Computer Sciences Commons^™

Adaptive Radial Basis Function Neural Networks-Based Real Time Harmonics Estimation And Pwm Control For Active Power Filters, Eyad Kh Almaita

Dissertations

With the proliferation of nonlinear loads in the power system, harmonic pollution becomes a serious problem that affects the power quality in both transmission and distribution systems. Active power filters (APF) have been proven to be one of the most successful methods for mitigating harmonics problems. So far, different techniques have been used in harmonics extraction and control of APF to satisfy the fast response and the accuracy required by the APF. Neural networks techniques have been used successfully in different real-time and complex situations. This dissertation demonstrates four main tasks; (i) a novel adaptive radial basis function neural networks …

Understanding How Reverse Engineers Make Sense Of Programs From Assembly Language Representations, Adam R. Bryant

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation develops a theory of the conceptual and procedural aspects involved with how reverse engineers make sense of executable programs. Software reverse engineering is a complex set of tasks which require a person to understand the structure and functionality of a program from its assembly language representation, typically without having access to the program's source code. This dissertation describes the reverse engineering process as a type of sensemaking, in which a person combines reasoning and information foraging behaviors to develop a mental model of the program. The structure of knowledge elements used in making sense of executable programs are …

Losing The Lake: Development And Deployment Of An Educational Game, Joseph M. Vesco, Katie Gilgen, Anne Paine, Marissa Owens, Michael Nussbaum, Gale M. Sinatra, Sajjad Ahmad, Kent J. Crippen, Sergiu Dascalu, Frederick C. Harris

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Faculty Research

When asked what the top three issues of the Las Vegas region were, the reply was “water, water, water!" This was the result of a survey done a few years ago of Las Vegas Valley TV anchors. The reason for this response is that sustainability of the urban environments requires sufficient water resources as does population growth. With the advent of global climate change, this resource is in danger. Water flow and mountainous ice packs are impacted by this change in climate there by impacting the amount of water the the region. This is compounded over time as the population …

3-D Scene Reconstruction From Aerial Imagery, Jared M. Ekholm

Theses and Dissertations

3-D scene reconstructions derived from Structure from Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) techniques were analyzed to determine the optimal reconnaissance flight characteristics suitable for target reconstruction. In support of this goal, a preliminary study of a simple 3-D geometric object facilitated the analysis of convergence angles and number of camera frames within a controlled environment. Reconstruction accuracy measurements revealed at least 3 camera frames and a 6 convergence angle were required to achieve results reminiscent of the original structure. The central investigative effort sought the applicability of certain airborne reconnaissance flight profiles to reconstructing ground targets. The data sets …

Mobicon: A Mobile Context-Monitoring Platform, Youngki Lee, S. S. Iyengar, Chulhong Min, Younghyun Ju, Taiwoo Park, Jinwon Lee, Yunseok Rhee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User context is defined by data generated through everyday physical activity in sensor-rich, resource-limited mobile environments.

Improved Duplicate Bug Report Identification, Yuan Tian, Chengnian Sun, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bugs are prevalent in software systems. To improve the reliability of software systems, developers often allow end users to provide feedback on bugs that they encounter. Users could perform this by sending a bug report in a bug report management system like Bugzilla. This process however is uncoordinated and distributed, which means that many users could submit bug reports reporting the same problem. These are referred to as duplicate bug reports. The existence of many duplicate bug reports may cause much unnecessary manual efforts as often a triager would need to manually tag bug reports as being duplicates. Recently, there …

Scenario-Based And Value-Based Specification Mining: Better Together, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification mining takes execution traces as input and extracts likely program invariants, which can be used for comprehension, verification, and evolution related tasks. In this work we integrate scenario-based specification mining, which uses a data-mining algorithm to suggest ordering constraints in the form of live sequence charts, an inter-object, visual, modal, scenario-based specification language, with mining of value-based invariants, which detects likely invariants holding at specific program points. The key to the integration is a technique we call scenario-based slicing, running on top of the mining algorithms to distinguish the scenario-specific invariants from the general ones. The resulting suggested specifications …

Dynamic Lookahead Mechanism For Conserving Power In Multi-Player Mobile Games, Karthik Thirugnanam, Bhojan Anand, Jeena Sebastian, Pravein Kannan, Akhihebbal L. Ananda, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Mun Choon Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the current generation of mobile smartphones become more powerful, they are being used to perform more resource intensive tasks making battery lifetime a major bottleneck. In this paper, we present a technique called dynamic AoV lookahead for reducing wireless interface power consumption up to 50% while playing a popular, yet resource intensive, mobile multiplayer games.

