Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Amake: Cached Builds Of Top-Level Targets, Jim Buffenbarger

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper describes a software-build tool named Amake, an extension of GNU Make. Its additional features solve important problems that have, until now, only been addressed by “high-end” build tools (e.g., ClearCase and Vesta).

With a typical build tool, if a top-level target must be updated, intermediate targets must be built from sources, and then combined to build the top-level target. The enhancements described here allow a top-level target to be fetched from a shared cache, without building, or even fetching its intermediate-target dependencies. Thus, a developer’s workspace may need only contain sources and top-level targets. This reduces build time, …

Fatrec Workshop On Responsible Recommendation Proceedings, Michael Ekstrand, Amit Sharma

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We sought with this workshop, to foster a discussion of various topics that fall under the general umbrella of responsible recommendation: ethical considerations in recommendation, bias and discrimination in recommender systems, transparency and accountability, social impact of recommenders, user privacy, and other related concerns. Our goal was to encourage the community to think about how we build and study recommender systems in a socially-responsible manner.

Recommendation systems are increasingly impacting people's decisions in different walks of life including commerce, employment, dating, health, education and governance. As the impact and scope of recommendations increase, developing systems that tackle issues of …

The Necst Program - Networking And Engaging In Computer Science And Information Technology Program, Jerry Alan Fails

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, we describe the NECST Program and its innovative mentorship structure for transitioning graduate students in computer science whose undergraduate experiences may be in other disciplines. NECST employs several activities that provide the additional scaffolding to support students as they make this transition. While we believe these activities may be suited for other situations, the program helps address the unique challenges northern New Jersey faces with relation to graduate studies in computing fields.

A Graphical Digital Personal Assistant That Grounds And Learns Autonomously, Casey Kennington, Aprajita Shukla

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present a speech-driven digital personal assistant that is robust despite little or no training data and autonomously improves as it interacts with users. The system is able to establish and build common ground between itself and users by signaling understanding and by learning a mapping via interaction between the words that users actually speak and the system actions. We evaluated our system with real users and found an overall positive response. We further show through objective measures that autonomous learning improves performance in a simple itinerary filling task.

Temporal Alignment Using The Incremental Unit Framework, Casey Kennington, Ting Han, David Schlangen

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We propose a method for temporal alignments--a precondition of meaningful fusions--of multimodal systems, using the incremental unit dialogue system framework, which gives the system flexibility in how it handles alignment: either by delaying a modality for a specified amount of time, or by revoking (i.e., backtracking) processed information so multiple information sources can be processed jointly. We evaluate our approach in an offline experiment with multimodal data and find that using the incremental framework is flexible and shows promise as a solution to the problem of temporal alignment in multimodal systems.

Edos: Edge Assisted Offloading System For Mobile Devices, Hank H. Harvey, Ying Mao, Yantian Hou, Bo Sheng

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Offloading resource-intensive jobs to the cloud and nearby users is a promising approach to enhance mobile devices. This paper investigates a hybrid offloading system that takes both infrastructure-based networks and Ad-hoc networks into the scope. Specifically, we propose EDOS, an edge assisted offloading system that consists of two major components, an Edge Assistant (EA) and Offload Agent (OA). EA runs on the routers/towers to manage registered remote cloud servers and local service providers and OA operates on the users’ devices to discover the services in proximity. We present the system with a suite of protocols to collect the potential service …

Silence, Please!: Interrupting In-Car Phone Conversations, Soledad López Gambino, Casey Kennington, David Schlangen

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Holding phone conversations while driving is dangerous not only because it occupies the hands, but also because it requires attention. Where driver and passenger can adapt their conversational behavior to the demands of the situation, and e.g. interrupt themselves when more attention is needed, an interlocutor on the phone cannot adjust as easily. We present a dialogue assistant which acts as 'bystander' in phone conversations between a driver and an interlocutor, interrupting them and temporarily cutting the line during potentially dangerous situations. The assistant also informs both conversation partners when the line has been cut, as well as when it …

Analysis On The Security And Use Of Password Managers, Carlos Luevanos, John Elizarraras, Khai Hirschi, Jyh-Haw Yeh

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Cybersecurity has become one of the largest growing fields in computer science and the technology industry. Faulty security has cost the global economy immense losses. Oftentimes, the pitfall in such financial loss is due to the security of passwords. Companies and regular people alike do not do enough to enforce strict password guidelines like the NIST (National Institute of Standard Technology) recommends. When big security breaches happen, thousands to millions of passwords can be exposed and stored into files, meaning people are susceptible to dictionary and rainbow table attacks. Those are only two examples of attacks that are used to …

Panel: Influencing Culture And Curriculum Via Revolution, Amit Jain

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The goal of this panel session is to introduce audience members to the challenges and successes of significant cultural and curricular change as enacted by awardees in the NSF program Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED). This panel will explore how organizations go about the process of cultural investigation and how they embark on culture change, using RED awardees of 2016 as the featured panelists (the second cohort). These teams are engaged in high-risk, high-trust-required activities focused on both the organizational and operational structure of their departments, and on re-envisioning engineering and computer science curricula to create professionals able …

Development Of An Intelligent Equipment Lock Management System With Rfid Technology, Yeh-Cheng Chen, C. N. Chu, H. M. Sun, Jyh-Haw Yeh, Ruey-Shun Chen, Chorng-Shiuh Koong

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The equipment lock has been an important tool for the power company to protect the electricity metering equipment. however, the conventional equipment lock has two potential problems: vandalism and counterfeiting. To fulfill the control and track the potential illegal behavior, the human labor and paper are required to proceed with related operations, resulting in the consumption of a large amount of human resources and maintenance costs.

This study focused on the design of RFID technology applied to the traditional equipment lock, which, through the mobile and electronic technology, strengthens the management/operating convenience of the lock and provides the solutions for …

Capia: Cloud Assisted Privacy-Preserving Image Annotation, Yifan Tian, Yantian Hou, Jiawei Yuan

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Using public cloud for image storage has become a prevalent trend with the rapidly increasing number of pictures generated by various devices. For example, today's most smartphones and tablets synchronize photo albums with cloud storage platforms. However, as many images contain sensitive information, such as personal identities and financial data, it is concerning to upload images to cloud storage. To eliminate such privacy concerns in cloud storage while keeping decent data management and search features, a spectrum of keywords-based searchable encryption (SE) schemes have been proposed in the past decade. Unfortunately, there is a fundamental gap remains open for their …

Kidrec: Children & Recommender Systems: Workshop Co-Located With Acm Conference On Recommender Systems (Recsys 2017), Jerry Alan Fails, Maria Soledad Pera, Franca Garzotto, Mirko Gelsomini

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The 1^st Workshop on Children and Recommender Systems (KidRec) is taking place in Como, Italy August 27^th, 2017 in conjunction with the ACM RecSys 2017 conference. The goals of the workshop are threefold: (1) discuss and identify issues related to recommender systems used by children including specific challenges and limitations, (2) discuss possible solutions to the identified challenges and plan for future research, and (3) build a community to directly work on these important issues.

Coms: Customer Oriented Migration Service, Kai Huang, Xing Gao, Fengwei Zhang, Jidong Xiao

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Virtual machine live migration has been studied for more than a decade, and this technique has been implemented in various commercial hypervisors. However, currently in the cloud environment, virtual machine migration is initiated by system administrators. Cloud customers have no say on this: They can not initiate a migration, and they do not even know whether or not their virtual machines have been migrated. In this paper, we propose the COMS framework, which is short for "Customer Oriented Migration Service". COMS gives more control to cloud customers so that migration becomes a service option and customers are more aware of …