Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Generating Energy Data For Machine Learning With Recurrent Generative Adversarial Networks, Mohammad Navid Fekri, Ananda M. Ghosh, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The smart grid employs computing and communication technologies to embed intelligence into the power grid and, consequently, make the grid more efficient. Machine learning (ML) has been applied for tasks that are important for smart grid operation including energy consumption and generation forecasting, anomaly detection, and state estimation. These ML solutions commonly require sufficient historical data; however, this data is often not readily available because of reasons such as data collection costs and concerns regarding security and privacy. This paper introduces a recurrent generative adversarial network (R-GAN) for generating realistic energy consumption data by learning from real data. Generativea adversarial …

Automatic Recall Of Software Lessons Learned For Software Project Managers, Tamer Mohamed Abdellatif Mohamed, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Context: Lessons learned (LL) records constitute the software organization memory of successes and failures. LL are recorded within the organization repository for future reference to optimize planning, gain experience, and elevate market competitiveness. However, manually searching this repository is a daunting task, so it is often disregarded. This can lead to the repetition of previous mistakes or even missing potential opportunities. This, in turn, can negatively affect the organization’s profitability and competitiveness.

Objective: We aim to present a novel solution that provides an automatic process to recall relevant LL and to push those LL to project managers. This will dramatically …

Can We Rely On Smartphone Applications?, Sonia Meskini, Ali Bou Nassif, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Smartphones are becoming necessary tools in the daily lives of millions of users who rely on these devices and their applications. There are thousands of applications for smartphone devices such as the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android, thus their reliability has become paramount for their users. This work aims to answer two related questions: (1) Can we assess the reliability of mobile applications by using the traditional reliability models? (2) Can we model adequately the failure data collected from many users? Firstly, it has been proved that the three most used software reliability models have fallen short of the mark when …

Ml4iot: A Framework To Orchestrate Machine Learning Workflows On Internet Of Things Data, Jose Miguel Alves, Leonardo Honorio, Miriam A M Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Internet of Things (IoT) applications generate vast amounts of real-time data. Temporal analysis of these data series to discover behavioural patterns may lead to qualified knowledge affecting a broad range of industries. Hence, the use of machine learning (ML) algorithms over IoT data has the potential to improve safety, economy, and performance in critical processes. However, creating ML workflows at scale is a challenging task that depends upon both production and specialized skills. Such tasks require investigation, understanding, selection, and implementation of specific ML workflows, which often lead to bottlenecks, production issues, and code management complexity and even then may …

Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning For Energy Forecasting With Big Data, Yifang Tian, Ljubisa Sehovac, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Smart meter popularity has resulted in the ability to collect big energy data and has created opportunities for large-scale energy forecasting. Machine Learning (ML) techniques commonly used for forecasting, such as neural networks, involve computationally intensive training typically with data from a single building or a single aggregated load to predict future consumption for that same building or aggregated load. With hundreds of thousands of meters, it becomes impractical or even infeasible to individually train a model for each meter. Consequently, this paper proposes Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning (SBCTL), an approach for building neural network-based models for many meters by …

An Empirical Study Of User Support Tools In Open Source Software, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Shuib Basri

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

End users’ positive response is essential for the success of any software. This is true for both commercial and Open Source Software (OSS). OSS is popular not only because of its availability, which is usually free but due to the user support it provides, generally through public platforms. The study model of this research establishes a relationship between OSS user support and available support tools. To conduct this research, we used a dataset of 100 OSS projects in different categories and examined five user support tools provided by different OSS projects. The results show that project trackers, user mailing lists, …

Forecasting Building Energy Consumption With Deep Learning: A Sequence To Sequence Approach, Ljubisa Sehovac, Cornelius Nesen, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Energy Consumption has been continuously increasing due to the rapid expansion of high-density cities, and growth in the industrial and commercial sectors. To reduce the negative impact on the environment and improve sustainability, it is crucial to efficiently manage energy consumption. Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including widely used smart meters, have created possibilities for energy monitoring as well as for sensor based energy forecasting. Machine learning algorithms commonly used for energy forecasting such as feedforward neural networks are not well-suited for interpreting the time dimensionality of a signal. Consequently, this paper uses Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to capture time …

Studies On The Software Testing Profession, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Pradeep Waychal, Jingdong Jia, Daniel Varona, Yadira Tejeda Saldaña

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

This paper attempts to understand motivators and de-motivators that influence the decisions of software professionals to take up and sustain software testing careers across four different countries, i.e. Canada, China, Cuba, and India. The research question can be framed as “How many software professionals across different geographies are keen to take up testing careers, and what are the reasons for their choices?” Towards that, we developed a cross-sectional but simple survey-based instrument. In this study we investigated how software testers perceived and valued what they do and their environmental settings. The study pointed out the importance of visualizing software testing …

Comparing The Popularity Of Testing Career Among Canadian, Chinese, And Indian Students, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Pradeep Waychal, Jingdong Jia

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Despite its importance, software testing is, arguably, the least understood part of the software life cycle and still the toughest to perform correctly. Many researchers and practitioners have been working to address the situation. However, most of the studies focus on the process and technology dimensions and only a few on the human dimension of testing, in spite of the reported relevance of human aspects of software testing. Testers need to understand various stakeholders’ explicit and implicit requirements, be aware of how developers work individually and in teams, and develop skills to report test results wisely to stakeholders. These multifaceted …

Design And Job Rotation In Software Engineering: Results From An Industrial Study, Ronnie Santos, Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Fabio Q. B. Silva Dr., Cleyton Magalhaes, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Jorge Correia-Neto

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Job rotation is a managerial practice to be applied in the organizational environment to reduce job monotony, boredom, and exhaustion resulting from job simplification, specialization, and repetition. Previous studies have identified and discussed the use of project-to-project rotations in software practice, gathering empirical evidence from qualitative and field studies and pointing out set of work-related factors that can be positively or negatively affected by this practice. Goal: We aim to collect and discuss the use of job rotation in software organizations in order to identify the potential benefits and limitations of this practice supported by the statement of existing theories …

Deep Learning: Edge-Cloud Data Analytics For Iot, Katarina Grolinger, Ananda M. Ghosh

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Sensors, wearables, mobile and other Internet of Thing (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly integrated in all aspects of our lives. They are capable of collecting massive quantities of data that are typically transmitted to the cloud for processing. However, this results in increased network traffic and latencies. Edge computing has a potential to remedy these challenges by moving computation physically closer to the network edge where data are generated. However, edge computing does not have sufficient resources for complex data analytics tasks. Consequently, this paper investigates merging cloud and edge computing for IoT data analytics and presents a deep learning-based …