Computer Sciences Commons^™

Harmony Oriented Architecture, Kyle A. Martin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents Harmony Oriented Architecture: a novel architectural paradigm that applies the principles of Harmony Oriented Programming to the architecture of scalable and evolvable distributed systems. It is motivated by research on Ultra Large Scale systems that has revealed inherent limitations in human ability to design large-scale software systems that can only be overcome through radical alternatives to traditional object-oriented software engineering practice that simplifies the construction of highly scalable and evolvable system. HOP eschews encapsulation and information hiding, the core principles of objectoriented design, in favor of exposure and information sharing through a spatial abstraction. This helps to …

Federated Critical Infrastructure Simulators: Towards Ontologies For Support Of Collaboration, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz, Adam Shypanski, Gagandeep S. Gill

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Our society relies greatly on a variety of critical infrastructures (CI), such as power system networks, water distribution, oil and natural gas systems, telecommunication networks and others. Interdependency between those systems is high and may result in cascading failures spanning different infrastructures. Behavior of each CI can be observed and analyzed through the use of domain simulators, but this does not account for their interdependency. To explore CI interdependencies, domain simulators need to be integrated in a federation where they can collaborate.

This paper explores three different simulators: the EPANET water distribution simulator, the PSCAD power system simulator and the …

From Glossaries To Ontologies: Disaster Management Domain, Katarina Grolinger, Kevin P. Brown, Miriam A.M. Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Our society’s reliance on a variety of critical infrastructures (CI) presents significant challenges for disaster preparedness, response and recovery. Experts from different domains including police, paramedics, firefighters and various other CI teams are involved in the fast paced response to a disaster, increasing the risk of miscommunication. To ensure clear communication, as well as to facilitate CI software interoperability, a common disaster ontology is needed. We propose using the knowledge stored in domain glossaries, vocabularies and dictionaries for the creation of a lightweight disaster management domain ontology. Glossaries, vocabularies and dictionaries are semi structured representations of domain knowledge, where significant …

A Unit Test Approach For Database Schema Evolution, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam A M Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Context: The constant changes in today’s business requirements demand continuous database revisions. Hence, database structures, not unlike software applications, deteriorate during their lifespan and thus require refactoring in order to achieve a longer life span. Although unit tests support changes to application programs and refactoring, there is currently a lack of testing strategies for database schema evolution.

Objective: This work examines the challenges for database schema evolution and explores the possibility of using various testing strategies to assist with schema evolution. Specifically, the work proposes a novel unit test approach for the application code that accesses databases with the objective …

An Empirical Study Of Open Source Software Usability – The Industrial Perspective, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the use of open source projects by common novice users; Open Source Software (OSS) is thus no longer a reserved arena for software developers and computer gurus. Although user-centered designs are gaining popularity in OSS, usability is still not considered one of the prime objectives in many design scenarios. This paper analyzes industry users’ perception of usability factors, including understandability, learnability, operability, and attractiveness on OSS usability. The research model of this empirical study establishes the relationship between the key usability factors and OSS usability from industrial perspective. In order to conduct …

An Empirical Study Of Open Source Software Usability: The Industrial Perspective, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the use of open source projects by common novice users; Open Source Software (OSS) is thus no longer a reserved arena for software developers and computer gurus. Although user-centered designs are gaining popularity in OSS, usability is still not considered as one of the prime objectives in many design scenarios. In this paper, we analyze industry users’ perception of usability factors, including understandability, learnability, operability and attractiveness, on OSS usability. The research model of this empirical study establishes the relationship between the key usability factors and OSS usability from industrial perspective. In …

Connecting Mathematics Students To Philosophy And Faith, Nathan Moyer

ACMS Journal 2010-2011

This paper describes an upper-division class project that helps students wrestle with the deep philosophical questions of mathematics in a relevant way. Through article readings and group discussions, various historical views of mathematical philosophy are examined and critiqued. An emphasis is placed upon students making meaningful connections between their own views of mathematics and their personal Christian faith or worldview.

The Rock 2011, School Of Engineering And Computer Science

The Rock

No abstract provided.

