a high level and present our …

Detecting Saliency By Combining Speech And Object Detection In Indoor Environments, Kiran Thapa

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Describing scenes such as rooms, city streets, or routes, is a very common human task that requires the ability to identify and describe the scene sufficiently for a hearer to develop a mental model of the scene. When people talk about such scenes, they mention some objects of the scene at the exclusion of others. We call the mentioned objects salient objects as people consider them noticeable or important in comparison to other non-mentioned objects. In this thesis, we look at saliency of visual scenes and how visual saliency informs what can and should be said about a scene when …

Performance, Scalability, And Robustness In Distributed File Tree Copy, Christopher Robert Sutton

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

As storage needs continually increase, and network file systems become more common, the need arises for tools that efficiently copy to and from these types of file systems. Traditional copy tools like the Linux cp utility were originally created for traditional storage systems, where storage is managed by a single host machine. cp uses a single-threaded approach to copying files. Using a multi-threaded approach would likely not provide an advantage in this system since the disk accesses are the bottleneck for this type of operation. In a distributed file system the disk accesses are spread across multiple hosts, and many …

Fusing Multi-Abstraction Vector Space Models For Concern Localization, Yun Zhang, David Lo, Xin Xia, Giuseppe Scanniello, Tien-Duy B. Le, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Concern localization refers to the process of locating code units that match a particular textual description. It takes as input textual documents such as bug reports and feature requests and outputs a list of candidate code units that are relevant to the bug reports or feature requests. Many information retrieval (IR) based concern localization techniques have been proposed in the literature. These techniques typically represent code units and textual descriptions as a bag of tokens at one level of abstraction, e.g., each token is a word, or each token is a topic. In this work, we propose a multi-abstraction concern …

A Formal Specification And Verification Framework For Timed Security Protocols, Li Li, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Meng Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, protocols often use time to provide better security. For instance, critical credentials are often associated with expiry dates in system designs. However, using time correctly in protocol design is challenging, due to the lack of time related formal specification and verification techniques. Thus, we propose a comprehensive analysis framework to formally specify as well as automatically verify timed security protocols. A parameterized method is introduced in our framework to handle timing parameters whose values cannot be decided in the protocol design stage. In this work, we first propose timed applied p-calculus as a formal language for specifying timed security …

Demand-Aware Charger Planning For Electric Vehicle Sharing, Bowen Du, Yongxin Tong, Zimu Zhou, Qian Tao, Wenjun Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cars of the future have been predicted as shared and electric. There has been a rapid growth in electric vehicle (EV) sharing services worldwide in recent years. For EV-sharing platforms to excel, it is essential for them to offer private charging infrastructure for exclusive use that meets the charging demand of their clients. Particularly, they need to plan not only the places to build charging stations, but also the amounts of chargers per station, to maximally satisfy the requirements on global charging coverage and local charging demand. Existing research efforts are either inapplicable for their different problem formulations or are …

Lightweight Call-Graph Construction For Multilingual Software Analysis, Anne-Marie Bogar, Damian Lyons, David Baird

Faculty Publications

Analysis of multilingual codebases is a topic of increasing importance. In prior work, we have proposed the MLSA (MultiLingual Software Analysis) architecture, an approach to the lightweight analysis of multilingual codebases, and have shown how it can be used to address the challenge of constructing a single call graph from multilingual software with mutual calls. This paper addresses the challenge of constructing monolingual call graphs in a lightweight manner (consistent with the objective of MLSA) which nonetheless yields sufficient information for resolving language interoperability calls. A novel approach is proposed which leverages information from …

Lightweight Multilingual Software Analysis, Damian Lyons, Anne Marie Bogar, David Baird

Faculty Publications

Large software systems can often be multilingual – that is, software systems are written in more than one language. However, many popular software engineering tools are monolingual by nature. Nonetheless, companies are faced with the need to manage their large, multilingual codebases to address issues with security, efficiency, and quality metrics. This paper presents a novel lightweight approach to multilingual software analysis – MLSA. The approach is modular and focused on efficient static analysis computation for large codebases. One topic is addressed in detail – the generation of multilingual call graphs to identify language boundary problems in multilingual code. The …

