Computer Sciences Commons^™

Reaper – Toward Automating Mobile Cloud Communication, Daniel R. Ward

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Mobile devices connected to cloud based services are becoming a mainstream method of delivery up-to-date and context aware information to users. Connecting mobile applications to cloud service require significant developer effort. Yet this communication code usually follows certain patterns, varying accordingly to the specific type of data sent and received from the server. By analyzing the causes of theses variations, we can create a system that can automate the code creation for communication from a mobile device to a cloud server. To automate code creation, a general pattern must extracted. This general solution can then be applied to any database …

Experimental Studies Of Android App Development For Smart Chess Board System, Srujan Gopu

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Playing chess on a smart phone has gained popularity in the last few years, offering the convenience of correspondence play, automatic recording of a game, etc. Although a good number of players love playing chess on a tablet/smart phone, it doesn't come close to the experience of playing over the traditional board. The feel and pleasure are more real when playing face down with the opponent sitting across each other rather than playing in mobile devices. This is especially true during chess tournaments. It would be ideal to enhance the experience of playing chess on board with the features of …

Solving The Search For Source Code, Kathryn T. Stolee

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Programmers frequently search for source code to reuse using keyword searches. When effective and efficient, a code search can boost programmer productivity, however, the search effectiveness depends on the programmer's ability to specify a query that captures how the desired code may have been implemented. Further, the results often include many irrelevant matches that must be filtered manually. More semantic search approaches could address these limitations, yet existing approaches either do not scale, are not flexible enough to find approximate matches, or require complex specifications.

We propose a novel approach to semantic search that addresses some of these limitations and …

Open Source Software Development Process Model – A Grounded Theory Approach, Keng Siau, Y. Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The open source movement has provided software users with more choices, lower software acquisition cost, more flexible software customization, and possibly higher quality software product. Although the development of open source software is dynamic and it encourages innovations, the process can be chaotic. An Open Source Software Development (OSSD) process model to enhance the survivability of OSSD projects is needed. This research uses the grounded theory approach to derive a Phase-Role-Skill-Responsibility (PRSR) OSSD process model. The three OSSD process phases -- Launch Stage, Before the First Release, and Between Releases -- address the characteristics of the OSSD process as well …

Integration Of Social Media Technologies With Erp:A Prototype Implementation, Venky Shankararaman, Eng Kit Lum

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many organizations use social media to enhance collaboration both internally among employees and externally with customers and partners. However, it is not sufficient to just create a presence in some key social environments such as Facebook or YouTube. In order to fully leverage the value of social media, organizations must integrate social media with their business processes, which means new solutions have to be developed that extend existing enterprise systems. In this paper, we present a prototype solution that demonstrates the integration of social media with the order processing process. The implemented solution brings together the embedded best practice processes …

How Many Researchers Does It Take To Make Impact? Mining Software Engineering Publication Data For Collaboration Insights, Subhajit Datta, Santonu Sarkar, Sajeev A. S. M., Nishant Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the three and half decades since the inception of organized research publication in software engineering, the discipline has gained a significant maturity. This journey to maturity has been guided by the synergy of ideas, individuals and interactions. In this journey software engineering has evolved into an increasingly empirical discipline. Empirical sciences involve significant collaboration, leading to large teams working on research problems. In this paper we analyze a corpus of 19,000+ papers, written by 21,000+ authors from 16 publication venues between 1975 to 2010, to understand what is the ideal team size that has produced maximum impact in software …

Usmmc: A Self-Contained Model Checker For Uml State Machines, Shuang Liu, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Manchun Zheng, Bimlesh Wadhwa, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

UML diagrams are gaining increasing usage in Object-Oriented system designs. UML state machines are specifically used in modeling dynamic behaviors of classes. It has been widely agreed that verification of system designs at an early stage will dramatically reduce the development cost. Tool support for verification UML designs can also encourage consistent usage of UML diagrams throughout the software development procedure. In this work, we present a tool, named USMMC, which turns model checking of UML state machines into practice. USMMC is a self-contained toolkit, which provides editing, interactive simulation as well as powerful model checking support for UML state …

Big Data: Immediate Opportunities And Longer Term Challenges, Jens Pohl, Kym Jason Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The transformation of words, locations, and human interactions into digital data forms the basis of trend detection and information extraction opportunities that can be automated with the increasing availability of relatively inexpensive computer storage and processing technology. Trend detection, which focuses on what, is facilitated by the ability to apply analytics to an entire corpus of data instead of a random sample. Since the corpus essentially includes all data within a population there is no need to apply any of the precautions that are in order to ensure the representativeness of a sample in traditional statistical analysis. Several examples are …

