Computer Sciences Commons^™

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 …

Innovative Entrepreneurs Workbook, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The workbook provides a step by step approach to identifying innovation opportunities and the key aspects of Innovation development

Point-Based Backup For Decentralized Pompds: Complexity And New Algorithms, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized POMDPs provide an expressive framework for sequential multi-agent decision making. Despite their high complexity, there has been significant progress in scaling up existing algorithms, largely due to the use of point-based methods. Performing point-based backup is a fundamental operation in state-of-the-art algorithms. We show that even a single backup step in the multi-agent setting is NP-Complete. Despite this negative worst-case result, we present an efficient and scalable optimal algorithm as well as a principled approximation scheme. The optimal algorithm exploits recent advances in the weighted CSP literature to overcome the complexity of the backup operation. The polytime approximation scheme …

Time-Bound Hierarchical Key Assignment: An Overview, Wen Tao Zhu, Robert H. Deng, Jianying Zhou, Feng Bao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The access privileges in distributed systems can be effectively organized as a partial-order hierarchy that consists of distinct security classes, and the access rights are often designated with certain temporal restrictions. The time-bound hierarchical key assignment problem is to assign distinct cryptographic keys to distinct security classes according to their privileges so that users from a higher class can use their class key to derive the keys of lower classes, and these keys are time-variant with respect to sequentially allocated temporal units called time slots. In this paper, we present the involved principle, survey the state of the art, and …

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 …

Naked Object File System (Nofs): A Framework To Expose An Object-Oriented Domain Model As A File System, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We present Naked Objects File System (NOFS), a novel framework that allows a developer to expose a domain model as a file system by leveraging the Naked Objects design principle. NOFS allows a developer to construct a file system without having to understand or implement all details related to normal file systems development. In this paper we explore file systems frameworks and object-oriented frameworks in a historical context and present an example domain model using the framework. This paper is based on a fully-functional implementation that is distributed as free/open source software, including virtual machine images to demonstrate and study …

Online Layered File System (Olfs): A Layered And Versioned Filesystem And Performance Analysis, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We present a novel form of intra-volume directory layering with hierarchical, inheritance-like namespace unification. While each layer of an OLFS volume constitutes a subvolume that can be mounted separately in a fan-in configuration, the entire hierarchy is always accessible (online) and fully navigable through any mounted layer. OLFS uses a relational database to store its layering metadata and either a relational database or any (virtual) host file system as its backing store, along with metadata and block caching for improved performance. Because OLFS runs as a virtual file system in user-space, its capabilities are available to all existing software without …

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 …

Exclusive Lasso For Multi-Task Feature Selection, Yang Zhou, Rong Jin, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a novel group regularization which we call exclusive lasso. Unlike the group lasso regularizer that assumes co-varying variables in groups, the proposed exclusive lasso regularizer models the scenario when variables in the same group compete with each other. Analysis is presented to illustrate the properties of the proposed regularizer. We present a framework of kernel-based multi-task feature selection algorithm based on the proposed exclusive lasso regularizer. An efficient algorithm is derived to solve the related optimization problem. Experiments with document categorization show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for multi-task feature selection.

Two-View Transductive Support Vector Machines, Guangxia Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Kuiyu Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Obtaining high-quality and up-to-date labeled data can be difficult in many real-world machine learning applications, especially for Internet classification tasks like review spam detection, which changes at a very brisk pace. For some problems, there may exist multiple perspectives, so called views, of each data sample. For example, in text classification, the typical view contains a large number of raw content features such as term frequency, while a second view may contain a small but highly-informative number of domain specific features. We thus propose a novel two-view transductive SVM that takes advantage of both the abundant amount of unlabeled data …

Exploiting Query Logs For Cross-Lingual Query Suggestions., Wei Gao, Cheng Niu, Jian-Yun Nie, Ming Zhou, Kam-Fai Wong, Hsiao-Wuen Hon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Query suggestion aims to suggest relevant queries for a given query, which helps users better specify their information needs. Previous work on query suggestion has been limited to the same language. In this article, we extend it to cross-lingual query suggestion (CLQS): for a query in one language, we suggest similar or relevant queries in other languages. This is very important to the scenarios of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) and other related cross-lingual applications. Instead of relying on existing query translation technologies for CLQS, we present an effective means to map the input query of one language to queries of …

