Computer Sciences Commons^™

To Live And Die In Ca, Jane Frances Curnutt

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis investigates the nature of elementary cellular automata to better understand their relationship of the models they support to the biological organisms that create the mats and soil crusts found in extreme environments here on earth. Cellular automata have been used to study growth and patterns in forests, arid desert environments, predator-prey problems, and sea shells. It has also been used to study areas of diverse epidemiology and linguistics. Cellular automata have been used as the core of computer games as well. This investigation has led to develop a graphical grammar for simple cellular automata, using L-systems, a grammar …

Spreadsheets Grow Up: Three Spreadsheet Engineering Methodologies For Large Financial Planning Models, Thomas A. Grossman Jr., O Ozluk

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Many large financial planning models are written in a spreadsheet programming language (usually Microsoft Excel) and deployed as a spreadsheet application. Three groups, FAST Alliance, Operis Group, and BPM Analytics (under the name “Spreadsheet Standards Review Board”) have independently promulgated standardized processes for efficiently building such models. These spreadsheet engineering methodologies provide detailed guidance on design, construction process, and quality control. We summarize and compare these methodologies. They share many design practices, and standardized, mechanistic procedures to construct spreadsheets. We learned that a written book or standards document is by itself insufficient to understand a methodology. These methodologies represent a …

Software Test Automation, Phillip Laplante, Fevzi Belli, Jerry Gao, Greg Kapfhammer, Keith Miller, W. Wong, Dianxiang Xu

Education Sciences and Professional Programs Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Online Administration System For Small And Medium-Sized Running Events, Steinar Johansen

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project is to address inefficiency at small to medium-sized running events with regards to registration, race timing, and result service. As a race coordinator or participant, it is important that the race timing is correct and that the result service can be delivered as soon as possible after the event in finished. Contains source code.

Reordered Subsets Reconstruction Of Proton Computed Tomography, Wenzhe Xue

Theses Digitization Project

This project investigates the improvement of iterative reconstruction using reordered subsets. Block iterative projection and Ordered Subset reconstruction algorithms are developed to improve the performance of image reconstruction. Contains source code.

Improvement Of Open Source Software Usability: An Empirical Evaluation From Developers Perspective, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

User satisfaction has always been important for software success whether it is Open Source Software (OSS) or closed proprietary software. Even though we do not presume that OSS always has poor usability, as there are examples of good usable open source software, it would still be agreed that OSS usability has room for further improvement. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the impact of some key factors on OSS usability from developers’ points of view. This is one of the series of four studies that we are conducting regarding improvement of OSS usability from OSS developers, users, contributors, …

Building An Oss Quality Estimation Model With Catreg, Athos Origin China, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Open Source Software (OSS) has been a popular form in software development. In this paper, we use statistical approaches to deriveOSSquality estimation models. Our objective is to build estimation models for the number of defects with metrics at project levels. First CATREG (Categorical regression with optimal scaling) is used to obtain quantifications of the qualitative variables. Then the independent variables are validated using the stepwise linear regression. The process is repeated to acquire optimal quantifications and final regression formula. This modeling process is performed based on data from theOSScommunities and is proved to be practically valuable.

Improvement Of Oss Usability: An Empirical Evaluation From Developers Perspective, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Arif Raza, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

No abstract provided.

Eliciting User Requirements Using Appreciative Inquiry, Carol Kernitzki Gonzales

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Many software development projects fail because they do not meet the needs of users, are over-budget, and abandoned. To address this problem, the user requirements elicitation process was modified based on principles of Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry, commonly used in organizational development, aims to build organizations, processes, or systems based on success stories using a hopeful vision for an ideal future. Spanning five studies, Appreciative Inquiry was evaluated for its effectiveness with eliciting user requirements. In the first two cases, it was compared with traditional approaches with end-users and proxy-users. The third study was a quasi-experiment comparing the use of …

Workshop Report From 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

Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, tags and feeds have been adopted and adapted by software engineers. With Web2SE, we provide a venue for pertinent work by highlighting current state-of-the-art research, by identifying research areas, and by discussing implications of Web 2.0 on software engineering. This paper reports on the paper presentations and the discussions among participants at Web2SE 2010 as well as on future directions of the Web2SE community.

