Computer Sciences Commons^™

Concernlines: A Timeline View Of Co-Occurring Concerns, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding the evolution of a software system requires understanding how information about the release history, non-functional requirements and project milestones relates to functional requirements on the software components. This short paper describes a new tool, called CONCERNLINES, that supports this cognitive process by visualizing co-occurring concerns over time.

Automatic Mining Of Functionally Equivalent Code Fragments Via Random Testing, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Similar code may exist in large software projects due to some common software engineering practices, such as copying and pasting code and n-version programming. Although previous work has studied syntactic equivalence and small-scale, coarse-grained program-level and function-level semantic equivalence, it is not known whether significant fine-grained, code-level semantic duplications exist. Detecting such semantic equivalence is also desirable because it can enable many applications such as code understanding, maintenance, and optimization. In this paper, we introduce the first algorithm to automatically mine functionally equivalent code fragments of arbitrary size - down to an executable statement. Our notion of functional equivalence is …

A Video Manager, Nicholas Omann

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduate requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Improving Automated Requirements Trace Retrieval Through Term-Based Enhancement Strategies, Xuchang Zou

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Requirements traceability is concerned with managing and documenting the life of requirements. Its primary goal is to support critical software development activities such as evaluating whether a generated software system satisfies the specified set of requirements, checking that all requirements have been implemented by the end of the lifecycle, and analyzing the impact of proposed changes on the system. Various approaches for improving requirements traceability practices have been proposed in recent years. Automated traceability methods that utilize information retrieval (IR) techniques have been recognized to effectively support the trace generation and retrieval process. IR based approaches not only significantly reduce …

Efficient Mining Of Closed Repetitive Gapped Subsequences From A Sequence Database, Bolin Ding, David Lo, Jiawei Han, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is a huge wealth of sequence data available, for example, customer purchase histories, program execution traces, DNA, and protein sequences. Analyzing this wealth of data to mine important knowledge is certainly a worthwhile goal. In this paper, as a step forward to analyzing patterns in sequences, we introduce the problem of mining closed repetitive gapped subsequences and propose efficient solutions. Given a database of sequences where each sequence is an ordered list of events, the pattern we would like to mine is called repetitive gapped subsequence, which is a subsequence (possibly with gaps between two successive events within it) …

The Digital Wallet: Opportunities And Prototypes, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Example digital wallet applications support secure P2P mobile cash transactions and alleviate point-of-sale confusion for consumers using multiple payment, discount, and loyalty cards.

A Framework For Using Modeling And Simulation-Based Methods In Support Of Project Management In A U.S. Department Of Defense Enterprise Architecture Framework Environment, Jose Leprout Bricio-Neto

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The Enterprise Architecture, Analysis and Project Management (EA2PM) framework developed and proposed in this study enables better evaluation of the ability for enterprise architects, project managers and analysts to share system data using their own domain-specific software tools with a focus on the capability to automatically generate a discrete-event simulation model. EA2PM framework is based on applying a Knowledge Management (KM) construct to establish data and information boundaries, and developing a methodology that allows for high levels of traceability from system architecture's environmental factors through assessment of data and information mediation across domains within a KM system.

An application of …

Pipelined Apache Http Server, Kevin Le

Master's Theses

Web servers often become overloaded with irregular surges in web traffic. Several techniques have been explored to cope with these overloads such as distributing load throughout different servers. This thesis presents Pipelined Apache HTTP Server, a modified version of the Apache Software Foundation’s HTTP Server that utilizes a pipelined execution of Apache’s request cycle. We discuss Apache’s original architecture, the modifications necessary for implementation of pipelined execution, and analyze its run time. Ultimately, we hoped to increase throughput of Apache but fall short because of unbalanced request phases and pipelining overhead.

