Digital Commons Network^™

Exploring The Dimensions Of Nomophobia: Developing And Validating A Questionnaire Using Mixed Methods Research, Caglar Yildirim

Caglar Yildirim

Nomophobia is defined as the fear of being out of mobile phone contact and is considered a modern age phobia introduced to our lives as a byproduct of the interaction between people and mobile information and communication technologies, especially smartphones. This research study sought to contribute to the nomophobia research literature by identifying and describing the dimensions of nomophobia and developing a questionnaire to measure nomophobia. Consequently, this study adopted a two-phase, exploratory sequential mixed methods design. The first phase was a qualitative exploration of nomophobia through semi-structured interviews conducted with nine undergraduate students at a large Midwestern university in …

A Sophisticated Library Search Strategy Using Folksonomies And Similarity Matching, William Lund, Yiu-Kai Ng, Maria Pera

William Lund

Libraries, private and public, offer valuable resources to library patrons. As of today the only way to locate information archived exclusively in libraries is through their catalogs. Library patrons, however, often find it difficult to formulate a proper query, which requires using specific keywords assigned to different fields of desired library catalog records, to obtain relevant results. These improperly formulated queries often yield irrelevant results or no results at all. This negative experience in dealing with existing library systems turn library patrons away from library catalogs; instead, they rely on Web search engines to perform their searches first and upon …

Ensemble Methods For Historical Machine-Printed Document Recognition, William Lund

William Lund

The usefulness of digitized documents is directly related to the quality of the extracted text. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has reached a point where well-formatted and clean machine- printed documents are easily recognizable by current commercial OCR products; however, older or degraded machine-printed documents present problems to OCR engines resulting in word error rates (WER) that severely limit either automated or manual use of the extracted text. Major archives of historical machine-printed documents are being assembled around the globe, requiring an accurate transcription of the text for the automated creation of descriptive metadata, full-text searching, and information extraction. Given document …

On Modeling Contention For Shared Caches In Multi-Core Processors With Techniques From Ecology, Amy Apon, Wesley Emeneker

Amy W. Apon

Multi-core x86_64 processors introduced an important change in architecture, a shared last level cache. Historically, each processor has had access to a large private cache that seamlessly and transparently (to end users) interfaced with main memory. Previously, processes or threads only had to compete for memory bandwidth, but now they are competing for actual space. Competition for space and environmental resources is a problem studied in other scientific domains. This paper introduces methods from ecology to model multi-core cache usage with the competitive Lotka–Volterra equations. A model is presented and validated for characterizing the interaction of cores through shared caching, …

A Component-Based End-To-End Simulation Of The Linux File System, Amy Apon, Hai Nguyen

Amy W. Apon

The Linux file system is designed with components utilizing a layered architecture. The upper components hide details of the lower components, and each layer presents unified and simple interfaces to the layers above and below. This design helps Linux to be flexible as well as to provide support for multiple types of storage devices. In this paper, this component architecture is used to develop a realistic simulation without having to model lower level details of the hardware layer or particular storage devices. A detailed simulation-based performance model of the Linux ext3 file system has been developed using Colored Petri Nets. …

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.

Community Funding Models For Computational Resources, Amy Apon, Jeff Pummill, Dana Brunson

Amy W. Apon

As scientific research has extended far beyond the practicality and abilities of laboratory experiments, computational simulations have become the mainstay of enabling and furthering the research in a way never previously thought possible. It is becoming commonplace to model and simulate both the very large, such as black hole collisions in astrophysics, and the very small, such as subatomic particle behavior and interaction in high energy physics. In addition to the previous examples detailing extremes, practically every area of research currently utilizes and benefits from computational resources to simulate their work; financial modeling, weather forecasting, geological phenomena, geo-spatial data analysis, …

Shibboleth As A Tool For Authorized Access Control To The Subversion Repository System, Linh Ngo, Amy Apon

Linh B Ngo

Shibboleth is an architecture and protocol for allowing users to authenticate and be authorized to use a remote resource by logging into the identity management system that is maintained at their home institution. With Shibboleth, a federation of institutions can share resources among users and yet allow the administration of both the user access control to resources and the user identity and attribute information to be performed at the hosting or home institution. Subversion is a version control repository system that allows the creation of fine-grained permissions to files and directories. In this project an infrastructure, Shibbolized Subversion, has been …

Randomized Detection Of Extraneous Factors, Manfred Minimair

Manfred Minimair

A projection operator of a system of parametric polynomials is a polynomial in the coefficients of the system that vanishes if the system has a common root. The projection operator is a multiple of the resultant of the system, and the factors of the projection operator that are not contained in the resultant are called extraneous factors. The main contribution of this work is to provide a randomized algorithm to check whether a factor is extraneous, which is an important task in applications. A lower bound for the success probability is determined which can be set arbitrarily close to one. …