Human: Creating Memorable Fingerprints Of Mobile Users, Gupta Payas, Kiat Wee Tan, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, David Lo, Debin Gao, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a new way of generating behavioral (not biometric) fingerprints from the cellphone usage data. In particular, we explore if the generated behavioral fingerprints are memorable enough to be remembered by end users. We built a system, called HuMan, that generates fingerprints from cellphone data. To test HuMan, we conducted an extensive user study that involved collecting about one month of continuous usage data (including calls, SMSes, application usage patterns etc.) from 44 Symbian and Android smartphone users. We evaluated the memorable fingerprints generated from this rich multi-context data by asking each user to answer various …

Hoare-Style Verification Of Graph Programs, Christopher M. Poskitt, Detlef Plump

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

GP (for Graph Programs) is an experimental nondeterministic programming language for solving problems on graphs and graph-like structures. The language is based on graph transformation rules, allowing visual programming at a high level of abstraction. In particular, GP frees programmers from dealing with low-level data structures. In this paper, we present a Hoare-style proof system for verifying the partial correctness of (a subset of) graph programs. The pre- and postconditions of the calculus are nested graph conditions with expressions, a formalism for specifying both structural graph properties and properties of labels. We show that our proof system is sound with …

Utility-Based Bandwidth Adaptation In Mission-Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Flavio Bergamaschi, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper develops a utility-based optimization framework for resource sharing by multiple competing missions in a mission-oriented wireless sensor network (WSN) environment. Prior work on network utility maximization (NUM) based optimization has focused on unicast flows with sender-based utilities in either wireline or wireless networks. In this work, we develop a generalized NUM model to consider three key new features observed in mission-centric WSN environments: i) the definition of the utility of an individual mission (receiver) as a joint function of data from multiple sensor sources ii) the consumption of each senders (sensor) data by multiple missions and iii) the …

Users’ Perception Of Open Source Usability: An Empirical Study, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The number of open source software (OSS) users has increased in recent years. No longer are they limited to technically adept software developers. Many believe that the OSS market share could increase tremendously provided OSS had systems that were easier to use. Although examples of good usable open source software exist, it is agreed that OSS can be made more usable. This study presents an empirical investigation to study the impact of some key factors on OSS usability from the end users’ point of view. The research model studies and establishes the relationship between the key usability factors from the …

The Social Network Of Software Engineering Research, Subhajit Datta, Nishant Kumar, Santonu Sarkar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The social network perspective has served as a useful framework for studying scientific research collaboration in different disciplines. Although collaboration in computer science research has received some attention, software engineering research collaboration has remained unexplored to a large extent. In this paper, we examine the collaboration networks based on co-authorship information of papers from ten software engineering publication venues over the 1976-2010 time period. We compare time variations of certain parameters of these networks with corresponding parameters of collaboration networks from other disciplines. We also explore whether software engineering collaboration networks manifest symptoms of the small-world phenomenon, conform to the …

Work Item Tagging: Communicating Concerns In Collaborative Software Development, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In collaborative software development projects, work items are used as a mechanism to coordinate tasks and track shared development work. In this paper, we explore how “tagging,” a lightweight social computing mechanism, is used to communicate matters of concern in the management of development tasks. We present the results from two empirical studies over 36 and 12 months, respectively, on how tagging has been adopted and what role it plays in the development processes of several professional development projects with more than 1,000 developers in total. Our research shows that the tagging mechanism was eagerly adopted by the teams, and …

Programming In A Socially Networked World: The Evolution Of The Social Programmer, Christoph Treude, Fernando Figueira Filho, Brendan Cleary, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media has changed how software developers collaborate, how they coordinate their work, and where they find information. Social media sites, such as the Question and Answer (Q&A) portal Stack Overflow, fill archives with millions of entries that contribute to what we know about software development, covering a wide range of topics. For today’s software developers, reusable code snippets, introductory usage examples, and pertinent libraries are often just a web search away. In this position paper, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for software developers that rely on web content curated by the crowd, and we envision the future of …

