Computer Sciences Commons^™

Development Of A 3d Game Engine, Nicholas Alexander Woodfield

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper presents the development history and specification of a 3D game engine titled "Spark Engine". The term "engine" is used to describe a complex graphics software suite that streamlines application development and provides efficient rendering functionality. A game engine specifically provides tools to simplify game development. Spark Engine is fully shader driven and is built on top of Microsoft's XNA Framework. It is a reusable and flexible platform that can be used to build any type of graphics application ranging from gaming to simulation. The engine was released as open source software under the New BSD License with an …

Using Ant Colonization Optimization To Control Difficulty In Video Game Ai., Joshua Courtney

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is an algorithm which simulates ant foraging behavior. When ants search for food they leave pheromone trails to tell other ants which paths to take to find food. ACO has been adapted to many different problems in computer science: mainly variations on shortest path algorithms for graphs and networks.

ACO can be adapted to work as a form of communication between separate agents in a video game AI. By controlling the effectiveness of this communication, the difficulty of the game should be able to be controlled. Experimentation has shown that ACO works effectively as a form …

Personalization By Website Transformation: Theory And Practice, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present an analysis of a progressive series of out-of-turn transformations on a hierarchical website to personalize a user’s interaction with the site. We formalize the transformation in graph-theoretic terms and describe a toolkit we built that enumerates all of the traversals enabled by every possible complete series of these transformations in any site and computes a variety of metrics while simulating each traversal therein to qualify the relationship between a site’s structure and the cumulative effect of support for the transformation in a site. We employed this toolkit in two websites. The results indicate that the transformation enables users …

Bridging Lightweight And Heavyweight Task Organization: The Role Of Tags In Adopting New Task Categories, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In collaborative software development projects, tasks are often used as a mechanism to coordinate and track shared development work. Modern development environments provide explicit support for task management where tasks are typically organized and managed through predefined categories. Although there have been many studies that analyze data available from task management systems, there has been relatively little work on the design of task management tools. In this paper we explore how tagging with freely assigned keywords provides developers with a lightweight mechanism to further categorize and annotate development tasks. We investigate how tags that are frequently used over a long …

A Discriminative Model Approach For Accurate Duplicate Bug Report Retrieval, Chengnian Sun, David Lo, Xiaoyin Wang, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug repositories are usually maintained in software projects. Testers or users submit bug reports to identify various issues with systems. Sometimes two or more bug reports correspond to the same defect. To address the problem with duplicate bug reports, a person called a triager needs to manually label these bug reports as duplicates, and link them to their "master" reports for subsequent maintenance work. However, in practice there are considerable duplicate bug reports sent daily; requesting triagers to manually label these bugs could be highly time consuming. To address this issue, recently, several techniques have be proposed using various similarity …

Web2se: First Workshop On Web 2.0 For Software Engineering, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey, Kate Ehrlich, Arie Van Deursen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social software is built around an "architecture of participation" where user data is aggregated as a side-effect of using Web 2.0 applications. Web 2.0 implies that processes and tools are socially open, and that content can be used in several different contexts. Web 2.0 tools and technologies support interactive information sharing, data interoperability and user centered design. For instance, wikis, blogs, tags and feeds help us organize, manage and categorize content in an informal and collaborative way. One goal of this workshop is to investigate how these technologies can improve software development practices. Some of these technologies have made their …

A Scalable And Energy-Efficient Context Monitoring Framework For Mobile Personal Sensor Networks, Seungwoo Kang, Jinwon Lee, Hyukjae Jang, Youngki Lee, Souneil Park, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The key feature of many emerging pervasive computing applications is to proactively provide services to mobile individuals. One major challenge in providing users with proactive services lies in continuously monitoring users’ context based on numerous sensors in their PAN/BAN environments. The context monitoring in such environments imposes heavy workloads on mobile devices and sensor nodes with limited computing and battery power. We present SeeMon, a scalable and energy-efficient context monitoring framework for sensor-rich, resource-limited mobile environments. Running on a personal mobile device, SeeMon effectively performs context monitoring involving numerous sensors and applications. On top of SeeMon, multiple applications on the …

Awareness 2.0: Staying Aware Of Projects, Developers And Tasks Using Dashboards And Feeds, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development teams need to maintain awareness of various different aspects ranging from overall project status and process bottlenecks to current tasks and incoming artifacts. Currently, there is a lack of theoretical foundations to guide tool selection and tool design to best support awareness tasks. In this paper, we explore how the combination of highly configurable project, team and contributor dashboards along with individual event feeds is used to accomplish extensive awareness. Our results stem from an empirical study of several large development teams, with a detailed study of a team of 150 developers and additional data from another four …

The Role Of Emergent Knowledge Structures In Collaborative Software Development, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many collaboration features in software development tools draw on lightweight technologies such as tagging and wikis. We propose to study the role of emergent knowledge structures created through these features. Using a mixed-methods approach, we investigate which processes emergent knowledge structures support and how tool support can leverage them.

