Computer Sciences Commons^™

The Future Of Information Systems Engineering, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Context-Based Detection Of Clone-Related Bugs, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su, Edwin Chiu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Studies show that programs contain much similar code, commonly known as clones. One of the main reasons for introducing clones is programmers' tendency to copy and paste code to quickly duplicate functionality. We commonly believe that clones can make programs difficult to maintain and introduce subtle bugs. Although much research has proposed techniques for detecting and removing clones to improve software maintainability, little has considered how to detect latent bugs introduced by clones. In this paper, we introduce a general notion of context-based inconsistencies among clones and develop an efficient algorithm to detect such inconsistencies for locating bugs. We have …

Difference Computation Of Large Models, Christoph Treude, Stefan Berlik, Sven Wenzel, Udo Kelter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern software engineering practices lead to large models which exist in many versions. Version management systems should offer a service to compare, and possibly merge, these models. The computation of a difference between large models is a big challenge; current algorithms are too inefficient here. We present a new technique for computing differences between models. In practical tests, this technique has been an order of magnitude faster than currently known algorithms. The main idea is to use a high-dimensional search tree for efficiently finding similar model elements. Individual elements are mapped onto a vector of numerical values using a collection …

Globally Distributed Software Development Project Performance: An Empirical Analysis, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software firms are increasingly distributing their software development effort across multiple locations. In this paper we present the results of a two year field study that investigated the effects of dispersion on the productivity and quality of distributed software development. We first develop a model of distributed software development. We then use the model, along with our empirically observed data, to understand the consequences of dispersion on software project performance. Our analysis reveals that, even in high process maturity environments, a) dispersion significantly reduces development productivity and has effects on conformance quality, and b) these negative effects of dispersion can …

Realizing Live Sequence Charts In System Verilog, Hai H. Wang, Shengchao Qin, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The design of an embedded control system starts with an investigation of properties and behaviors of the process evolving within its environment, and an analysis of the requirement for its safety performance. In early stages, system requirements are often specied as scenarios of behavior using sequence charts for different use cases. This specication must be precise, intuitive and expressive enough to capture different aspects of embedded control systems. As a rather rich and useful extension to the classical message sequence charts, Live Sequence Charts (LSC), which provide a rich collection of constructs for specifying both possible and mandatory behaviors, are …

Measuring Knowledge Sharing In Open Source Software Development Teams, Y. Long, Keng Siau, K. Howell

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The study provides an approach to measure the extent of knowledge sharing in Open Source Software (OSS) development in terms of two aspects: the quality of knowledge sharing which is indicated by the helpfulness of the messages, and the quantity of knowledge sharing which is indicated by the volume of the messages. The study developed a computer-aided content analysis program to assess the helpfulness of the messages based on a set of keywords and the length of the messages. The approach was applied to measure the extent of knowledge sharing of 150 OSS projects. The results further confirmed that the …

Century: Automated Aspects Of Patient Care, Marion Blount, John Davis, Maria Ebling, Ji Hyun Kim, Kyun Hyun Kim, Kang Yoon Lee, Archan Misra, Se Hun Park, Daby Sow, Young Ju Tak, Min Wang, Karen Witting

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Remote health monitoring affords the possibility of improving the quality of health care by enabling relatively inexpensive out-patient care. However, remote health monitoring raises new a problem: the potential for data explosion in health care systems. To address this problem, the remote health monitoring systems must be integrated with analysis tools that provide automated trend analysis and event detection in real time. In this paper, we propose an overview of Century, an extensible framework for analysis of large numbers of remote sensor-based medical data streams.

Pre-Conference Proceedings Of The Focus Symposium On Representation Of Context In Software Data → Information → Knowledge, Collaborative Agent Design Research Center

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

For the past 20 years commercial corporations and government agencies have suffered under the limitations of stove-piped computer software applications that function as discrete entities within a fragmented data-processing environment. In the United States of America (US) military services, lack of interoperability has been identified by numerous think tanks, advisory boards, and studies, as the primary information systems problem (e.g., Army Science Board 2000, Air Force SAB 2000 Command and Control Study, and NSB Network-Centric Naval Forces 2000). Yet, despite this level of attention, all attempts to achieve interoperability within the current data-centric information systems environment have proven to be …

Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (Kmes): Concepts And Implementation Principles, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The purpose of this paper is to present concepts and implementation principles related to the design and development of reusable software services that are capable of assisting users at the operational level. Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (KMES) are an implementation of the service-oriented architecture paradigm, with a focus on the exchange of data within the meaningful context of a particular application (i.e., knowledge) domain. This requires a KMES service to incorporate a high level representation of this knowledge domain in the form of an ontology that is shared among all collaborating services within the application environment and at the same …

Alternative Paths To Intelligent Systems, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This paper examines the three prevalent approaches to Artificial Intelligence (AI), namely symbolic reasoning systems, connectionist systems, and emergent systems based on the principles of the subsumption theory. Distinguished by their top-down and bottom-up mechanisms all three approaches have strengths and weaknesses. While the logical reasoning approach is precise and well supported by mathematical theories and procedures, it is constrained by a largely predefined representational model. Connectionist systems, on the other hand, are able to recognize patterns even if these patterns are only similar and not identical to the patterns that they have been trained to recognize, but they have …

Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (Kmes): Concepts And Implementation Principles, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The purpose of this paper is to present concepts and implementation principles related to the design and development of reusable software services that are capable of assisting users at the operational level. Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (KMES) are an implementation of the service-oriented architecture paradigm, with a focus on the exchange of data within the meaningful context of a particular application (i.e., knowledge) domain. This requires a KMES service to incorporate a high level representation of this knowledge domain in the form of an ontology that is shared among all collaborating services within the application environment and at the same …

Enhancing The Face Of Service-Oriented Capabilities, Kym J. Pohl, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

With today’s focus toward discoverable web services, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) are becoming increasingly prevalent. To support an effective interaction between services and their clientele, the sophistication of the interface, or face, such services present is of critical importance. Without a rich, expressive nature, such services struggle to satisfy the industry promises of reuse, composability, and reduced inter-component dependencies. Especially relevant for domain-oriented applications, services must present sufficient levels of expression to allow for an effective exchange of relevant context. Further, such communication should be offered in an asynchronous manner to promote both work flow efficiency and limited coupling.

This paper …

Entrepreneurial Opportunities And Market Analysis Of The Information Technology And Software Development Sector Of Pakistan, Toshio Fujita, Hassan Tajuddin

Business Review

This study investigates the Information Technology and the Software Development sector of Pakistan. It discusses the reasons for the lack of trust in Pakistani IT companies and different problems faced by an entrepreneur starting an IT company in Pakistan. The data was analyzed by qualitative content analysis. The findings are discussed with reference to previous research, and implications for entrepreneurial setups are noted.

Internet Enabled Remote Driving Of A Combat Hybrid Electric Power System For Duty Cycle Measurement, Jarrett Goodell, Marc Compere, Wilford Smith, Mark Brudnak, Mike Pozolo, Et Al.

Publications

This paper describes a human-in-the-loop motion-based simulator interfaced to hybrid-electric power system hardware, both of which were used to measure the duty cycle of a combat vehicle in a virtual simulation environment. The project discussed is a greatly expanded follow-on to the experiment published in [1,7]. This paper is written in the context of [1,7] and therefore highlights the enhancements. The most prominent of these enhancements is the integration (in real-time) of the Power & Energy System Integration Lab (P&E SIL) with a motion base simulator by means of a “long haul” connection over the Internet (a geographical distance of …

Simplifying Cyber Foraging For Mobile Devices, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Darren Gergle, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, James Herbsleb

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber foraging is the transient and opportunistic use of compute servers by mobile devices. The short market life of such devices makes rapid modification of applications for remote execution an important problem. We describe a solution that combines a "little language" for cyber foraging with an adaptive runtime system. We report results from a user study showing that even novice developers are able to successfully modify large, unfamiliar applications in just a few hours. We also show that the quality of novice-modified and expert-modified applications are comparable in most cases.