As-Trust: A Trust Quantification Scheme For Autonomous Systems In Bgp, Jian Chang, Krishna Venkatasubramanian, Andrew West, Sampath Kannan, Boon Thau Loo, Oleg Sokolsky, Insup Lee

Oleg Sokolsky

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) works by frequently exchanging updates that disseminate reachability information about IP prefixes (i.e., IP address blocks) between Autonomous Systems (ASes) on the Internet. The ideal operation of BGP relies on three major behavioral assumptions (BAs): (1) information contained in the update is legal and correct, (2) a route to a prefix is stable, and (3) the route adheres to the valley free routing policy. The current operation of BGP implicitly trusts all ASes to adhere to these assumptions. However, several documented violation of these assumptions attest to the fact that such an assumption of trust …

The Medical Device Dongle: An Open-Source Standards-Based Platform For Interoperable Medical Device Connectivity, Philip Asare, Danyang Cong, Santosh Vattam, Baekgyu Kim, Andrew King, Oleg Sokolsky, Insup Lee, Shan Lin, Margaret Mullen-Fortino

Oleg Sokolsky

Emerging medical applications require device coordination, increasing the need to connect devices in an interoperable manner. However, many of the existing health devices in use were not originally developed for network connectivity and those devices with networking capabilities either use proprietary protocols or implementations of standard protocols that are unavailable to the end user. The first set of devices are unsuitable for device coordination applications and the second set are unsuitable for research in medical device interoperability. We propose the Medical Device Dongle (MDD), a low-cost, open-source platform that addresses both issues.

Link Spamming Wikipedia For Profit, Andrew West, Jian Chang, Krishna Venkatasubramanian, Oleg Sokolsky, Insup Lee

Oleg Sokolsky

Collaborative functionality is an increasingly prevalent web technology. To encourage participation, these systems usually have low barriers-to-entry and permissive privileges. Unsurprisingly, ill-intentioned users try to leverage these characteristics for nefarious purposes. In this work, a particular abuse is examined -- link spamming -- the addition of promotional or otherwise inappropriate hyperlinks.

Our analysis focuses on the "wiki" model and the collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, in particular. A principal goal of spammers is to maximize *exposure*, the quantity of people who view a link. Creating and analyzing the first Wikipedia link spam corpus, we find that existing spam strategies perform quite poorly …

A Computationally Efficient System For High-Performance Multi-Document Summarization, Sean Sovine, Hyoil Han

Hyoil Han

We propose and develop a simple and efficient algorithm for generating extractive multi-document summaries and show that this algorithm exhibits state-of-the-art or near state-of-the-art performance on two Document Understanding Conference datasets and two Text Analysis Conference datasets. Our results show that algorithms using simple features and computationally efficient methods are competitive with much more complex methods for multi-document summarization (MDS). Given these findings, we believe that our summarization algorithm can be used as a baseline in future MDS evaluations. Further, evidence shows that our system is near the upper limit of performance for extractive MDS.

Language Modeling Approaches To Information Retrieval, Protima Banerjee, Hyoil Han

Hyoil Han

This article surveys recent research in the area of language modeling (sometimes called statistical language modeling) approaches to information retrieval. Language modeling is a formal probabilistic retrieval framework with roots in speech recognition and natural language processing. The underlying assumption of language modeling is that human language generation is a random process; the goal is to model that process via a generative statistical model. In this article, we discuss current research in the application of language modeling to information retrieval, the role of semantics in the language modeling framework, cluster-based language models, use of language modeling for XML retrieval and …

Will Fault Localization Work For These Failures? An Automated Approach To Predict Effectiveness Of Fault Localization Tools, Tien-Duy B. Le, David Lo

David LO

Debugging is a crucial yet expensive activity to improve the reliability of software systems. To reduce debugging cost, various fault localization tools have been proposed. A spectrum-based fault localization tool often outputs an ordered list of program elements sorted based on their likelihood to be the root cause of a set of failures (i.e., their suspiciousness scores). Despite the many studies on fault localization, unfortunately, however, for many bugs, the root causes are often low in the ordered list. This potentially causes developers to distrust fault localization tools. Recently, Parnin and Orso highlight in their user study that many debuggers …

Drone: Predicting Priority Of Reported Bugs By Multi-Factor Analysis, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Chengnian Sun

David LO

Bugs are prevalent. To improve software quality, developers often allow users to report bugs that they found using a bug tracking system such as Bugzilla. Users would specify among other things, a description of the bug, the component that is affected by the bug, and the severity of the bug. Based on this information, bug triagers would then assign a priority level to the reported bug. As resources are limited, bug reports would be investigated based on their priority levels. This priority assignment process however is a manual one. Could we do better? In this paper, we propose an automated …

