Computer Sciences Commons^™

Addressing User Requirements In Open Source Software: The Role Of Online Forums, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

User satisfaction has always been important in the success of software, regardless of whether it is closed and proprietary or open source software (OSS). OSS users are geographically distributed and include technical as well as novice users. However, it is generally believed that if OSS was more usable, its popularity would increase tremendously. Hence, users and their requirements need to be addressed in the priorities of an OSS environment. Online public forums are a major medium of communication for the OSS community. The research model of this work studies the relationship between user requirements in open source software and online …

Midiflapper: A Leap Motion Midi Controller, Mark M. Henry

Computer Science and Software Engineering

An application called MIDIFlapper was developed that translates data from the Leap Motion, an NUI device, into MIDI data suitable for use by a contemporary digital audio workstation. This allows electronic musicians to use the Leap Motion for musical creation and live performance.

A Comparative Study On The Effectiveness Of Part-Of-Speech Tagging Techniques On Bug Reports, Yuan Tian, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many software artifacts are written in natural language or contain substantial amount of natural language contents. Thus these artifacts could be analyzed using text analysis techniques from the natural language processing (NLP) community, e.g., the part-of-speech (POS) tagging technique that assigns POS tags (e.g., verb, noun, etc.) to words in a sentence. In the literature, several studies have already applied POS tagging technique on software artifacts to recover important words in them, which are then used for automating various tasks, e.g., locating buggy files for a given bug report, etc. There are many POS tagging techniques proposed and they are …

Theorems About Quadrilaterals And Conics, Dorde Baralic, Branko Grbic, Dorde Zikelic

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study quadrilaterals inscribed and circumscribed about conics and prove interesting theorems. Theorems are discovered by experimenting with dynamical geometry software. The Poncelet theorem for quadrilaterals is proved by elementary means together with Poncelet's grid property.

An Active Resource Orchestration Framework For Pan-Scale Sensor-Rich Environments, Youngki Lee, Chulhong Min, Younghyun Ju, Seungwoo Kang, Yunseok Rhee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present Orchestrator, an active resource orchestration framework for a PAN-scale sensor-rich mobile computing platform. Incorporating diverse sensing devices connected to a mobile phone, the platform will serve as a common base to accommodate personal context-aware applications. A major challenge for the platform is to simultaneously support concurrent applications requiring continuous and complex context processing, with highly scarce and dynamic resources. To address the challenge, we build Orchestrator, which actively coordinates applications' resource uses over the distributed mobile and sensor devices. As a key approach, it adopts an active resource use orchestration, which prepares multiple alternative plans …

An Empirical Study Of Bug Report Field Reassignment, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ming Wen, Shihab Emad, Bo Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A bug report contains many fields, such as product, component, severity, priority, fixer, operating system (OS), platform, etc., which provide important information for the bug triaging and fixing process. It is important to make sure that bug information is correct since previous studies showed that the wrong assignment of bug report fields could increase the bug fixing time, and even delay the delivery of the software. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on bug report field reassignments in open-source software projects. To better understand why bug report fields are reassigned, we manually collect 99 recent bug reports that …

Barometric Phone Sensors: More Hype Than Hope!, Kartik Muralidharan, Azeem Javed Khan, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Sharad Agarwal

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The inclusion of the barometer sensor in smartphones signaled an opportunity for aiding indoor localization efforts. In this paper, we therefore investigate a possible use of the barometer sensor for detecting vertically oriented activities. We start by showing the accuracies of various commodity measurement devices and the challenges they bring forth. We then show how to use the barometer values to build a predictor that can detect floor changes and the mode (elevator, escalator, or stairs) used to change floors with nearly 100% accuracy. We validate these properties with data collected using 3 different measurement devices from 7 different buildings. …

Los And Nlos Classification For Underwater Acoustic Localization, Roee Diamant, Hwee-Pink Tan, Lutz Lampe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The low sound speed in water makes propagation delay (PD)-based range estimation attractive for underwater acoustic localization (UWAL). However, due to the long channel impulse response and the existence of reflectors, PD-based UWAL suffers from significant degradation when PD measurements of nonline-of-sight (NLOS) communication links are falsely identified as line-of-sight (LOS). In this paper, we utilize expected variation of PD measurements due to mobility of nodes and present an algorithm to classify the former into LOS and NLOS links. First, by comparing signal strength-based and PD-based range measurements, we identify object-related NLOS (ONLOS) links, where signals are reflected from objects …