A Time-And-Value Centric Provenance Model And Architecture For Medical Event Streams, Marion Bllount, John Davis, Archan Misra, Daby Sow, Min Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Provenance becomes a critical requirement for healthcare IT infrastructures, especially when pervasive biomedical sensors act as a source of raw medical streams for large-scale, automated clinical decision support systems. Medical and legal requirements will make it obligatory for such systems to answer queries regarding the underlying data samples from which output alerts are derived, the IDs of the processing components used and the privileges of the individuals and software components accessing the medical data. Unfortunately, existing models of either annotation or process based provenance are designed for transaction-oriented systems and do not satisfy the unique requirements for systems processing high-volume, …

Maximizing Broadcast And Multicast Traffic Load Through Link-Rate Diversity In Wireless Mesh Networks, Chun Tung Chou, Bao Hua Liu, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies some of the fundamental challenges and opportunities associated with the network-layer broadcast and multicast in a multihop multirate wireless mesh network (WMN). In particular, we focus on exploiting the ability of nodes to perform link-layer broadcasts at different rates (with correspondingly different coverage areas). We first show how, in the broadcast wireless medium, the available capacity at a mesh node for a multicast transmission is not just a function of the aggregate pre-existing traffic load of other interfering nodes, but intricately coupled to the actual (sender, receiver) set and the link-layer rate of each individual transmission. We …

Deckard: Scalable And Accurate Tree-Based Detection Of Code Clones, Lingxiao Jiang, Ghassan Misherghi, Zhendong Su, Stephane Glondu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Detecting code clones has many software engineering applications. Existing approaches either do not scale to large code bases or are not robust against minor code modifications. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for identifying similar subtrees and apply it to tree representations of source code. Our algorithm is based on a novel characterization of subtrees with numerical vectors in the Euclidean Rn and an efficient algorithm to cluster these vectors w.r.t. the Euclidean distance metric. Subtrees with vectors in one cluster are considered similar. We have implemented our tree similarity algorithm as a clone detection tool called DECKARD …

Residual-Based Measurement Of Peer And Link Lifetimes In Gnutella Networks, Xiaoming Wang, Zhongmei Yao, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Existing methods of measuring lifetimes in P2P systems usually rely on the so-called create-based method (CBM), which divides a given observation window into two halves and samples users "created" in the first half every Delta time units until they die or the observation period ends. Despite its frequent use, this approach has no rigorous accuracy or overhead analysis in the literature. To shed more light on its performance, we flrst derive a model for CBM and show that small window size or large Delta may lead to highly inaccurate lifetime distributions. We then show that create-based sampling exhibits an inherent …

Cognitive Evaluation Of Information Modeling Methods, Keng Siau, Yuan Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the field of information system engineering, information modeling method is a technique to capture user requirements and to understand system complexity. The importance of information modeling has been recognized by practitioners and researchers, but little has been explored to analyze the available information modeling methods or to evaluate them in terms of their strengths, weaknesses, and effectiveness. This research analyzes six information-modeling methods: use case diagram, rich picture diagram, entity-relationship diagram, Trochim’s concept mapping, repertory grid, and causal mapping. These information-modeling methods are analyzed from a cognitive perspective in order to better understand their nature, the assumptions, and the …

Object-Relational Mapping As A Persistence Mechanism For Object-Oriented Applications, Jeffrey M. Barnes

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

Many object-oriented applications created today, especially Web applications, use relational databases for persistence. Often there is a straightforward correspondence between database tables on the one hand and application classes on the other. Application developers usually write a great deal of code to connect to and query the database, code which differs little from class to class and is often tedious to write. Moreover, the parallel class and table structures constitute a duplication of information, which requires duplication of work and increases the likelihood of errors. Ideally, we could automate this duplication, rendering it invisible to developers. This is the idea …

The Student Scholarship And Creative Achievement Day Application Software, Charles Alan Hofer

Honors Capstones

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

An Exploratory Study Of Iso 9001:2000 Quality Management Systems Using The Iso/Iec 15504 Architecture, Paul Richard Shimp

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to provide an exploratory study on the implementation and issues regarding Quality Management Systems as defined by ISO 9001 :2000 using the architecture of ISO/IEC 15504. The recently published ISO/IEC 15504 series of standards provides a framework to assess processes and determine levels of capability. With the use of this framework, the study will focus on the assessment and identification of problem areas requiring focus for continual improvement within an ISO 9001 :2000 quality management system.