A Social Relation Aware Routing Protocol For Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Jisun An, Yangwoo Ko, Dongman Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a social relation aware routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks, which is designed for content sharing mobile social applications. Since a content can be shared by a group of users who have similar interests, the similarity of users' interests is a good metric to predict who will consume which contents. Shared interests can be exploited in routing and replication of content request and reply to achieve enhanced efficacy in content sharing. Since routing determines which content will be forwarded by whom, a route selected based on similarity of interest increases the utilization of contents …

Server-Assisted Context-Dependent Pervasive Wellness Monitoring, Archan Misra, Ben Falchuk, Shoshana Loeb

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent research on remote health monitoring solutions has focused largely on developing context-dependent, streamprocessing capabilities on a personal mobile hub (typically, a cellphone) for energy-efficient transmission of data collected from a set of body-worn medical sensors. In this paper, we argue that commercial deployment of such pervasive wellness monitoring will require the extension of such ‘context dependency’ to the process of data collection (from the sensors to the mobile device) as well. In particular, the utilization of an individuals non-medical activity context, by the cellphone, in coordination with a backend server, is posited to be the key to supporting important …

Programmable Presence Virtualization For Next-Generation Context-Based Applications, Arup Acharya, Nilanjan Banerjee, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Koustuv Dasgupta, Archan Misra, Shachi Sharma, Xiping Wang, Charles P. Wright

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Presence, broadly defined as an event publish-notification infrastructure for converged applications, has emerged as a key mechanism for collecting and disseminating context attributes for next-generation services in both enterprise and provider domains. Current presence-based solutions and products lack in the ability to a) support flexible user-defined queries over dynamic presence data and b) derive composite presence from multiple provider domains. Accordingly, current uses of context are limited to individual domains/organizations and do not provide a programmable mechanism for rapid creation of context-aware services. This paper describes a presence virtualization architecture, where a virtualized presence server receives customizable queries from multiple …

Simulation Scoring Systems, Raynald Bedard

Publications

Simulation scoring systems including software, methods of use, and related methods that provide for simulating and scoring of aircraft flight and other missions, particularly where such simulating is purely electronic and particularly where such scoring is objective and particularly where such scoring has a plurality of gradations, as to distinguish a plurality of skill levels.

Pat: Towards Flexible Verification Under Fairness, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong, Jun Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent development on distributed systems has shown that a variety of fairness constraints (some of which are only recently defined) play vital roles in designing self-stabilizing population protocols. Current practice of system analysis is, however, deficient under fairness. In this work, we present PAT, a toolkit for flexible and efficient system analysis under fairness. A unified algorithm is proposed to model check systems with a variety of fairness effectively in two different settings. Empirical evaluation shows that PAT complements existing model checkers in terms of fairness. We report that previously unknown bugs have been revealed using PAT against systems functioning …

Icodes Global Services (Gs): A Single Load-Planning Capability, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Over the past decade the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center (CADRC) at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo) and its commercial arm CDM Technologies, Inc. (CDM) have developed a suite of information-centric software tools in support of military deployment and distribution processes. All of these tools feature agents that are capable of reasoning about data in the context provided by an internal information model. Together they represent an evolving suite of adaptive Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (KMES) that can be readily configured into a net-centric, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based planning and decision-support toolset for a particular application …

Bmq-Processor: A High-Performance Border Crossing Event Detection Framework For Large-Scale Monitoring Applications, Jinwon Lee, Seungwoo Kang, Youngki Lee, Sangjeong Lee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present BMQ-Processor, a high-performance Border-Crossing Event (BCE) detection framework for large-scale monitoring applications. We first characterize a new query semantics, namely, Border Monitoring Query (BMQ), which is useful for BCE detection in many monitoring applications. It monitors the values of data streams and reports them only when data streams cross the borders of its range. We then propose BMQ-Processor to efficiently handle a large number of BMQs over a high volume of data streams. BMQ-Processor efficiently processes BMQs in a shared and incremental manner. It develops and operates over a novel stateful query index, achieving a …

The Lookup Technique To Replace Nested-If Formulas In Spreadsheet Programming, Thomas A. Grossman Jr., O Ozluk, J Gustavson