Improving Tool Support For Software Reverse Engineering In A Security Context, Brendan Cleary, Christoph Treude, Fernando Figueira Filho, Margaret-Anne Storey, Martin Salois

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Illegal cyberspace activities are increasing rapidly and many software engineers are using reverse engineering methods to respond to attacks. The security-sensitive nature of these tasks, such as the understanding of malware or the decryption of encrypted content, brings unique challenges to reverse engineering: work has to be done offline, files can rarely be shared, time pressure is immense, and there is a lack of tool and process support for capturing and sharing the knowledge obtained while trying to understand assembly code. To help us gain an understanding of this reverse engineering work, we conducted an exploratory study at a government …

Orion: A Software Project Search Engine With Integrated Diverse Software Artifacts, Tegawende F. Bissyande, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Laurent Réveillère

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software projects produce a wealth of data that is leveraged in different tasks and for different purposes: researchers collect project data for building experimental datasets; software programmers reuse code from projects; developers often explore the opportunities for getting involved in the development of a project to gain or offer expertise. Finding relevant projects that suit one needs is however currently challenging with the capabilities of existing search systems. We propose Orion, an integrated search engine architecture that combines information from different types of software repositories from multiple sources to facilitate the construction and execution of advanced search queries. Orion provides …

Popularity, Interoperability, And Impact Of Programming Languages In 100,000 Open Source Projects, Tegawende F. Bissyande, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Laurent Réveillère

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programming languages have been proposed even before the era of the modern computer. As years have gone, computer resources have increased and application domains have expanded, leading to the proliferation of hundreds of programming languages, each attempting to improve over others or to address new programming paradigms. These languages range from procedural languages like C, object oriented languages like Java, and functional languages such as ML and Haskell. Unfortunately, there is a lack of large scale and comprehensive studies that examine the “popularity”, “interoperability”, and “impact” of various programming languages. To fill this gap, this study investigates a hundred thousands …

An Empirical Study Of Adoption Of Software Testing In Open Source Projects, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Tegawende F. Bissyande, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In software engineering, testing is a crucial activity that is designed to ensure the quality of program code. For this activity, software teams spend substantial resources constructing test cases to thoroughly assess the correctness of software functionality. What is the proportion of open source projects that include test cases? What is the effect of number of developers on the number of test cases? In this study, we explore open source projects and investigate the correlation between the presence of test cases and various project development characteristics, including the number of lines of code, the size of development teams and the …

Combining Model Checking And Testing With An Application To Reliability Prediction And Distribution, Lin Gui, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Yuanjie Si, Jin Song Dong, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Testing provides a probabilistic assurance of system correctness. In general, testing relies on the assumptions that the system under test is deterministic so that test cases can be sampled. However, a challenge arises when a system under test behaves non-deterministiclly in a dynamic operating environment because it will be unknown how to sample test cases.In this work, we propose a method combining hypothesis testing and probabilistic model checking so as to provide the ``assurance" and quantify the error bounds. The idea is to apply hypothesis testing to deterministic system components and use probabilistic model checking techniques to lift the results …

The Case For Mobile Forensics Of Private Data Leaks: Towards Large-Scale User-Oriented Privacy Protection, Joseph Joo Keng Chan, Kiat Wee Tan, Lingxiao Jiang, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy protection against mobile applications on mobile devices is becoming a serious concern as user sensitive data may be leaked without proper justification. Most current leak detection tools only report leaked private data, but provide inadequate information about the causes of the leaks for end users to take preventive measures. Hence, users often cannot reconcile the way they have used an application to a reported leak — i.e., they are unable to comprehend the (il)legitimacy of the leak or make a decision on whether to allow the leak. This paper aims to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of identifying the …

An Empirical Study Of Bugs In Software Build Systems, Xin Xia, Xiaozhen Zhou, David Lo, Xiaoqiong Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Build system converts source code, libraries and other data into executable programs by orchestrating the execution of compilers and other tools. The whole building process is managed by a software build system, such as Make, Ant, CMake, Maven, Scons, and QMake. The reliability of software build systems would affect the reliability of the build process. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on bugs in software build systems. We analyze four software build systems, Ant, Maven, CMake and QMake, which are four typical and widely-used software build systems, and can be used to build Java, C, C++ systems. We …