Privacy-Aware An Scalable Content Dissemination In Distributed Social Networks, Pavan Kapanipathi, Julia Anaya, Amit P. Sheth, Brett Slatkin, Alexandre Passant

Kno.e.sis Publications

Centralized social networking websites raise scalability issues - due to the growing number of participants - and, as well as, policy concerns - such as control, privacy and ownership over the user's published data. Distributed Social Networks aim to solve this issue by enabling architecture where people own their data and share it their own way. However, the privacy and scalability challenge is still to be tackled. This paper presents a privacy-aware extension to Google's PubSubHubbub protocol, using Semantic Web technologies, solving both the scalability and the privacy issues in Distributed Social Networks. We enhanced the traditional feature of PubSubHubbub …

Semantic Social Mashup Approach For Designing Citizen Diplomacy, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Advancement in technology has brought exceptional connectivity, easy and open access to communication mediums via Internet. Everyday millions of people are interactively communicating to each other and sharing multimedia content through Social Media/Networks, Web-based and mobile-based technologies. Social media provides variety of interesting, engaging applications such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flicker, Blogs. People interested in contributing to global welfare and improving humanity are connected to various NGO's like Red Cross, Ushahidi (www.ushahidi.com), eMoksha (emoksha.org), etc. Social media and NGOs are acting as an excellent medium of communication and sharing, connected diverse people irrespective of their nationality, religion, culture, etc. Social …

Clustering Web Video Search Results Based On Integration Of Multiple Features, Alex Hindle, Jie Shao, Dan Lin, Jiaheng Lu, Rui Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The usage of Web video search engines has been growing at an explosive rate. Due to the ambiguity of query terms and duplicate results, a good clustering of video search results is essential to enhance user experience as well as improve retrieval performance. Existing systems that cluster videos only consider the video content itself. This paper presents the first system that clusters Web video search results by fusing the evidence from a variety of information sources besides the video content such as title, tags and description. We propose a novel framework that can integrate multiple features and enable us to …

Interdisciplinary Computational Projects Utilizing The Hpc Cluster, Demos Athanasopoulos

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

No abstract provided.

Lessons Learned From Comprehensive Deployments Of Multiagent Cscl Applications I-Minds And Classroomwiki, Nobel Khandaker, Leen-Kiat Soh, L.D. Miller, Adam D. Eck, Hong Jiang

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Recent years have seen a surge in the use of intelligent computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) tools for improving student learning in traditional classrooms. However, adopting such a CSCL tool in a classroom still requires the teacher to develop (or decide on which to adopt) the CSCL tool and the CSCL script, design the relevant pedagogical aspects (i.e., the learning objectives, assessment method, etc.) to overcome the associated challenges (e.g., free riding, student assessment, forming student groups that improve student learning, etc). We have used a multiagent-based system to develop a CSCL application and multiagent frameworks to form student groups that …

Cost And Reliability Considerations In Designing The Next-Generation Ip Over Wdm Backbone Networks, Byrav Ramamurthy, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Rakesh K. Sinha

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

To accommodate the increasing demands for bandwidth, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have deployed higher speed links and reconfigurable optical add drop multiplexers (ROADMs) in their backbone networks. To address the reliability challenges due to failures and planned outages, ISPs typically use two backbone routers at each central office in a dual home configuration. Thus at the IP layer, redundant backbone routers as well as redundant transport equipment to interconnect them are deployed to provide reliability through node and path diversity. However, adding such redundant resources increases the overall cost of the network. Hence, a fundamental redesign of the backbone network …

A Break In The Clouds: Towards A Cloud Definition, Chris Rose

Walden Faculty and Staff Publications

This paper discusses the concept of Cloud Computing to achieve a complete definition of what a Cloud is, using the main characteristics typically associated with this paradigm in the literature. More than 20 definitions have been studied allowing for the extraction of a consensus definition as well as a minimum definition containing the essential characteris- tics. This paper pays much attention to the Grid paradigm, as it is often confused with Cloud technologies. We also de- scribe the relationships and distinctions between the Grid and Cloud approaches.