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Spreadsheet programmers often implement contingent logic using a nested-IF formula even though this technique is difficult to test and audit and is believed to be risky. We interpret the programming of contingent logic in spreadsheets in the context of traditional computer programming. We investigate the “lookup technique” as an alternative to nested-IF formulas, describe its benefits for testing and auditing, and define its limitations. The lookup technique employs four distinct principles: 1) make logical tests visible; 2) make outcomes visible; 3) make logical structure visible; and 4) replace a multi-function nested-IF formula with a single-function lookup formula. It can be …

An Extendable General Platform For Cluster Analysis And Validation, Brandon Troy Edwards

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis implements a general platform which integrates several commonly used cluster analysis algorithms with ease of use and extendability, along with various validation techniques to analyze the results of algorithms.

Improving Effort Estimation By Voting Software Estimation Models, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Venus Marza

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Estimating software development effort is an important task in the management of large software projects. The task is challenging, and it has been receiving the attentions of researchers ever since software was developed for commercial purpose. A number of estimation models exist for effort prediction. However, there is a need for novel models to obtain more accurate estimations. The primary purpose of this study is to propose a precise method of estimation by selecting the most popular models in order to improve accuracy. Consequently, the final results are very precise and reliable when they are applied to a real dataset …

User Interface Design, Moritz Stefaner, Sebastien Ferre, Saverio Perugini, Jonathan Koren, Yi Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

As detailed in Chap. 1, system implementations for dynamic taxonomies and faceted search allow a wide range of query possibilities on the data. Only when these are made accessible by appropriate user interfaces, the resulting applications can support a variety of search, browsing and analysis tasks. User interface design in this area is confronted with specific challenges. This chapter presents an overview of both established and novel principles and solutions.

Specifying Reusable Aspects, Neelam Soundarajan, Raffi Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Aspect-Oriented Programming enables developers to manage, in a more modular fashion, implementations of crosscutting concerns that might be scattered or tangled if aspect-oriented techniques were not utilized. Our interest in this paper is in considering techniques for specifying precise properties of aspects. In particular, we are interested in specifying reusable aspects; i.e., aspects that correspond to crosscutting concerns that occur in many systems. These abstract aspects can be reused in various systems where a particular concern is applicable. Although there has been work on issues related to reasoning about aspects and the behaviors of aspect-oriented systems, specifying reusable abstract aspects …

A Two-Population Insurgency In Colombia: Quasi-Predator-Prey Models - A Trend Towards Simplicity, John A. Adam, John A. Sokolowski, Catherine M. Banks

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

A sequence of analytic mathematical models has been developed in the context of the "low-level insurgency" in Colombia, from 1993 to the present. They are based on generalizations of the two-population "predator-prey" model commonly applied in ecological modeling, and interestingly, the less sophisticated models yield more insight into the problem than the more complicated ones, but the formalism is available to adapt the model "upwards" in the event that more data becomes available, or as the situation increases in complexity. Specifically, so-called "forcing terms" were included initially in the coupled differential equations to represent the effects of government policies towards …

Software Reverse Engineering Education, Teodoro Cipresso

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

A Covert Encryption Method For Applications In Electronic Data Interchange, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitry Dubovitskiy

Articles

A principal weakness of all encryption systems is that the output data can be ‘seen’ to be encrypted. In other words, encrypted data provides a ‘flag’ on the potential value of the information that has been encrypted. In this paper, we provide a new approach to ‘hiding’ encrypted data in a digital image.

In conventional (symmetric) encryption, the plaintext is usually represented as a binary stream and encrypted using an XOR type operation with a binary cipher. The algorithm used is ideally designed to: (i) generate a maximum entropy cipher so that there is no bias with regard to any …

Distributed Utility-Based Rate Adaptation Protocols For Prioritized, Quasi-Elastic Flows, Sharanya Eswaran, Matthew P. Johnson, Archan Misra, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper considers rate adaptation for streaming multimedia data in a wireless sensor network (WSN) consisting of multiple missions, where each mission subscribes to data streams from multiple sensors, and each sensor's data is utilized by multiple heterogenous missions. We specifically consider the application of the distributed network utility maximization (NUM) framework to a previously unconsidered scenario where the different missions have different priorities, as well as minimum utility demands. When all the utility demands are feasible, we first show that the addition of a penalty for failing to reach the minimum utility demand to the base NUM protocol leads …