An Empirical Study Of Adoption Of Software Testing In Open Source Projects, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Tegawende F. Bissyande, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Psyhcos: Parameter Synthesis For Hierarchical Concurrent Real-Time Systems, Étienne André, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong, Shang-Wei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time systems are often hard to control, due to their complicated structures, quantitative time factors and even unknown delays. We present here PSyHCoS, a tool for analyzing parametric real-time systems specified using the hierarchical modeling language PSTCSP. PSyHCoS supports several algorithms for parameter synthesis and model checking, as well as state space reduction techniques. Its architecture favors reusability in terms of syntax, semantics, and algorithms. It comes with a friendly user interface that can be used to edit, simulate and verify PSTCSP models. Experiments show its efficiency and applicability

Enhancing The Expressiveness Of The Cleanjava Language, Melisa Vela, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The CleanJava language is a formal annotation language for Java to support Cleanroom-style functional program verification that views a program as a mathematical function from one program state to another. The CleanJava notation is based on the Java expression syntax with a few extensions, and thus its vocabulary is somewhat limited to that of Java. This often makes it difficult to specify the rich semantics of a Java program in a succinct and natural way that is easy to manipulate for formal correctness reasoning. In this paper we propose to make the CleanJava language more expressive by supporting user-defined mathematical …

Gravity Evolved, Clark Duvall

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Gravity Evolved is a galactic physics game, created for mobile devices. In the game, you make your own solar system by creating planets, and then placing weapons on the planets. The physics of these planets and projectiles shot by the weapons are then simulated. Gravity Evolved has a Battle mode, where your solar system is pitted against an opposing solar system. In Battle mode, you earn money to unlock, create, and upgrade items in your solar system. Gravity Evolved will be on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in the summer of 2013.

Channels: Easy Video Content Consumption, Alexander R. Ledwith

Computer Engineering

The idea for this project is to take a user’s digital movie and television show library, and organize the individual videos into lists that will continuously and concurrently play like cable TV channels. This means that when a list of channels is switched to, video content will automatically start playing, possibly in the middle, based on a schedule. It should serve the needs of the user by allowing the user to quickly watch any of their existing channels, easily add a new channel based on chosen criteria or manual selection, and easily add new video content. In addition, the product …

Protocases, Christopher M. Polis

Computer Engineering

Design and implementation of a 3D printing web application.

Integrated Collision Avoidance System Sensor Evaluation Final Design Project, Alex F. Graebe, Bridgette S. Kimball, Drew T. Lavoise

Mechanical Engineering

Following the development of Aircraft Collision Avoidance Technology (ACAT) by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a need arose to transition the life-saving technology to aid the general aviation community. Considering the realistic cost of implementation, it was decided that the technology should be adapted to function on any smartphone, using that device as an end-to-end solution to sense, process, and alert the pilot to imminent threats. In September of 2012, the SAS (Sense and Survive) Senior Project Team at California Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo was assigned the task of using smartphone technology to accurately sense …

Approximating The Performance Of A "Last Mile" Transportation System, Hai Wang, Amedeo Odoni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Last Mile Problem (LMP) refers to the provision of travel service from thenearest public transportation node to a home or office. We study the supply side of thisproblem in a stochastic setting, with batch demands resulting from the arrival of groupsof passengers at rail stations or bus stops who request last-mile service. Closed-formbounds and approximations are derived for the performance of Last Mile TransportationsSystems as a function of the fundamental design parameters of such systems. An initialset of results is obtained for the case in which a fleet of vehicles of unit capacity providesthe Last Mile service and each …

Cameo: A Middleware For Mobile Advertisement Delivery, Azeem J. Khan, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Dongsu Han, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Srinivasan Seshan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Advertisements are the de-facto currency of the Internet with many popular applications (e.g. Angry Birds) and online services (e.g., YouTube) relying on advertisement generated revenue. However, the current economic models and mechanisms for mobile advertising are fundamentally not sustainable and far from ideal. In particular, as we show, applications which use mobile advertising are capable of using significant amounts of a mobile users' critical resources without being controlled or held accountable. This paper seeks to redress this situation by enabling advertisement supported applications to become significantly more "user-friendly". To this end, we present the design and implementation of CAMEO, a …