An Application Of Game Theory In Distributed Collaborative Decision Making, Angran Xiao

Publications and Research

In a distributed product realization environment, new paradigms and accompanying software systems are necessary to support the collaborative work of geographically dispersed engineering teams from different disciplines who have different knowledge, experience, tools and resources. To verify the concept of collaboration by separation, we propose a generic information communication medium to enable knowledge representation and exchange between engineering teams, a digital interface. Across digital interfaces, each engineering team maintains its own perspective towards the product realization problem, and each controls a subset of design variables and seeks to maximize its own payoff function subject to individual constraints. Hence, we postulate …

An Algorithmic Approach To Creating Effective Study Groups Using A Smart Phone App, Kelvin J. Rosado-Ayala

Honors College Theses

For many students entering college, meeting new people and studying are a common struggle. Study groups are generally recommended, especially if the groups are comprised of members with complementary personality traits. But the challenge still remains, how do freshmen or transfer students find and form these heterogeneous study groups. In order to help alleviate this issue, an Android application was developed to automatically create study groups for students. Using basic information provided by students upon registration, the algorithm is able to automatically find matching group members. The application was designed using an agile life cycle model over the course of …

Data Scientist’S Analysis Toolbox: Comparison Of Python, R, And Sas Performance, Jim Brittain, Mariana Cendon, Jennifer Nizzi, John Pleis

SMU Data Science Review

A quantitative analysis will be performed on experiments utilizing three different tools used for Data Science. The analysis will include replication of analysis along with comparisons of code length, output, and results. Qualitative data will supplement the quantitative findings. The conclusion will provide data support guidance on the correct tool to use for common situations in the field of Data Science.

Searching For Relevant Lessons Learned Using Hybrid Information Retrieval Classifiers: A Case Study In Software Engineering, Tamer Mohamed Abdellatif Mohamed, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The lessons learned (LL) repository is one of the most valuable sources of knowledge for a software organization. It can provide distinctive guidance regarding previous working solutions for historical software management problems, or former success stories to be followed. However, the unstructured format of the LL repository makes it difficult to search using general queries, which are manually inputted by project managers (PMs). For this reason, this repository may often be overlooked despite the valuable information it provides. Since the LL repository targets PMs, the search method should be domain specific rather than generic as in the case of general …

Lightweight Multilingual Software Analysis, Damian Lyons, Anne Marie Bogar, David Baird

Faculty Publications

Developer preferences, language capabilities and the persistence of older languages contribute to the trend that large software codebases are often multilingual – that is, written in more than one computer language. While developers can leverage monolingual software development tools to build software components, companies are faced with the problem of managing the resultant large, multilingual codebases to address issues with security, efficiency, and quality metrics. The key challenge is to address the opaque nature of the language interoperability interface: one language calling procedures in a second (which may call a third, or even back to the first), resulting in a …

Kbase: The United States Department Of Energy Systems Biology Knowledgebase, Adam P. Arkin, Robert W. Cottingham, Christopher S. Henry, Nomi L. Harris, Rick L. Stevens, Sergei Maslov, Doreen Ware, Fernando Perez, Shane Canon, Michael W. Sneddon, Matthew L. Henderson, William J. Riehl, Dan Murphy-Olson, Stephen Y. Chan, Roy T. Kamimura, Sunita Kumari, Meghan M. Drake, Thomas S. Brettin, Elizabeth M. Glass, Dylan Chivian, Dan Gunter, David J. Weston, Benjamin H. Allen, Jason Baumohl, Nathan L. Tintle

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

No abstract provided.

Deep Specification Mining, Tien-Duy B. Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Formal specifications are essential but usually unavailable in software systems. Furthermore, writing these specifications is costly and requires skills from developers. Recently, many automated techniques have been proposed to mine specifications in various formats including finite-state automaton (FSA). However, more works in specification mining are needed to further improve the accuracy of the inferred specifications. In this work, we propose Deep Specification Miner (DSM), a new approach that performs deep learning for mining FSA-based specifications. Our proposed approach uses test case generation to generate a richer set of execution traces for training a Recurrent Neural Network Based Language Model (RNNLM). …