A Review Of The Professionalization Of The Software Industry: Has It Made Software Engineering A Real Profession?, Heng Ngee Mok

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Every industry strives to be called a "profession", and software engineering is no exception. This paper attempts to define "profession" from three different perspectives and provides a chronological narration of the professionalization efforts of major IT bodies such as the IEEE Computer Society, Association of Computing Machinery and British Computer Society to promote software engineering from "occupation" to "profession". The outcome of this professionalization process is then examined against the three vastly different definitions of "profession" to qualitatively gauge the success of the professionalization process.

Scalable Multi-Core Model Checking Fairness Enhanced Systems, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rapid development in hardware industry has brought the prevalence of multi-core systems with shared-memory, which enabled the speedup of various tasks by using parallel algorithms. The Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) model checking problem is one of the difficult problems to be parallelized or scaled up to multi-core. In this work, we propose an on-the-fly parallel model checking algorithm based on the Tarjan’s strongly connected components (SCC) detection algorithm. The approach can be applied to general LTL model checking or with different fairness assumptions. Further, it is orthogonal to state space reduction techniques like partial order reduction. We enhance our PAT …

Exercise Power Grid Display And Web Interface, Alexander (Alex) Chernetz

Computer Engineering

The 2008-2009 expansion of the Recreation Center at Cal Poly includes three new rooms with cardiovascular fitness equipment. As part of its ongoing commitment to sustainable development, the new machines connect to the main power grid and generate power during a workout. This document explains the process of quantifying and expressing the power generated using two interfaces: an autonomous display designed for a television with a text size and amount of detail adaptable to multiple television sizes and viewing distances, and an interactive, more detailed Web interface accessible with any Java-capable computer system or browser.

Object Oriented Program Correctness With Oosiml, José M. Garrido

Faculty Articles

Software reliability depends on program correctness and robustness and these are extremely important in developing high-quality software. Correctness is also essential when considering aspects of software security. However, experience applying these concepts, associated methods, and supporting software with Eiffel and Java have shown that students find some diffculty learning program correctness and in learning the software tools provided. We have developed an experimental language, OOSimL, that includes an assertion notation similar to that of Eiffel but which has much more flexibility, and that provides the same semantics as Java.

The first part of this paper provides an overview of concepts …

Coherent Phrase Model For Efficient Image Near-Duplicate Retrieval, Yiqun Hu, Xiangang Cheng, Liang-Tien Chia, Xing Xie, Deepu Rajan, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents an efficient and effective solution for retrieving image near-duplicate (IND) from image database. We introduce the coherent phrase model which incorporates the coherency of local regions to reduce the quantization error of the bag-of-words (BoW) model. In this model, local regions are characterized by visual phrase of multiple descriptors instead of visual word of single descriptor. We propose two types of visual phrase to encode the coherency in feature and spatial domain, respectively. The proposed model reduces the number of false matches by using this coherency and generates sparse representations of images. Compared to other method, the …

Pointcut Rejuvenation: Recovering Pointcut Expressions In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi Khatchadourian, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Guoqing Harry Xu

Publications and Research

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming; changes to the base-code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. We present an automated approach that limits fragility problems by providing mechanical assistance in pointcut maintenance. The approach is based on harnessing arbitrarily deep structural commonalities between program elements corresponding to join points selected by a pointcut. The extracted patterns are then applied to later versions to offer suggestions of new join points that may require inclusion. We demonstrate the usefulness of our technique by rejuvenating pointcuts in multiple versions of several …

Mining Hierarchical Scenario-Based Specifications, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Scalability over long traces, as well as comprehensibility and expressivity of results, are major challenges for dynamic analysis approaches to specification mining. In this work we present a novel use of object hierarchies over traces of inter-object method calls, as an abstraction/refinement mechanism that enables user-guided, top-down or bottom-up mining of layered scenario-based specifications, broken down by hierarchies embedded in the system under investigation. We do this using data mining methods that provide statistically significant sound and complete results modulo user-defined thresholds, in the context of Damm and Harel’s live sequence charts (LSC); a visual, modal, scenario-based, inter-object language. Thus, …