Sociophone: Everyday Face-To-Face Interaction Monitoring Platform Using Multi-Phone Sensor Fusion, Youngki Lee, Chulhong Min, Chanyou Hwang, Jaeung Lee, Inseok Hwang, Younghyun Ju, Chungkuk Yoo, Miri Moon, Uichin Lee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose SocioPhone, a novel initiative to build a mobile platform for face-to-face interaction monitoring. Face-to-face interaction, especially conversation, is a fundamental part of everyday life. Interaction-aware applications aimed at facilitating group conversations have been proposed, but have not proliferated yet. Useful contexts to capture and support face-to-face interactions need to be explored more deeply. More important, recognizing delicate conversational contexts with commodity mobile devices requires solving a number of technical challenges. As a first step to address such challenges, we identify useful meta-linguistic contexts of conversation, such as turn-takings, prosodic features, a dominant participant, and pace. …

Improved Reachability Analysis In Dtmc Via Divide And Conquer, Songzheng Song, Lin Gui, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Discrete Time Markov Chains (DTMCs) are widely used to model probabilistic systems in many domains, such as biology, network and communication protocols. There are two main approaches for probability reachability analysis of DTMCs, i.e., solving linear equations or using value iteration. However, both approaches have drawbacks. On one hand, solving linear equations can generate accurate results, but it can be only applied to relatively small models. On the other hand, value iteration is more scalable, but often suffers from slow convergence. Furthermore, it is unclear how to parallelize (i.e., taking advantage of multi-cores or distributed computers) these two approaches. In …

Demo: Sociophone: Everyday Face-To-Face Interaction Monitoring Platform Using Multi-Phone Sensor Fusion, Youngki Lee, Chulhong Min, Chanyou Hwang, Jaeung Lee, Inseok Hwang, Younghyun Ju, Chungkuk Yoo, Miri Moon, Uichin Lee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we introduce SocioPhone, a novel initiative toward everyday face-to-face interaction monitoring platform. Among diverse verbal, aural, visual cues expressed during face-to-face interaction, SocioPhone captures diverse meta-linguistic information from conversations and provides interaction-aware applications on-the-fly. Undoubtedly, conversations are a key channel for face-to-face interaction. Specifically, monitoring conversational turns, i.e., alternation of different speakers (including none speaking), is the first crucial step to derive diverse interesting aspects of conversations, e.g., who is talking right now, how long and often one talks, how quickly one responds to another, and so on. In this demo, we will show the core technique …

A Formal Semantics For Complete Uml State Machines With Communications, Shuang Liu, Yang Liu, Étienne André, Christine Choppy, Jun Sun, Bimlesh Wadhwa, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

UML is a widely used notation, and formalizing its semantics is an important issue. Here, we concentrate on formalizing UML state machines, used to express the dynamic behaviour of software systems. We propose a formal operational semantics covering all features of the latest version (2.4.1) of UML state machines specification. We use labelled transition systems as the semantic model, so as to use automatic verification techniques like model checking. Furthermore, our proposed semantics includes synchronous and asynchronous communications between state machines. We implement our approach in USM2C, a model checker supporting editing, simulation and automatic verification of UML state machines. …

Experiences With Performance Tradeoffs In Practical, Continuous Indoor Localization, Azeem J. Khan, Vikash Ranjan, Trung-Tuan Luong, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes our experiences and observations with the first version of a localization system that continuous tracks the indoor location of a large number of consumer mobile devices. Unlike past work that focuses principally on the accuracy of the location tracking algorithm, we study the performance of the localization system in terms of key additional metrics: scalability and energy-efficiency, which can sometimes conflict with the desire for high accuracy. To ensure that our solution can handle both Android and iOS-based mobile devices (& other closed mobile platforms), we adapt the conventional client-side fingerprinting-based localization approaches to develop a novel …

Energy-Efficient Collaborative Query Processing Framework For Mobile Sensing Services, Jin Yang, Tianli Mo, Lipyeow Lim, Kai Uwe Sattler, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many emerging context-aware mobile applications involve the execution of continuous queries over sensor data streams generated by a variety of on-board sensors on multiple personal mobile devices (aka smartphones). To reduce the energyoverheads of such large-scale, continuous mobile sensing and query processing, this paper introduces CQP, a collaborative query processing framework that exploits the overlap (in both the sensor sources and the query predicates) across multiple smartphones. The framework automatically identifies the shareable parts of multiple executing queries, and then reduces the overheads of repetitive execution and data transmissions, by having a set of 'leader' mobile nodes execute and disseminate …