Theory And Practice, Do They Match? A Case With Spectrum-Based Fault Localization, Tien-Duy B. Le, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

David LO

Spectrum-based fault localization refers to the process of identifying program units that are buggy from two sets of execution traces: normal traces and faulty traces. These approaches use statistical formulas to measure the suspiciousness of program units based on the execution traces. There have been many spectrum-based fault localization approaches proposing various formulas in the literature. Two of the best performing and well-known ones are Tarantula and Ochiai. Recently, Xie et al. find that theoretically, under certain assumptions, two families of spectrum-based fault localization formulas outperform all other formulas including those of Tarantula and Ochiai. In this work, we empirically …

Intertwining Material And Virtual Work, Daniel Robey, Kathy Schwaig, Leigh Jin

Kathy S Schwaig

Virtual work in organizations continues to be promoted despite the absence of a strong conceptual understanding of virtual work and its consequences. In this paper, we draw from and , who treat virtual work as a second, electronically mediated representation of material work. The virtual and material representations co-exist and intertwine, potentially allowing teams and organizations to extend their capabilities. We identify four aspects of intertwining: reinforcement, complementarity, synergy, and reciprocity. In instances where the relationship between virtual and material worlds of work lack one or more of these aspects, ironic and confused outcomes may result. We illustrate these aspects …

Knowledge Management In An Organisational Climate Of Uncertainty And Change: A Longitudinal Case Study Of An Australian University, Denise Gengatharen

Denise E Gengatharen

Universities are in the knowledge business and are expected to be at the forefront of knowledge management (KM). However, KM in a university is complex given the diversity of stakeholder groups. This is exacerbated in the Australian context by the changing climate of rationalisation, corporatisation and marketisation universities faced in the past decade. This paper investigates KM strategies in an Australian university to uncover barriers to knowledge-sharing among academics. Although the organisational infrastructure supports KM, many academics have not actively embraced it. One reason is that they struggle with KM for operational excellence in the increasing administrative aspects of the …

You've Got Mail: Accountability And End User Attitudes To Email Management., Mark Brogan, Susan Vreugdenburg

Mark Brogan

In a pioneering ethnographic study of end user responses to the problem of ‘information overload’ Whittaker and Sidner (1996) found that the design of systems primarily as methods of asynchronous communication, posed significant information management problems for users. In another contemporaneous study, David Bearman (1993) extended understanding of the implications of end user email management behavior by identifying significant accountability implications for organizations arising from the use of email. Recent case studies in the United States and Australia (Leopold, 2008; Raleigh Chronicle, 2008; Strutt, and Taylor, 2007) have once again focused attention on the accountability consequences for Government of email …

A Bounded Or Unbounded Universe?: Knowledge Management In Postgraduate Lis Education, Mark Brogan, Philip Hingston, Victoria Wilson

Mark Brogan

The School of Computer and Information Science at ECU has made a commitment to teaching Knowledge Management (KM) and is, at present, engaged in the process of determining its place within existing postgraduate LIS and IT courses. In turn, it is engaging in debate with other academics and industry practitioners about the unique contribution that the LIS disciplines could make to KM. This paper reports on the research and consultative processes that the School undertook and discusses the findings and conclusions. It will also offer some thoughts on where the authors believe LIS, in particular, can make a contribution to …

In The Shadow Of The Cloud - Technology In The Rim Workspace, Mark Brogan, David Roberts

Mark Brogan

In 2008 RIM Professionals Australasia conducted its first Technology Survey, on which the authors reported in a previous issue. At the time, it was recognised that the greatest value to professionals would come from a longitudinal study, enabling 'flash in the pan' innovation to be sorted from durable change that has implications for the work and education of RIM professionals. This article - in two parts in this issue of iQ and the next - reports results from the RIM Professionals Australasia 2010 Technology Survey, which has enabled a longitudinal view of data first gathered in 2008.

