Digital Commons Network^™

Modeling User-Affected Software Properties For Open Source Software Supply Chains, Tapajit Dey

Doctoral Dissertations

Background: Open Source Software development community relies heavily on users of the software and contributors outside of the core developers to produce top-quality software and provide long-term support. However, the relationship between a software and its contributors in terms of exactly how they are related through dependencies and how the users of a software affect many of its properties are not very well understood.

Aim: My research covers a number of aspects related to answering the overarching question of modeling the software properties affected by users and the supply chain structure of software ecosystems, viz. 1) Understanding how software usage …

Application Of Software Engineering Principles To Synthetic Biology And Emerging Regulatory Concerns, Justin Firestone

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As the science of synthetic biology matures, engineers have begun to deliver real-world applications which are the beginning of what could radically transform our lives. Recent progress indicates synthetic biology will produce transformative breakthroughs. Examples include: 1) synthesizing chemicals for medicines which are expensive and difficult to produce; 2) producing protein alternatives; 3) altering genomes to combat deadly diseases; 4) killing antibiotic-resistant pathogens; and 5) speeding up vaccine production.

Although synthetic biology promises great benefits, many stakeholders have expressed concerns over safety and security risks from creating biological behavior never seen before in nature. As with any emerging technology, there …

Using Taint Analysis And Reinforcement Learning (Tarl) To Repair Autonomous Robot Software, Damian Lyons, Saba Zahra

Faculty Publications

It is important to be able to establish formal performance bounds for autonomous systems. However, formal verification techniques require a model of the environment in which the system operates; a challenge for autonomous systems, especially those expected to operate over longer timescales. This paper describes work in progress to automate the monitor and repair of ROS-based autonomous robot software written for an a-priori partially known and possibly incorrect environment model. A taint analysis method is used to automatically extract the data-flow sequence from input topic to publish topic, and instrument that code. A unique reinforcement learning approximation of MDP utility …

Information Retrieval-Based Optimization Approaches For Requirement Traceability Recovery, Danissa Victoria Rodriguez Caraballo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Requirements traceability provides support for important software engineering activities. Requirements traceability recovery (RTR) is becoming increasingly important due to the numerous benefits to the overall quality of software. Improving the RTR problem has become an active topic of research for software engineers; researchers have proposed a number of approaches for improving and automating RTR across the requirements and the source code of the system. Textual analysis and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been applied to the RTR problem for many years; however, most of the existing IR-based methodologies applied to the RTR problem are semiautomatic or time-consuming, even though many …

Wayfinder Application For Autistic Occupational Assistance, Nathaniel Edward Hishon

Master's Theses

Employment among autistic individuals is an area of noted difficulty, with an employment rate well below the general population [1]. Several barriers attributed to autistic unemployment, including difficulties communicating with employers and social interactions with coworkers, obsessive adherence to routine, and trouble organizing and completing workplace tasks, are also attributed to challenges in maintaining employment [2]. Several studies have concluded that long-term employment support is necessary to acquire and maintain autistic employment [3]. The noted benefit of intensive job training, such as access to job coaches, indicates the need for further support to help autistic individuals complete workplace tasks and …