Static Validation Of C Preprocessor Macros, Andreas Saebjornsen, Lingxiao Jiang, Daniel Quinlan, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widely used C preprocessor (CPP) is generally considered a source of difficulty for understanding and maintaining C/C++ programs. The main reason for this difficulty is CPP’s purely lexical semantics, i.e., its treatment of both input and output as token streams. This can easily lead to errors that are difficult to diagnose, and it has been estimated that up to 20% of all macros are erroneous. To reduce such errors, more restrictive, replacement languages for CPP have been proposed to limit expanded macros to be valid C syntactic units. However, there is no practical tool that can effectively validate CPP …

Minimum Latency Broadcasting In Multiradio, Multichannel, Multirate Wireless Meshes, Junaid Qadir, Chuntung Chou, Archan Misra, Joo Ghee Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of minimizing the worst-case broadcast delay in multi-radio multi-channel multi-rate (MR2-MC) wireless mesh networks (WMN). The problem of 'efficient' broadcast in such networks is especially challenging due to the numerous interrelated decisions that have to be made. The multi-rate transmission capability of WMN nodes, interference between wireless transmissions, and the hardness of optimal channel assignment adds complexity to our considered problem. We present four heuristic algorithms to solve the minimum latency broadcast problem for such settings and show that the 'best' performing algorithms usually adapt themselves to the available radio interfaces and channels. We also study …

User Interfaces For Visual Analysis And Monitoring In Business Intelligence, Lars Grammel, Margaret-Anne Storey, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Business intelligence is concerned with understanding and leveraging the vast amounts of information stored in the databases of modern enterprises. Visualization techniques have been used to make sense of this data for a long time, first in the form of simple charts, and nowadays in the form of interactive visualizations. By leveraging the strengths of the human perceptual system and incorporating user interaction, they support the flexible analysis of data as well as data monitoring by users. The recent progress in the fields of information and data visualization as well as new hardware developments and trends in business intelligence have …

Mining Quantified Temporal Rules: Formalism, Algorithms, And Evaluation, David Lo, Ganesan Ramalingam, Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath, Kapil Vaswani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Libraries usually impose constraints on how clients should use them. Often these constraints are not well-documented. In this paper, we address the problem of recovering such constraints automatically, a problem referred to as specification mining. Given some client programs that use a given library, we identify constraints on the library usage that are (almost) satisfied by the given set of clients.The class of rules we target for mining combines simple binary temporal operators with state predicates (involving equality constraints) and quantification. This is a simple yet expressive subclass of temporal properties that allows us to capture many common API usage …

Contributing Factors To Pointcut Fragility, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Raffi Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem of Aspect-Oriented Programming with changes to the base-code causing join points to incorrectly fall in or out of scope. In order to combat this problem a tool was developed that provides mechanical assistance to pointcut maintenance. This tool relied on the deep structural commonalities between program elements to detect when pointcut fragility occurs. During the assessment of this tool a number of common practices were uncovered that were employed both in the aspect and base-code that contributed to or prevented pointcut fragility. This paper documents the practices uncovered and describes how they can affect …

Analysis Of Tradeoffs Between Buffer And Qos Requirements In Wireless Networks, Raphael Rom, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we consider the scheduling problem where data packets from K input-flows need to be delivered to K corresponding wireless receivers over a heterogeneous wireless channel. Our objective is to design a wireless scheduler that achieves good throughput and fairness performance while minimizing the buffer requirement at each wireless receiver. This is a challenging problem due to the unique characteristics of the wireless channel. We propose a novel idea of exploiting both the long-term and short-term error behavior of the wireless channel in the scheduler design. In addition to typical first-order Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as …

Verifying Stateful Timed Csp Using Implicit Clocks And Zone Abstraction, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong, Xian Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we study model checking of compositional real-time systems. A system is modeled using mutable data variables as well as a compositional timed process. Instead of explicitly manipulating clock variables, a number of compositional timed behavioral patterns are used to capture quantitative timing requirements, e.g. delay, timeout, deadline, timed interrupt, etc. A fully automated abstraction technique is developed to build an abstract finite state machine from the model. The idea is to dynamically create/delete clocks, and maintain/solve a constraint on the clocks. The abstract machine weakly bi-simulates the model and, therefore, LTL model checking or trace-refinement checking are …

