Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Improving Developers' Understanding Of Regex Denial Of Service Tools Through Anti-Patterns And Fix Strategies, Sk Adnan Hassan, Zainab Aamir, Dongyoon Lee, James C. Davis, Francisco Servant

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Regular expressions are used for diverse purposes, including input validation and firewalls. Unfortunately, they can also lead to a security vulnerability called ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service), caused by a super-linear worst-case execution time during regex matching. Due to the severity and prevalence of ReDoS, past work proposed automatic tools to detect and fix regexes. Although these tools were evaluated in automatic experiments, their usability has not yet been studied; usability has not been a focus of prior work. Our insight is that the usability of existing tools to detect and fix regexes will improve if we complement them …

Applying Hierarchical Task Analysis Method To Discovery Layer Evaluation, Marlen Promann, Tao Zhang

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

While usability tests have been helpful in evaluating the success or failure of implementing discovery layers in the library context, the focus of usability tests has remained on the search interface rather than the discovery process for users. The informal site-­‐ and context specific usability tests have offered little to test the rigor of the discovery layers against the user goals, motivations and workflow they have been designed to support. This study proposes hierarchical task analysis (HTA) as an important complementary evaluation method to usability testing of discovery layers. Relevant literature is reviewed for the discovery layers and the HTA …

A Farm Management Information System With Task-Specific, Collaborative Mobile Apps And Cloud Storage Services, Jonathan Tyler Welte

Open Access Theses

Modern production agriculture is beginning to advance beyond deterministic, scheduled operations between relatively few people to larger scale, information-driven efficiency in order to respond to the challenges of field variability and meet the needs of a growing population. Since no two farms are the same with respect to information and management structure, a specialized farm management information system (FMIS) which is tailored to the realities on the ground of individual farms is likely to be more effective than generalized FMIS available today.

This thesis presents the design of a FMIS using proven user-centered design principles. This approach resulted in the …

Usability Testing Of The M.A.E.G.U.S. Serious Game, James He

Open Access Theses

Interpreting raw data in serious games and simulations can be a time consuming and uninteresting task without visualizations. This study proposes one possible solution for an interface that incorporates data visualizations for Whittinghill and Nataraja's (2013) MAEGUS simulation, a serious game used to increase the retention of wind energy and solar energy concepts in students, while still being fun. After the interface was designed and developed, a think aloud usability test was conducted to answer the following research questions: how do students use a series of information visualizations to operate a multi-variate game-based simulation and what are some the usability …