The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 1 provides a background discussion of ISO 9001 :2000. …

A Structured Systemic Framework For Software Development, Kevin Macgregor Adams

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to develop and apply a systems-based framework for the analysis of software development project performance. Software development project performance is measured at the project level; that is, cost, schedule, and product quality that affect the overall project. To date, most performance improvement efforts have been focused on individual processes within the overall software development system. Making improvements to sub-elements, processes, or sub-systems without regard for the overall project is a classic misbehavior entered into by practitioners who fail to use a holistic, systemic approach. Attempts to improve sub-system behavior are at odds with The …

Automated Refactoring Of Legacy Java Software To Enumerated Types, Raffi Khatchadourian, Jason Sawin, Atanas Rountev

Publications and Research

Modern Java languages introduce several new features that offer significant improvements over older Java technology. In this article we consider the new enum construct, which provides language support for enumerated types. Prior to recent Java languages, programmers needed to employ various patterns (e.g., the weak enum pattern) to compensate for the absence of enumerated types in Java. Unfortunately, these compensation patterns lack several highly-desirable properties of the enum construct, most notably, type safety. We present a novel fully-automated approach for transforming legacy Java code to use the new enumeration construct. This semantics-preserving approach increases type safety, produces code that is …

Locating Encrypted Data Hidden Among Non-Encrypted Data Using Statistical Tools, Walter J. Hayden

Theses and Dissertations

This research tests the security of software protection techniques that use encryption to protect code segments containing critical algorithm implementation to prevent reverse engineering. Using the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Tests for Randomness encrypted regions hidden among non-encrypted bits of a binary executable file are located. The location of ciphertext from four encryption algorithms (AES, DES, RSA, and TEA) and three block sizes (10, 100, and 500 32-bit words) were tested during the development of the techniques described in this research. The test files were generated from the Win32 binary executable file of Adobe's Acrobat Reader version …

Software Protection Against Reverse Engineering Tools, Joshua A. Benson

Theses and Dissertations

Advances in technology have led to the use of simple to use automated debugging tools which can be extremely helpful in troubleshooting problems in code. However, a malicious attacker can use these same tools. Securely designing software and keeping it secure has become extremely difficult. These same easy to use debuggers can be used to bypass security built into software. While the detection of an altered executable file is possible, it is not as easy to prevent alteration in the first place. One way to prevent alteration is through code obfuscation or hiding the true function of software so as …

Experiences With Tracking The Effects Of Changing Requirements On Morphbank: A Web-Based Bioinformatics Application, Subhajit Datta, Robert Van Engelen, David Gaitros, Neelima Jammigumpula

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a case study of applying the metrics Mutation Index, Component Set, Dependency Index on Morphbank- a web based bioinformatics application - to track the effects of changing requirements on a software system and suggest design modifications to mitigate such impact. Morphbank is "an open web repository of biological images documenting specimen-based research in comparative anatomy, morphological phylogenetics, taxonomy and related fields focused on increasing our knowledge about biodiversity". This paper discusses the context of the case study, analyzes the results, highlights observations and learning, and mentions directions of future work.

Soldier/Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulation-Based Combat Vehicle Duty Cycle Measurement: Duty Cycle Experiment 2, Mark Brudnak, Mike Pozolo, Victor Paul, Syed Mohammad, Marc Compere, Et Al.

Publications

This paper describes a human-in-the-loop motion-based simulator interfaced to hybrid-electric power system hardware both of which were used to measure the duty cycle of a combat vehicle in a virtual simulation environment. The project discussed is a greatly expanded follow-on to the experiment published in [1]. This paper is written in the context of [1] and therefore highlights the enhancements. The most prominent of these enhancements is the integration (in real-time) of the Power & Electric System Integration Lab (P&E SIL) with a motion base simulator by means of a “long haul” connection over the Internet (a geographical distance of …

Acquiring Three-Dimensional Data From Small Mammalian Teeth : Laser Scanning Eocene Marsupials, Nicholas E. Smith

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Three-dimensional laser scanning is an effective method of digitization in paleontology, but has traditionally been restricted to larger specimens. The goal of this study was to develop a laser scanning technique applicable to small mammalian (< 5 mm) dentition. Modeling protocols were developed, and a morphometric error study showed the system highly accurate (percent error = 1D- 0.4%, 2D- 0.05%, 3D- 1.74%). Automation and standardization were accomplished by implementation of a multiscan platform and autosurfacing macro reducing modeling time by 60%. To highlight one morphometric application, 3D models (n=61) of three sympatric Eocene marsupials were digitized, and traditionally qualitative diagnostic characters were quantified and assessed. All but two of the 19 characters examined proved diagnostic (p < 0.05), and exploratory canonical discriminant analysis confirmed three distinct species. Incorporating type specimens revealed a familial overlap, therefore, this novel modeling technique can be employed in a full revision of early Eocene marsupials.