Refactoring Pipe-Like Mashups For End-User Programmers, Kathryn T. Stolee, Sebastian Elbaum

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Mashups are becoming increasingly popular as end users are able to easily access, manipulate, and compose data from many web sources. We have observed, however, that mashups tend to suffer from deficiencies that propagate as mashups are reused. To address these deficiencies, we would like to bring some of the benefits of software engineering techniques to the end users creating these programs. In this work, we focus on identifying code smells indicative of the deficiencies we observed in web mashups programmed in the popular Yahoo! Pipes environment. Through an empirical study, we explore the impact of those smells on end-user …

Robust Lifetime Measurement In Large-Scale P2p Systems With Non-Stationary Arrivals, Xiaoming Wang, Zhongmei Yao, Yueping Zhang, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Characterizing user churn has become an important topic in studying P2P networks, both in theoretical analysis and system design. Recent work has shown that direct sampling of user lifetimes may lead to certain bias (arising from missed peers and round-off inconsistencies) and proposed a technique that estimates lifetimes based on sampled residuals. In this paper, however, we show that under non-stationary arrivals, which are often present in real systems, residual-based sampling does not correctly reconstruct user lifetimes and suffers a varying degree of bias, which in some cases makes estimation completely impossible. We overcome this problem using two contributions: a …

Admission Control For Differentiated Services In Future Generation Cdma Networks, Hwee-Pink Tan, Rudesindo Núñez-Queija, Adriana F. Gabor, Onno J. Boxma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Future Generation CDMA wireless systems, e.g., 3G, can simultaneously accommodate flow transmissions of users with widely heterogeneous applications. As radio resources are limited, we propose an admission control rule that protects users with stringent transmission bit-rate requirements (“streaming traffic”) while offering sufficient capacity over longer time intervals to delay-tolerant users (“elastic traffic”). While our strategy may not satisfy classical notions of fairness, we aim to reduce congestion and increase overall throughput of elastic users. Using time-scale decomposition, we develop approximations to evaluate the performance of our differentiated admission control strategy to support integrated services with transmission bit-rate requirements in a …

Using Bpm As An Interoperability Platform, Dennis Taylor, Hisham Assal, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Data mediation is an essential component in the Modeling and Simulation field (M&S). Managing multiple data sources and exchanging data among multiple systems requires sophisticated tools and a powerful process management system. Business Process Management (BPM) provides a framework for modeling and managing business activities, both manual and automated, in a consistent manner. Managing automated processes offers an opportunity to integrate external applications into the platform. By integrating automated data transformation tools into the business processes using graphical programming, we provide an approach to achieve operational interoperability among diverse applications without the need for any application to be aware of …

Software Engineering: Security Characterization For Evaluation Of Software Architectures Using Atam, Asad Raza, Haider Abbas, Louise Yngstrom, Ahmed Hemani

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Significant technological advancement in the current electronic era has influenced the work processes of private and government business entities. E-Government is one such area where almost every country is emphasizing and automating their work processes. Software architecture is the integral constituent of any software system with not only cumbersome modeling and development but require heedful evaluation. Considering this aspect we have highlighted in this paper, security evaluation of an ongoing e-society project ESAM using Architectural Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). ESAM is a Web based system intended to provide e-services to the Swedish community residents. ATAM is primarily used for architectural …

Software Engineering: An Open Source Service Oriented Mobile Business Intelligence Tool (Mbit), Bushra Sajjad, A. Mir, A. Khawar, F. Bashir, A. Tariq

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Corporate executives require relevant and intelligent business information in real-time to take strategic decisions. They require the freedom to access this information anywhere and anytime. There is a need to extend this functionality beyond the office and on the fingertips of the decision makers. Mobile Business Intelligence Tool (MBIT) aims to provide these features in a flexible and cost-efficient manner. This paper describes the detailed architecture of MBIT to overcome the limitations of existing mobile business intelligence tools. Further, a detailed implementation framework is presented to realize the design. This research highlights the benefits of using service oriented architecture to …