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 …

Towards Finding Robust Execution Strategies For Rcpsp/Max With Durational Uncertainty, Na Fu, Pradeep Varakantham, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problems with minimum and maximum time lags (RCPSP/max) have been studied extensively in the literature. However, the more realistic RCPSP/max problems — ones where durations of activities are not known with certainty – have received scant interest and hence are the main focus of the paper. Towards addressing the significant computational complexity involved in tackling RCPSP/max with durational uncertainty, we employ a local search mechanism to generate robust schedules. In this regard, we make two key contributions: (a) Introducing and studying the key properties of a new decision rule to specify start times of activities with …

Learning User Profiles For Personalized Information Dissemination, Ah-Hwee Tan, Christine Teo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Personalized information systems represent the recent effort of delivering information to users more effectively in the modern electronic age. This paper illustrates how a supervised Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) system, known as fuzzy ARAM, can be used to learn user profiles for personalized information dissemination. ARAM learning is on-line, fast, and incremental. Acquisition of new knowledge does not require re-training on previously learned cases. ARAM integrates both user-defined and system-learned knowledge in a single framework. Therefore inconsistency between the two knowledge sources will not arise. ARAM has been used to develop a personalized news system known as PIN. Preliminary experiments …

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.

Understanding The Values Of Mobile Technology In Education: A Value-Focused Thinking Approach, Hong Sheng, Keng Siau, Fiona Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile technology has mobilized the human interaction in all dimensions by supporting mobile collaboration. As collaboration is key to learning in today's educational environment, mobile technology has tremendous potential in supporting and improving education and its delivery. Given that mobile technology for education is a new phenomenon that is gaining popularity, the values of using mobile technology to support education need to be further researched and better understood. In this research, we used the Value-Focused Thinking approach to interview students and instructors to identify the values of education that are enabled by mobile technology. These values are represented in the …

Open Innovation In Platform Competition, Mei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We examine the competition between a proprietary platform and an open platform,where each platform holds a two-sided market consisted of app developers and users.The open platform cultivates an innovative environment by inviting public efforts todevelop the platform itself and permitting distribution of apps outside of its own appmarket; the proprietary platform restricts apps sales solely within its app market. Weuse a game theoretic model to capture this competitive phenomenon and analyze theimpact of growth of the open source community on the platform competition. We foundthat growth of the open community mitigates the platform rivalry, and balances the developernetwork sizes on …

Efficient Unidirectional Proxy Re-Encryption, Sherman Chow, Weng Jian, Yanjiang Yang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proxy re-encryption (PRE) allows a semi-trusted proxy to convert a ciphertext originally intended for Alice into one encrypting the same plaintext for Bob. The proxy only needs a re-encryption key given by Alice, and cannot learn anything about the plaintext encrypted. This adds flexibility in various applications, such as confidential email, digital right management and distributed storage. In this paper, we study unidirectional PRE, which the re-encryption key only enables delegation in one direction but not the opposite. In PKC 2009, Shao and Cao proposed a unidirectional PRE assuming the random oracle. However, we show that it is vulnerable to …

Global Project Management: Pedagogy For Distributed Teams, Benjamin Kok Siew Gan, Randy Weinberg, Selma Limam Mansar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reflects on pedagogy for teaching collaborative global projects across universities in different countries. Over a period of four years, students at three universities - one in the United States, one in Singapore and one in the Middle East - enrolled in a course called "Global Project Management". In this course, coordinated across locations, students experience a global project with distant team members. We describe the course experience and student perceptions of the requisite skills, collaboration tools and challenges bearing on effective global project work.

Generation And Analysis Of Verbal Route Directions For Blind Navigation, John Nicholson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

According to the National Federation of the Blind, there are an estimated 10 million people in the United States who are visually impaired. Of these, 1.3 million are legally blind. Many people with extreme vision loss receive orientation and mobility training in order to help them learn skills that allow them to travel and navigate multiple types of indoor and outdoor environments. Even with this training, a fundamental problem these people face is learning new routes, especially in environments with which they are not familiar. Although the research community has developed a number of localization and navigation aids that are …

Expanding The Horizons Of Educational Pair Programming: A Methodological Review Of Pair Programming In Computer Science Education Research, Keith B. Rimington

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Educators and researchers continue to explore the benefits, real or imagined, of implementing pair programming as part of the computer science pedagogy. Current reviews of computer science educational research practices do not focus on educational pair programming. This thesis presents a review of the research methods used in recent educational pair programming research. The primary purpose of this review is to inform the ongoing dialogue about and to provide evidence-based recommendations for improving educational pair programming research.