Towards Fine-Grained Radio-Based Indoor Location, Jie Xiong, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Location systems are key to a rich experience for mobile users. When they roam outdoors, mobiles can usually count on a clear GPS signal for an accurate location, but indoors, GPS usually fades, and so up until recently, mobiles have had to rely mainly on rather coarse-grained signal strength readings for location. What has changed this status quo is the recent trend of dramatically increasing numbers of antennas at the indoor AP, mainly to bolster capacity and coverage with multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) techniques. In the near future, the number of antennas at the access point will increase several-fold, to meet …

Mitigating The True Cost Of Advertisement-Supported "Free" Mobile Applications, Azeem J. Khan, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Archan Misra, Srinivasan Seshan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The dominant, "ad-supported free application" model for consumer-oriented mobile computing is seemingly imperiled by the growing global adoption of metered data pricing plans by mobile operators. In this paper, we explore the opportunities for addressing this emerging conflict by enabling more intelligent ad delivery to such mobile devices. One especially promising path is leveraging the increasing availability of heterogeneous wireless access technologies (e.g., WiFi, femtocells) that offer less restrictive and more energy-efficient transport substrates for such data traffic. To understand the possibilities that exist, we first profile the advertisement traffic characteristics for some of the most popular advertisement-supported consumer applications, …

Arivu: Making Networked Mobile Games Green: A Scalable Power-Aware Middleware, Anand Bhojan, Ananda L. Akhihebbal L., Mun Choon Chan, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the improved processing power, graphic quality and high-speed wireless connection in recent generations of mobile phones, it looks more attractive than ever to introduce networked games on these devices. However, these games consume higher levels of energy. While device features and application resource requirements are rapidly growing, the battery technologies are not growing at the same pace. Therefore, the main concern is the limitation of the battery power of such portable devices to support potentially long-hour of game play. In this paper we present ARIVU, a scalable power aware middleware that dynamically controls the energy consumption of wireless interface …

Formal Modeling And Validation Of Stateflow Diagrams, Chunqing Chen, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong, Manchun Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stateflow is an industrial tool for modeling and simulating control systems in model-based development. In this paper, we present our latest work on automatic verification of Stateflow using model-checking techniques. We propose an approach to systematically translate Stateflow diagrams to a formal modeling language called CSP# by precisely following Stateflow’s execution semantics, which is described by examples. A translator is developed inside the Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT) model checker to automate this process with the support of various Stateflow advanced modeling features. Formal analysis can be conducted on the transformed CSP# with PAT’s simulation and model-checking power. Using our approach, …

New Open Source Software For Building Molecular Dynamics Systems, Bruce Michael Allen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The context of this work is the development of open source software to support researchers to quickly build systems of molecules for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The goal is achieved through the integration of three open source programs by judicious modifications and creation of new source code, which allows the creation of molecular models, MD cells and the LAMMPS geometry input files. The software changes work together supporting an easy and intuitive process for simulation system creation. Creation of multiple MD cells for research simulations becomes quicker and provides needed standardization to the simulation process. The researcher can select from …

A Global Positioning System On The Lunar Sphere Utilizing Cubesats, Armani Giann Batista

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this thesis was to research the viability and feasibility of a new Lunar GPS that would utilize the CubeSat platform, newly emerging technology, and the consideration of satellites without the large, currently employed, chemically atomic clocks.

Autonomic Database Management: State Of The Art And Future Trends, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

In recent years, Database Management Systems (DBMS) have increased significantly in size and complexity, increasing the extent to which database administration is a time-consuming and expensive task. Database Administrator (DBA) expenses have become a significant part of the total cost of ownership. This results in the need to develop Autonomous Database Management systems (ADBMS) that would manage themselves without human intervention. Accordingly, this paper evaluates the current state of autonomous database systems and identifies gaps and challenges in the achievement of fully autonomic databases. In addition to highlighting technical challenges and gaps, we identify one human factor, gaining the trust …

Ontology–Based Representation Of Simulation Models, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam A.M. Capretz, José R. Marti, Krishan D. Srivastava