Livelabs: Building An In-Situ Real-Time Mobile Experimentation Testbed, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Archan Misra, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present LiveLabs, a mobile experimentation testbed that is currently deployed across our university campus with further deployments at a large shopping mall, a commercial airport, and a resort island soon to follow. The key goal of LiveLabs is to allow in-situ real-time experimentation of mobile applications and services that require context-specific triggers with real participants on their actual smart phones. We describe how LiveLabs works, and then explain the novel R&D required to realise it. We end with a descriptionof the current LiveLabs status (> 700 active participants to date) as well as present some key lessons learned.

Extended Comprehensive Study Of Association Measures For Fault Localization, Lucia Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Ferdian Thung, Aditya Budi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spectrum-based fault localization is a promising approach to automatically locate root causes of failures quickly. Two well-known spectrum-based fault localization techniques, Tarantula and Ochiai, measure how likely a program element is a root cause of failures based on profiles of correct and failed program executions. These techniques are conceptually similar to association measures that have been proposed in statistics, data mining, and have been utilized to quantify the relationship strength between two variables of interest (e.g., the use of a medicine and the cure rate of a disease). In this paper, we view fault localization as a measurement of the …

Towards More Accurate Multi-Label Software Behavior Learning, Xin Xia, Feng Yang, David Lo, Zhenyu Chen, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a modern software system, when a program fails, a crash report which contains an execution trace would be sent to the software vendor for diagnosis. A crash report which corresponds to a failure could be caused by multiple types of faults simultaneously. Many large companies such as Baidu organize a team to analyze these failures, and classify them into multiple labels (i.e., multiple types of faults). However, it would be time-consuming and difficult for developers to manually analyze these failures and come out with appropriate fault labels. In this paper, we automatically classify a failure into multiple types of …

Automated Construction Of A Software-Specific Word Similarity Database, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Julia Lawall

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many automated software engineering approaches, including code search, bug report categorization, and duplicate bug report detection, measure similarities between two documents by analyzing natural language contents. Often different words are used to express the same meaning and thus measuring similarities using exact matching of words is insufficient. To solve this problem, past studies have shown the need to measure the similarities between pairs of words. To meet this need, the natural language processing community has built WordNet which is a manually constructed lexical database that records semantic relations among words and can be used to measure how similar two words …

Sinabro: Opportunistic And Unobtrusive Mobile Ecg Monitoring System, Seungwoo Kang, Sungjun Kwon, Sangwon Seo, Chungkuk Yoo, Kwangsuk Park, Junehwa Song, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose Sinabro, an opportunistic and unobtrusive mobile electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system that monitors the user’s ECG opportunistically during daily smartphone use. Daily ECG monitoring will open up an unprecedented opportunity for pervasive healthcare applications. It will enable the daily detection and prevention of heart problems and also allow inferences about stress, emotion, and even sleep quality. Despite its huge potential, daily ECG monitoring still has not become reality due to its obtrusiveness. In this paper, we first study the potential opportunity to capture ECGs from daily use of smartphones, without requiring the user’s explicit attention. Based …

Parameter Synthesis For Hierarchical Concurrent Real-Time Systems, Étienne André, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling and verifying complex real-time systems, involving timing delays, are notoriously difficult problems. Checking the correctness of a system for one particular value for each delay does not give any information for other values. It is thus interesting to reason parametrically, by considering that the delays are parameters (unknown constants) and synthesizing a constraint guaranteeing a correct behavior. We present here Parametric Stateful Timed Communicating Sequential Processes, a language capable of specifying and verifying parametric hierarchical real-time systems with complex data structures. Although we prove that the synthesis is undecidable in general, we present several semi-algorithms for efficient parameter synthesis, …

Towards Verification Of Computation Orchestration, Jin Song Dong, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Xian Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, a promising programming model called Orc has been proposed to support a structured way of orchestrating distributed Web Services. Orc is intuitive because it offers concise constructors to manage concurrent communication, time-outs, priorities, failure of Web Services or communication and so forth. The semantics of Orc is precisely defined. However, there is no automatic verification tool available to verify critical properties against Orc programs. Our goal is to verify the orchestration programs (written in Orc language) which invoke web services to achieve certain goals. To investigate this problem and build useful tools, we explore in two directions. Firstly, we …