Replicating the design of a previous computer science education methodological review, this study inspected a sample of 108 articles from a population of …

An Exploratory Study On Issues And Challenges Of Agile Software Development With Scrum, Juyun Joey Cho

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore critical issues and challenges that might arise in agile software development processes with Scrum. It also sought to provide management guidelines to help organizations avoid and overcome barriers in adopting the Scrum method as a future software development method. A qualitative research method design was used to capture the knowledge of practitioners and scrutinize the Scrum software development process in its natural settings. An in-depth case study was conducted in two organizations where the Scrum method was fully integrated in every aspect of two organizations' software development processes. One organization provides large-scale …

A Publish-Subscribe System For Data Replication And Synchronization Among Integrated Person-Centric Information Systems, Xiangbin Qiu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Synchronization of data across an integrated system of heterogeneous databases is a difficult but important task, especially in the context of integrating health care information throughout a region, state, or nation. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a data replication and synchronization tool, called the Sync Engine, which allows users to define custom data-sharing patterns and transformations for an integrated system of heterogeneous person-centric databases. This thesis also discusses the relationship between the Sync Engine's contributions and several relevant issues in the area of data integration and replication. The Sync Engine's design and implementation was validated by …

Computer-Aided Detection Of Breast Cancer Using Ultrasound Images, Yanhui Guo

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Ultrasound imaging suffers from severe speckle noise. We propose a novel approach for speckle reduction using 2D homogeneity and directional average filters to remove speckle noise. We transform speckle noise into additive noise using a logarithm transformation. Texture information is employed to describe the speckle characteristics of the image. The homogeneity value is defined using texture information value, and the ultrasound image is transformed into a homogeneity domain from the gray domain. If the homogeneity value is high, the region is homogenous and has less speckle noise. Otherwise, the region is nonhomogenous, and speckle noise occurs. The threshold value is …

A Singular-Value-Based Semi-Fragile Watermarking Scheme For Image Content Authentication With Tampering Localization, Xing Xin

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis presents a novel singular-value-based semi-fragile watermarking scheme for image content authentication with tampering localization. The proposed scheme first generates a secured watermark bit sequence by performing a logical "xor" operation on a content-based watermark and content-independent watermark, wherein the content-based watermark is generated by a singular-value-based watermark bit sequence that represents intrinsic algebraic image properties, and the content-independent watermark is generated by a private-key-based random watermark bit sequence. It next embeds the secure watermark in the approximation subband of each non-overlapping 4×4 block using the adaptive quantization method to generate the watermarked image. The image content authentication process …

A Comparative Study On Text Categorization, Aditya Chainulu Karamcheti

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Automated text categorization is a supervised learning task, defined as assigning category labels to new documents based on likelihood suggested by a training set of labeled documents. Two examples of methodology for text categorizations are Naive Bayes and K-Nearest Neighbor.

In this thesis, we implement two categorization engines based on Naive Bayes and K-Nearest Neighbor methodology. We then compare the effectiveness of these two engines by calculating standard precision and recall for a collection of documents. We will further report on time efficiency of these two engines.

Extending The Page Segmentation Algorithms Of The Ocropus Documentation Layout Analysis System, Amy Alison Winder

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

With the advent of more powerful personal computers, inexpensive memory, and digital cameras, curators around the world are working towards preserving historical documents on computers. Since many of the organizations for which they work have limited funds, there is world-wide interest in a low-cost solution to obtaining these digital records in a computer-readable form. An open source layout analysis system called OCRopus is being developed for such a purpose. In its original state, though, it could not process documents that contained information other than text. Segmenting the page into regions of text and non-text areas is the first step of …

A Visualization Approach For Message Passing In Parallel Computing Systems, Arunkumar Sadasivan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Information Visualization has been used as an effective method in transforming textual information into a visual form that enables users to effectively communicate and understand the information. MPI (Message Passing Interface) usually involves a large amount of data, which necessitates exploring innovative ideas to visualize such data effectively.

In this thesis, we implement a graph visualization tool called MPROV to effectively visualize communication patterns of message passing using log files from MPI applications. The tool provides several interaction techniques to effectively reduce the amount of data displayed on the screen. We have also developed protocol conformance checking, which verifies the …