A Comparative Exploration Of Freebsd Bug Lifetimes, Gargi Bougie, Christoph Treude, Daniel M. Germán, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we explore the viability of mining the basic data provided in bug repositories to predict bug lifetimes. We follow the method of Lucas D. Panjer as described in his paper, Predicting Eclipse Bug Lifetimes. However, in place of Eclipse data, the FreeBSD bug repository is used. We compare the predictive accuracy of five different classification algorithms applied to the two data sets. In addition, we propose future work on whether there is a more informative way of classifying bugs than is considered by current bug tracking systems.

Testing And Maintenance In The Video Game Industry Today, Anthony A. Jarman

Senior Honors Theses

Testing and maintenance are important when designing any type of software, especially video games. Since the gaming industry began, testing and maintenance techniques have evolved and changed. In order to understand how testing and maintenance techniques are practiced in the gaming industry, several key elements must be examined. First, specific testing and maintenance techniques that are most useful for video games must be analyzed to understand their effectiveness. Second, the processes used for testing and maintaining video games at the beginning of the industry must be reviewed in order to see how far testing and maintenance techniques have progressed. Third, …

Contributors’ Preference In Open Source Software Usability: An Empirical Study, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The fact that the number of users of open source software (OSS) is practically un-limited and that ultimately the software quality is determined by end user’s experience, makes the usability an even more critical quality attribute than it is for proprietary software. With the sharp increase in use of open source projects by both individuals and organizations, the level of usability and related issues must be addressed more seriously. The research model of this empirical investigation studies and establishes the relationship between the key usability factors from contributors’ perspective and OSS usability. A data set of 78 OSS contributors that …

Pretty Lights, Nicholas (Nick) Delmas, Matthew (Matt) Maniaci

Computer Engineering

Digital media players often include a visualization component that allows a user to watch a visualization synchronized to their music or videos. This project uses the visualization plugin API of an existing media playback program (WinAmp) but it displays its visuals using physical LED lights. Instead of outputting visuals to the computer screen, data is sent over USB to a micro controller that runs the LED lights. This project aims to give users a more visceral visual experience than traditional visualizations on the computer screen.

A Social Network Based Study Of Software Team Dynamics, Subhajit Datta, Vikrant S. Kaulgoud, Vibhu Saujanya Sharma, Nishant Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Members of software project teams have specific roles and responsibilities which are formally defined during project inception or at the start of a life cycle activity. Often, the team structure undergoes spontaneous changes as delivery deadlines draw near and critical tasks have to be completed. Some members -- depending on their skill or seniority -- need to take on more responsibilities, while others end up being peripheral to the project's execution. We posit that this kind of ad hoc reorganization of a team's structure can be discerned from the project's bug tracker. In this paper, we extract a social network …

Mashup Environments In Software Engineering, Lars Grammel, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Too often, software engineering (SE) tool research is focused on creating small, stand-alone tools that address rarely understood developer needs. We believe that research should instead provide developers with flexible environments and interoperable tools, and then study how developers appropriate and tailor these tools in practice. Although there has been some prior work on this, we feel that flexible tool environments for SE have not yet been fully explored. In particular, we propose adopting the Web 2.0 idea of mashups and mashup environments to support SE practitioners in analytic activities involving multiple information sources.

A Verification System For Interval-Based Specification Languages, Chunqing Chen, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun, Andrew P. Martin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Interval-based specification languages have been used to formally model and rigorously reason about real-time computing systems. This usually involves logical reasoning and mathematical computation with respect to continuous or discrete time. When these systems are complex, analyzing their models by hand becomes error-prone and difficult. In this article, we develop a verification system to facilitate the formal analysis of interval-based specification languages with machine-assisted proof support. The verification system is developed using a generic theorem prover, Prototype Verification System (PVS). Our system elaborately encodes a highly expressive set-based notation, Timed Interval Calculus (TIC), and can rigorously carry out the verification …

Policy-Driven Distributed And Collaborative Demand Response In Multi-Domain Commercial Buildings, Archan Misra, Henning Schulzrinne

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Enabling a sophisticated Demand Response (DR) framework, whereby individual consumers adapt their electricity consumption in response to price variations, is a major objective of the emerging Smart Grid. We first point out why the current model, of EMS-based centralized control of a static repository of high load appliances, is inappropriate for supporting DR in future commercial buildings and campuses, where the consuming appliances are controlled by multiple users. To enable DR in such multi-domain environments, we envision a more collaborative and autonomous model, where a large set of heterogeneous smart electrical devices autonomously self-organize and negotiate their collective DR. Enabling …

Playing With Recognizers: A Call For An Extensible Editor, Richard C. Davis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The sketch recognition interface community has not produced a -killer‖ application, because access to sketch recognition technology has been too restricted. If recognition technologies were more freely available for experimentation, powerful new applications would evolve. This paper proposes a rough architecture for an extensible graphical editor that facilitates collaboration between recognition technology developers, user interface designers, and early adopters of sketch recognition interfaces. Only by serving all three communities will we reach the critical mass necessary for killer applications to emerge.