Model Checking Approach To Automated Planning, Yi Li, Jin Song Dong, Jing Sun, Yang Liu, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking provides a way to automatically explore the state space of a finite state system based on desired properties, whereas planning is to produce a sequence of actions that leads from the initial state to the target goal states. Previous research in this field proposed a number of approaches for connecting model checking with planning problem solving. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using an established model checking framework, Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT), as a planning solution provider for upper layer applications. To achieve this, we first carry out a number of experiments on different model checking …

Towards Formal Modelling And Verification Of Pervasive Computing Systems, Yan Liu, Xian Zhang, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun, Jit Biswas, Mounir Mokhtari

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart systems equipped with emerging pervasive computing technologies enable people with limitations to live in their homes independently. However, lack of guarantees for correctness prevent such system to be widely used. Analysing the system with regard to correctness requirements is a challenging task due to the complexity of the system and its various unpredictable faults. In this work, we propose to use formal methods to analyse pervasive computing (PvC) systems. Firstly, a formal modelling framework is proposed to cover the main characteristics of such systems (e.g., context-awareness, concurrent communications, layered architectures). Secondly, we identify the safety requirements (e.g., free of …

Learning Assumptions For Compositional Verification Of Timed Systems, Shang-Wei Lin Lin, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Compositional techniques such as assume-guarantee reasoning (AGR) can help to alleviate the state space explosion problem associated with model checking. However, compositional verification is difficult to be automated, especially for timed systems, because constructing appropriate assumptions for AGR usually requires human creativity and experience. To automate compositional verification of timed systems, we propose a compositional verification framework using a learning algorithm for automatic construction of timed assumptions for AGR. We prove the correctness and termination of the proposed learning-based framework, and experimental results show that our method performs significantly better than traditional monolithic timed model checking.

An Active Learning Module For An Introduction To Software Engineering Course, A. Frank Ackerman, Ph.D.

Computer Science & Software Engineering

Many schools do not begin to introduce college students to software engineering until they have had at least one semester of programming. Since software engineering is a large, complex, and abstract subject it is difficult to construct active learning exercises that build on the students’ elementary knowledge of programming and still teach basic software engineering principles. It is also the case that beginning students typically know how to construct small programs, but they have little experience with the techniques necessary to produce reliable and long-term maintainable modules. I have addressed these two concerns by defining a local standard (Montana Tech …

Challenges For Mapreduce In Big Data, Katarina Grolinger, Michael Hayes, Wilson A. Higashino, Alexandra L'Heureux, David S. Allison, Miriam A.M. Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

In the Big Data community, MapReduce has been seen as one of the key enabling approaches for meeting continuously increasing demands on computing resources imposed by massive data sets. The reason for this is the high scalability of the MapReduce paradigm which allows for massively parallel and distributed execution over a large number of computing nodes. This paper identifies MapReduce issues and challenges in handling Big Data with the objective of providing an overview of the field, facilitating better planning and management of Big Data projects, and identifying opportunities for future research in this field. The identified challenges are grouped …

A Fault-Based Model Of Fault Localization Techniques, Mark A. Hays

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Every day, ordinary people depend on software working properly. We take it for granted; from banking software, to railroad switching software, to flight control software, to software that controls medical devices such as pacemakers or even gas pumps, our lives are touched by software that we expect to work. It is well known that the main technique/activity used to ensure the quality of software is testing. Often it is the only quality assurance activity undertaken, making it that much more important.

In a typical experiment studying these techniques, a researcher will intentionally seed a fault (intentionally breaking the functionality of …

Prelude - An Augmented Reality Ios Application For Music Education, Kristen Brown

Honors Projects

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology which serves to enhance the real world environment through the addition of relevant digital content, and has many potential applications within a variety of different fields, including, but not limited to, fields such as marketing, entertainment, medicine, and education. The purpose of this project is to develop an iOS augmented reality application for music educators that will serve as a tool in teaching students to recognize specific music notes and symbols.