Vascular Countercurrent Network For 3d Triple-Layered Skin Structure With Radiation Heating, Xiaoqi Zeng

Doctoral Dissertations

Heat transfer in living tissue has become more and more attention for researchers, because high thermal radiation produced by intense fire, such as wild fires, chemical fires, accidents, warfare, terrorism, etc, is often encountered in human's daily life. Living tissue is a heterogeneous organ consisting of cellular tissue and blood vessels, and heat transfer in cellular tissue and blood vessel is quite different, because the blood vessels provide channels for fast heat transfer. The metabolic heat generation, heat conduction and blood perfusion in soft tissue, convection and perfusion of the arterial-venous blood through the capillary, and interaction with the environment …

A Reformulation Strategy For Multi-Dimensional Csps: The Case Study Of The Set Game, Amanda Swearngin, Berthe Y. Choueiry, Robert J. Woodward, Eugene C. Freuder

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

•General reformulation strategy for CSPs

–Multidimensional CSPs (MD-CSPs)

–Problem reformulation by value interchangeability

–A general reformulation strategy for MD-CSPs

•Game of Set: A new toy problem

–Game, CSP model

–Problem reformulation

–Algorithms & Results

•Conclusions

A Reformulation Strategy For Multi-Dimensional Csps: The Case Study Of The Set Game, Amanda Swearngin, Berthe Y. Choueiry, Eugene C. Freuder

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

•General reformulation strategy for CSPs

–Multidimensional CSPs (MD-CSPs)

–Problem reformulation by value interchangeability

–A general reformulation strategy for MD-CSPs

•Game of Set: A new toy problem

–Game, CSP model

–Problem reformulation

–Algorithms & Results

•Conclusions

Solving Difficult Csps With Relational Neighborhood Inverse Consistency, Robert J. Woodward, Shant Karakashian, Berthe Y. Choueiry, Christian Bessiere

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

•Introduction

•Relational Neighborhood Inverse Consistency

–Property, Algorithm, Improvements

•Reformulating the Dual Graph by

1.Redundancy removal ⟿ property wRNIC

2.Triangulation ⟿ property triRNIC

•Selection strategy: four alternative dual graphs

•Experimental Results

•Conclusion

A Real-Time Rfid Localization Experiment Using Propagation Models, Jason L. Brchan, Lianlin Zhao, Jiaqing Wu

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper introduces a real-time localization system (RTLS) using efficient multiple propagation models to compensate for the drawback of the received signal strength technique. The RTLS is implemented on an active RFID system and uses received signal strength measurements and reference tags for ranging. The RTLS is implemented purely in software that post processes the received signal strength data from the reader and does not require any additional hardware or any modifications to the RFID reader or tags. The proposed algorithm using multiple propagation models improves the performance of the RTLS. Two-dimensional localization results are given for a four-reader system …

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

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

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 …

Gpu Parallel Collections For Scala, Kishen Das Kondabagilu Rajanna

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

A decade ago, graphics processing units have been used specifically for high-speed graphics. Of late, they are becoming more popular as general purpose parallel processors. With the release of CUDA, ATI Stream and OpenCL, programmers can now split their program execution between CPU and GPU, whenever appropriate, resulting in huge performance gain. The cost of GPU is declining and also their performance is improving faster than CPUs. Although enormous performance gains can be achieved by parallelizing the code, identifying the right candidate for GPU execution is very tricky. Coding in OpenCL is a difficult task because of the memory management …

Privacy For Location Based Services With Smartphones, James Nathaniel Spargo

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

In recent years, mobile devices and smartphones enabled with GPS and Inter-net access have become extremely common. People use these devices as they woulda personal computer for easy access to information. Location Based Services (LBS)provide customized information based on a user's geographic location that has beenretrieved from a dedicated spatial database such as Google Places, Yahoo's LocalSearch Web Services and Yelp.com. This information can include nearby hotels andrestaurants, gas stations, banks or other Points of Interest (POIs). Since most searchengines and databases are known to store previous queries in order to improve futuresearch results and other data analysis on previous …