Control-Theoretic, Mission-Driven, Optimization Techniques For Wireless Sensor Networks, Archan Misra, Sharanya Eswaran, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Network Utility Maximization (NUM) techniques, which cast resource sharing problems as one of distributed utility maximization, have been investigated for a variety of optimization problems in wireless and wired networks. Our recent work has extended the NUM framework to consider the case of resource sharing by multiple competing missions in a military-centric wireless sensor network (WSN) environment. Our enhanced NUM-based protocols provide rapid and dynamic mission-based adaptation of tactical wireless networks to support the transport of sensor data streams with very small control overhead. In particular, we focus specifically on mechanisms that capture the joint nature of mission utilities and …

Sub-Circuit Selection And Replacement Algorithms Modeled As Term Rewriting Systems, Eric D. Simonaire

Theses and Dissertations

Intent protection is a model of software obfuscation which, among other criteria, prevents an adversary from understanding the program’s function for use with contextual information. Relating this framework for obfuscation to malware detection, if a malware detector can perfectly normalize a program P and any obfuscation (variant) of the program O(P), the program is not intent protected. The problem of intent protection on programs can also be modeled as intent protection on combinational logic circuits. If a malware detector can perfectly normalize a circuit C and any obfuscation (variant) O(C) of the circuit, the circuit is not intent protected. In …

Secureqemu: Emulation-Based Software Protection Providing Encrypted Code Execution And Page Granularity Code Signing, William B. Kimball

Theses and Dissertations

This research presents an original emulation-based software protection scheme providing protection from reverse code engineering (RCE) and software exploitation using encrypted code execution and page-granularity code signing, respectively. Protection mechanisms execute in trusted emulators while remaining out-of-band of untrusted systems being emulated. This protection scheme is called SecureQEMU and is based on a modified version of Quick Emulator (QEMU) [5]. RCE is a process that uncovers the internal workings of a program. It is used during vulnerability and intellectual property (IP) discovery. To protect from RCE program code may have anti-disassembly, anti-debugging, and obfuscation techniques incorporated. These techniques slow the …

Steganography In Ipv6, Barret Miller

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Steganography is the process of hiding a secret message within another message such that it is difficult to detect the presence of the secret message. In other words, the existence of the secret message is hidden. A covert channel refers to the actual medium that is used to communicate the information such as a message, image, or file. This honors thesis uses steganography within the source address fields of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) packets to create a covert channel through which clandestine messages are passed from one party to another. A fully functional computer program was designed and written …

Calibrating Function Point Backfiring Conversion Ratios Using Neuro-Fuzzy Technique, Justin Wong, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software estimation is an important aspect in software development projects because poor estimations can lead to late delivery, cost overruns, and possibly project failure. Backfiring is a popular technique for sizing and predicting the volume of source code by converting the function point metric into source lines of code mathematically using conversion ratios. While this technique is popular and useful, there is a high margin of error in backfiring. This research introduces a new method to reduce that margin of error. Neural networks and fuzzy logic in software prediction models have been demonstrated in the past to have improved performance …

Privacy Engine For Context-Aware Enterprise Application Services, Marion Blount, John Davis, Maria Ebling, William Jerome, Barry Leiba, Xuan Liu, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Satisfying the varied privacy preferences of individuals, while exposing context data to authorized applications and individuals, remains a major challenge for context-aware computing. This paper describes our experiences in building a middleware component, the context privacy engine (CPE), that enforces a role-based, context-dependent privacy model for enterprise domains. While fundamentally an ACL-based access control scheme, CPE extends the traditional ACL mechanism with usage control and context constraints. This paper focuses on discussing issues related to managing and evaluating context-dependent privacy policies. Extensive experimental studies with a production-grade implementation and real-life context sources demonstrate that the CPE can support a large …