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Ontologies have been used in a variety of domains for multiple purposes such as establishing common terminology, organizing domain knowledge and describing domain in a machine-readable form. Moreover, ontologies are the foundation of the Semantic Web and often semantic integration is achieved using ontology. Even though simulation demonstrates a number of similar characteristics to Semantic Web or semantic integration, including heterogeneity in the simulation domain, representation and semantics, the application of ontology in the simulation domain is still in its infancy. This paper proposes an ontology-based representation of simulation models. The goal of this research is to facilitate comparison among …

An Iterative Association Rule Mining Framework To K-Anonymize A Dataset, Michael Hayes, Miriam A M Capretz, Jefferey Reed, Cheryl Forchuk

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Preserving and maintaining client privacy and anonymity is of utmost importance in any domain and specially so in healthcare, as loss of either of these can result in legal and ethical implications. Further, it is sometimes important to extract meaningful and useful information from existing data for research or management purposes. In this case it is necessary for the organization who manages the dataset to be certain that no attributes can identify individuals or group of individuals. This paper proposes an extendable and generalized framework to anonymize a dataset using an iterative association rule mining approach. The proposed framework also …

Evolution Of Software Engineers’ Personality Profile, Daniel Varona, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Arif Raza

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has been applied to several studies that explore various dimensions of human factors in software engineering. Accordingly, this work reviews the results of these studies to explore existing trends. In order to attain a greater understanding of human resources in the software industry, we have reviewed sixteen studies that had been performed between 1985 and 2011. This review concludes that the changes in the complexity of software processes and products have created new roles and demanded new skills for software engineers.

Soft Skills Requirements In Software Development Jobs: A Cross-Cultural Empirical Study, Faheem Amed, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Salah Bouktif, Piers Campbell

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Purpose: Most of the studies carried out on human factor in software development concentrate primarily on personality traits. However, soft skills which largely help in determining personality traits have been given comparatively little attention by researchers. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether employers’ soft skills requirements, as advertised in job postings, within different roles of software development, are similar across different cultures.

Design/methodology/approach: The authors review the literature relating to soft skills before describing a study based on 500 job advertisements posted on well-known recruitment sites from a range of geographical locations, including North America, Europe, …

Evaluating The Demand For Soft Skills In Software Development, Faheem Ahmed, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Piers Campbell

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

An analysis of 500 advertisements for IT positions focuses on the soft skills mentioned in the ads, revealing which soft skills are in high demand for software development and which ones are neglected despite their importance.

Crowd Documentation: Exploring The Coverage And The Dynamics Of Api Discussions On Stack Overflow, Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude, Lars Grammel, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditionally, many types of software documentation, such as API documentation, require a process where a few people write for many potential users. The resulting documentation, when it exists, is often of poor quality and lacks sufficient examples and explanations. In this paper, we report on an empirical study to investigate how Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, facilitate crowd documentation — knowledge that is written by many and read by many. We examine the crowd documentation for three popular APIs: Android, GWT, and the Java programming language. We collect usage data using Google Code Search, and analyze …

A Web Application In Rest: The Design, Implementation, And Evaluation Of A Web Application Based On RePresentational STate TRansfer, William O’Brien

Honors Theses

It is no secret the Internet has evolved at an alarming rate since its public debut in the early 90s. What began as a simple way for users to publish files has evolved into a platform for impressively complex interactive applications. Now, applications once restricted to a single operating system are made available to all through advancements in browser technology and libraries. For a long time, Adobe has offered Photoshop as a far from trivial image editing program for around $100 to the Windows and Mac platforms. Recently, a web application emulating Photoshop’s features has been made freely available to …

Significantly Reducing The Processing Times Of High-Speed Photometry Data Sets Using A Distributed Computing Model, Paul Doyle, Fredrick Mtenzi, Niall Smith, Adrian Collins, Brendan O'Shea

Other

The scientific community is in the midst of a data analysis crisis. The increasing capacity of scientific CCD instrumentation and their falling costs is contributing to an explosive generation of raw photometric data. This data must go through a process of cleaning and reduction before it can be used for high precision photometric analysis. Many existing data processing pipelines either assume a relatively small dataset or are batch processed by a High Performance Computing centre. A radical overhaul of these processing pipelines is required to allow reduction and cleaning rates to process terabyte sized datasets at near capture rates using …