Social Sensing For Urban Crisis Management: The Case Of Singapore Haze, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ming Gao, Ee Peng Lim, Christie N. Scollon

Ming Gao

Sensing social media for trends and events has become possible as increasing number of users rely on social media to share information. In the event of a major disaster or social event, one can therefore study the event quickly by gathering and analyzing social media data. One can also design appropriate responses such as allocating resources to the affected areas, sharing event related information, and managing public anxiety. Past research on social event studies using social media often focused on one type of data analysis (e.g., hashtag clusters, diffusion of events, influential users, etc.) on a single social media data …

Jummp: Job Uninterrupted Maneuverable Mapreduce Platform, William Moody, Linh Ngo, Edward Duffy, Amy Apon

Amy W. Apon

In this paper, we present JUMMP, the Job Uninterrupted Maneuverable MapReduce Platform, an automated scheduling platform that provides a customized Hadoop environment within a batch-scheduled cluster environment. JUMMP enables an interactive pseudo-persistent MapReduce platform within the existing administrative structure of an academic high performance computing center by “jumping” between nodes with minimal administrative effort. Jumping is implemented by the synchronization of stopping and starting daemon processes on different nodes in the cluster. Our experimental evaluation shows that JUMMP can be as efficient as a persistent Hadoop cluster on dedicated computing resources, depending on the jump time. Additionally, we show that …

Seniors Language Paradigms: 21st Century Jargon And The Impact On Computer Security And Financial Transactions For Senior Citizens, David Cook, Patryk Szewczyk, Krishnun Sansurooah

David M Cook

Senior Citizens represent a unique cohort of computer users insomuch as they have come to the field of computer usage later in life, as novices compared to other users. As a group they exhibit a resentment, mistrust and ignorance towards cyber related technology that is born out of their educational and social experiences prior to widespread information technology. The shift from analogue to digital proficiency has been understated for a generation of citizens who were educated before computer usage and internet ubiquity. This paper examines the language difficulties encountered by senior citizens in attempting to engage in banking and communications …

The Battle For Money Transfers: The Allure Of Paypal And Western Union Over Familial Remittance Networks, David Cook, Timothy Smith

David M Cook

Informal Money Transfer systems continue to provide importunate loopholes in the global wrestle against terrorism. Radical cells, as well as broader criminal networks, maintain their use of Hawala systems, but do so in concert with other informal transfer systems, largely to sidestep the regulatory and administrative management of formally institutionalized worldwide money transactions. At a time when financial acts are globally regulated under the Basel Accord and other global instruments, the enduring use of Informal Value Transfers (IVTs) in Australia is cause for mounting unease. To concentrate on the informal money transfer system known as Hawala, is to overlook much …

An Exploration Of 1st And 2nd Generation Cpted For End Of Year School Leavers At Rottnest Island, John Letch, Ellice Mcglinn, Jonathan Bell, Emma Downing, David Cook

David M Cook

The end-of-year post exam celebrations for Year 12 secondary school students presents a unique crime prevention proposition in Australia each year. Students of approximately 17 years of age congregate in a variety of locations in large groups known as ‘Leavers’. Traditionally a number of 'rite of passage' activities, fuelled by additional factors such as alcohol, drugs and peer pressure, have resulted in an increased risk of crime and anti-social behaviour. This paper examines mitigation strategies aligned with Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) when placed at an event. Using the annual Leavers cohort at Rottnest Island, W.A., a number of …

A Treeboost Model For Software Effort Estimation Based On Use Case Points, Luiz Capretz, Ali Nassif

Luiz Fernando Capretz

Software effort prediction is an important task in the software development life cycle. Many models including regression models, machine learning models, algorithmic models, expert judgment and estimation by analogy have been widely used to estimate software effort and cost. In this work, a Treeboost (Stochastic Gradient Boosting) model is put forward to predict software effort based on the Use Case Point method. The inputs of the model include software size in use case points, productivity and complexity. A multiple linear regression model was created and the Treeboost model was evaluated against the multiple linear regression model, as well as the …

Managing The Business Of Software Product Line: An Empirical Investigation Of Key Business Factors, Faheem Ahmed, Luiz Capretz

Luiz Fernando Capretz

Business has been highlighted as a one of the critical dimensions of software product line engineering. This paper’s main contribution is to increase the understanding of the influence of key business factors by showing empirically that they play an imperative role in managing a successful software product line. A quantitative survey of software organizations currently involved in the business of developing software product lines over a wide range of operations, including consumer electronics, telecommunications, avionics, and information technology, was designed to test the conceptual model and hypotheses of the study. This is the first study to demonstrate the relationships between …

Infectious Texts: Modeling Text Reuse In Nineteenth-Century Newspapers, David Smith, Ryan Cordell, Elizabeth Dillon

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Texts propagate through many social networks and provide evidence for their structure. We present efficient algorithms for detecting clusters of reused passages embedded within longer documents in large collections. We apply these techniques to analyzing the culture of reprinting in the United States before the Civil War. Without substantial copyright enforcement, stories, poems, news, and anecdotes circulated freely among newspapers, magazines, and books. From a collection of OCR’d newspapers, we extract a new corpus of reprinted texts, explore the geographic spread and network connections of different publications, and analyze the time dynamics of different genres.