Concurrent Polyglot: An Extensible Compiler Framework, Saurabh Satish Kothari

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

We have today crossed the threshold of increasing clock frequencies as the dominant solution to faster computing, and it is imperative for software developers to be able to think in the concurrent and parallel paradigm. Important still is to equip programmers with the right tools to develop concurrent and parallel software. Software concurrency is a widely researched area, and many of today's compilers concentrate on compiling for parallelism. However, although concurrent compilers have been explored since the 1970s, very few of them exist today that justify multicore environments. For instance, gmake [1] supports coarse grained parallelism through the -j option …

Moving Towards Adaptive Search In Digital Libraries, Udo Kruschwitz, M-Dyaa Albakour, Jinzhong Niu, Johannes Leveling, Nikolaos Nanas, Yunhyong Kim, Dawei Song, Maria Fasli, Anne De Roeck

Publications and Research

Information retrieval has become very popular over the last decade with the advent of the Web. Nevertheless, searching on the Web is very different to searching on smaller, often more structured collections such as digital libraries, local Web sites and intranets. One way of helping the searcher locating the right information for a specific information need is by providing well-structured domain knowledge to assist query modification and navigation. There are two challenges: acquiring the domain knowledge and adapting it automatically to the specific interests of the user community. We will outline how a domain model can be automatically acquired using …

A Secure Behavior Modification Sensor System For Physical Activity Improvement, Alan Price

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Today, advances in wireless sensor networks are making it possible to capture large amounts of information about a person and their interaction within their home environment. However, what is missing is how to ensure the security of the collected data and its use to alter human behavior for positive benefit.

In this research, exploration was conducted involving the "infrastructure" and "intelligence" aspects of a wireless sensor network through a Behavior Modification Sensor System. First was to understand how a secure wireless sensor network could be established through the symmetric distribution of keys (the securing of the infrastructure), and it involves …

Haskell For The Cloud, Andrew P. Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present Cloud Haskell, a domain specific language for developing programs for a distributed-memory computing environment. Implemented as a shallow embedding in Haskell, it provides a message-passing communication model, inspired by Erlang, without introducing incompatibility with Haskell's established sharedmemory concurrency. A key contribution is a method for serializing function closures for transmission across the network. Cloud Haskell has been implemented; we present example code and some preliminary performance measurements.

Relativistic Red-Black Trees, Philip William Howard, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Operating system performance and scalability on sharedmemory many-core systems depends critically on efficient access to shared data structures. Scalability has proven difficult to achieve for many data structures. In this paper we present a novel and highly scalable concurrent red-black tree. Red-black trees are widely used in operating systems, but typically exhibit poor scalability. Our red-black tree has linear read scalability, uncontended read performance that is at least 25% faster than other known approaches, and deterministic lookup times for a given tree size, making it suitable for realtime applications.

The Ordering Requirements Of Relativistic And Reader-Writer Locking Approaches To Shared Data Access, Philip William Howard, Josh Triplett, Jonathan Walpole, Paul E. Mckenney

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The semantics of reader-writer locks allow read-side concurrency. Unfortunately, the locking primitives serialize access to the lock variable to an extent that little or no concurrency is realized in practice for small critical sections. Relativistic programming is a methodology that also allows read- side concurrency. Relativistic programming uses dfferent ordering constraints than reader-writer locking. The different ordering constraints allow relativistic readers to proceed without synchronization so relativistic readers scale even for very short critical sections. In this paper we explore the diferences between the ordering constraints for reader-writer locking and relativistic programs. We show how and why the dfferent ordering …

Finding Haystacks With Needles: Ranked Search For Data Using Geospatial And Temporal Characteristics, Veronika Margaret Megler, David Maier

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The past decade has seen an explosion in the number and types of environmental sensors deployed, many of which provide a continuous stream of observations. Each individual observation consists of one or more sensor measurements, a geographic location, and a time. With billions of historical observations stored in diverse databases and in thousands of datasets, scientists have difficulty finding relevant observations. We present an approach that creates consistent geospatial-temporal metadata from large repositories of diverse data by blending curated and automated extracts. We describe a novel query method over this metadata that returns ranked search results to a query with …