Neutrosophic Logic Approaches Applied To ”Rabot” Real Time Control, Alexandru Gal, Luige Vladareanu, Florentin Smarandache, Hongnian Yu, Mincong Deng

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this paper we present a way of deciding which control law should operate at a time for a mobile walking robot. The proposed deciding method is based on the new research field, called Neutrosophic Logic. The results are presented as a simulated system for which the output is related to the inputs according to the Neutrosophic Logic.

An Investigation Of Complex Systems In 16 Dimensions, Jordon M. Huffman

Theses and Dissertations

Sir Isaac Newton studied the world around him. He observed unexplainable phenomena that the math of his time could not prove. With the help of Gottfried Leibniz, he created infinitesimal calculus to prove his theories. The new concepts he created revolutionized science, and opened new realms of science previously unthought of. In 2002, Dr. Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science, He argues that the processes of understanding cellular automata can be applied to other aspects of science. Dr. Rodrigo Obando of Columbus State University took Dr. Wolfram's work and dissected it. By breaking down the rules, he started …

Personalizing Software Development Practice Using Mastery-Based Coaching, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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.

Colormoo: An Algorithmic Approach To Generating Color Palettes, Joshua Rael

CMC Senior Theses

Selecting one color can be done with relative ease, but this task becomes more difficult with each subsequent color. Colormoo is an online tool aimed at solving this problem. We implement three algorithms for generating color palettes based off of a starting color. Data is collected for each palette that is generated. Our analysis reveals two of the algorithms are preferred, but under different circumstances. Furthermore, we find that users prefer palettes containing colors that are compatible, but not too similar. With refined heuristics, we believe these techniques can be extended and applied beyond the field of graphic design alone.

Scalable Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithms On Apache Spark, Walker Evan Casey

CMC Senior Theses

Collaborative filtering based recommender systems use information about a user's preferences to make personalized predictions about content, such as topics, people, or products, that they might find relevant. As the volume of accessible information and active users on the Internet continues to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to compute recommendations quickly and accurately over a large dataset. In this study, we will introduce an algorithmic framework built on top of Apache Spark for parallel computation of the neighborhood-based collaborative filtering problem, which allows the algorithm to scale linearly with a growing number of users. We also investigate several different variants …

The Challenge Of Continuous Mobile Context Sensing, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee, Kiat Wee Tan, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we highlight the challenge of continuously sensing context data from mobile phones. In particular, we show that the energy cost of this type of continuous sensing is extremely high if a) accuracy is desired, and b) power optimisations do not work well if multiple tasks are sensing concurrently. Our results are derived from our experience in building the LiveLabs context sensing platform. We present results for different types of sensing tasks; ranging from simple sensing using just one sensor all the way to multi-sensor sensing performed by concurrent high-level tasks. We end with a discussion of the …

Free Market Of Crowdsourcing: Incentive Mechanism Design For Mobile Sensing, Xinglin Zhang, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Haibin Cai, Lei Chen, Xiang-Yang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Off-the-shelf smartphones have boosted large scale participatory sensing applications as they are equipped with various functional sensors, possess powerful computation and communication capabilities, and proliferate at a breathtaking pace. Yet the low participation level of smartphone users due to various resource consumptions, such as time and power, remains a hurdle that prevents the enjoyment brought by sensing applications. Recently, some researchers have done pioneer works in motivating users to contribute their resources by designing incentive mechanisms, which are able to provide certain rewards for participation. However, none of these works considered smartphone users’ nature of opportunistically occurring in the area …

An Approach For Clone Detection In Documentation Reuse, Dmitry V. Lutsiv, Dmitry Koznov, Hamid A. Basit, Eng Lieh Ouh, Mikhail N. Smirnov, Konstantin Y. Romanovsky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The paper focuses on the searching method for repetitions in DocBook/DRL or plain text documents. An algorithm has been designed based on software clone detection. The algorithm supports filtering results: clones are rejected if clone length in the group is less than 5 symbols, intersection of clone groups is eliminated, meaningfulness clones are removed, the groups containing clones consisting only of XML are eliminated. Remaining search is supported: found clones are extracted from the documentation, and clone search is repeated. One step is proved to be enough. Adaptive reuse technique of Paul Bassett – Stan Jarzabek has been implemented. A …