The Implications Of How We Tag Software Artifacts: Exploring Different Schemata And Metadata For Tags, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social tagging has been adopted by software developers in various contexts from source code to work items and build definitions. While the success of tagging is usually attributed to the simplicity of tags, the implementation details of tagging systems vary significantly in terms of metadata, schemata and semantics. In this position paper, we argue that academia and industry should be aware of these differences and that we should start to examine their implications.

Model-Based Methods For Linking Web Service Choreography And Orchestration, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong, Geguang Pu, Tian Huat Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, many Web service composition languages have been proposed. Web service choreography describes collaboration protocols of cooperating Web service participants from a global view. Web service orchestration describes collaboration of the Web services in predefined patterns based on local decision about their interactions with one another at the message/execution level. In this work, we present model-based methods to close the gap between the two views. Building on the strength of model checking techniques, Web service choreography and orchestration are verified against temporal properties or against each other (to show that they are consistent). Specialized optimization techniques are developed …

Bay Audio Repair Website & Data Management Application, Michael Shelley

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to build a website and software application to receive and manage audio equipment repair requests for a small startup company called Bay Audio Repair (BAR). Furthermore, it allowed me to gain experience in web development and software engineering practices, specifically requirements gathering, design and implementation. The website provides an online interface for BAR’s customers to request repairs and the application allows BAR employees to update the progress of a repair. Several technologies were used in the system’s construction: HTML, XML, PHP, and C#.

Creating An Immersive Game World With Evolutionary Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, Yundong Cai, Ah-Hwee Tan, Zhiqi Shen, Boyang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An increasing number of serious games have been developed to enhance the user experiences in education and training. In order to bridge the gap of game experiences in the virtual environment and in the real life, it is crucial to generate believable characters and contexts in real-time. However, the variables to be simulated for a large-scale serious game are numerous. These variables are involved in complex causal relationships and their values change over time. In view that world modeling has not been well addressed with conventional models, this paper uses a computational model Evolutionary Fuzzy Cognitive Map (EFCM) to model …

Medially: A Provenance-Aware Remote Health Monitoring Middleware, Atanu Roy Chowdhury, Ben Falchuk, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents MediAlly, a middleware for supporting energy-efficient, long-term remote health monitoring. Data is collected using physiological sensors and transported back to the middleware using a smart phone. The key to MediAlly's energy efficient operations lies in the adoption of an Activity Triggered Deep Monitoring (ATDM) paradigm, where data collection episodes are triggered only when the subject is determined to possess a specified context. MediAlly supports the on-demand collection of contextual provenance using a novel low-overhead provenance collection sub-system. The behaviour of this sub-system is configured using an application-defined context composition graph. The resulting provenance stream provides valuable insight …

Software Internationalization: A Framework Validated Against Industry Requirements For Computer Science And Software Engineering Programs, John Huân Vũ

Master's Theses

View John Huân Vũ's thesis presentation at http://youtu.be/y3bzNmkTr-c.

In 2001, the ACM and IEEE Computing Curriculum stated that it was necessary to address "the need to develop implementation models that are international in scope and could be practiced in universities around the world." With increasing connectivity through the internet, the move towards a global economy and growing use of technology places software internationalization as a more important concern for developers. However, there has been a "clear shortage in terms of numbers of trained persons applying for entry-level positions" in this area. Eric Brechner, Director of Microsoft Development Training, suggested …

Design Of A Software Framework Prototype For Scientific Model Interoperability, Eric Fritzinger, Sohei Okamoto

2010 Annual Nevada NSF EPSCoR Climate Change Conference

19 PowerPoint slides Session 2: Infrastructure Convener: Sergiu Dascalu, UNR Abstract: -What are models? -Mathematical models used to describe a system -E.g. Atmospheric, Oceanic, Ecological, etc… -Algorithmic calculations which take input and produce estimated results -Weather forecasting, global warming predictions, sea level estimations, etc… -Models are invaluable

Architecture And Usability Aspects Of Environmental Data Portals, Michael Mcmahon, Jr.

2010 Annual Nevada NSF EPSCoR Climate Change Conference

12 PowerPoint slides Session 2: Infrastructure Convener: Sergiu Dascalu, UNR Abstract: -Web Portal: A web site that acts as a starting point or gateway to Internet content, services, and information. Portals expose this information via a consistent set of visual elements and organizational constructs that improve the user experience and may relate, unify, or otherwise enhance the content. -Data Portal: A web site that acts as a starting point or gateway to Internet content, web/data services, and related information. Portals expose this information via a consistent set of visual elements and organizational constructs that improve the user experience and relate, …

Research Poster: Software Frameworks For Improved Productivity In Climate Change Research, Sohei Okamoto

2010 Annual Nevada NSF EPSCoR Climate Change Conference

Research poster

Making Sense Of Software Development And Personality Types, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed Dr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

No abstract provided.

M&S Body Of Knowledge: Progress Report And Look Ahead, Andreas Tolk

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cellular Automata Rules Generator For Microbial Communities, Melissa Marie Quintana

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project is to provide a visual representation as program output so that the rules and the radius of effect can be estimated. Currently there is a need for a method that extracts the cellular automata rules which simulate the growth patterns of microbial communities found within extreme environments. Contains source code.