Computer Sciences Commons^™

Data Visualization On Interactive Surfaces: A Research Agenda, Petra Isenberg, Tobias Isenberg, Tobias Hesselmann, Bongshin Lee, Ulrich Von Zadow, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Interactive tabletops and surfaces (ITSs) provide rich opportunities for data visualization and analysis and consequently are used increasingly in such settings. A research agenda of some of the most pressing challenges related to visualization on ITSs emerged from discussions with researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative work, and a variety of visualization fields at the 2011 Workshop on Data Exploration for Interactive Surfaces (Dexis 2011)

Network Structure Of Social Coding In Github, Ferdian Thung, Tegawende F. Bissyande, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social coding enables a different experience of software development as the activities and interests of one developer are easily advertized to other developers. Developers can thus track the activities relevant to various projects in one umbrella site. Such a major change in collaborative software development makes an investigation of networkings on social coding sites valuable. Furthermore, project hosting platforms promoting this development paradigm have been thriving, among which GitHub has arguably gained the most momentum. In this paper, we contribute to the body of knowledge on social coding by investigating the network structure of social coding in GitHub. We collect …

Csc Senior Project: Nlpstats, Michael Mease

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Natural Language Processing has recently increased in popularity. The field of authorship analysis, specifically, uses various characteristics of text quantified by markers. NLPStats serves as a tool designed to streamline marker extraction based on user needs. A flexible query system allows for custom marker requests, adjustment of result formatting, and preprocessing options. Furthermore, an efficiently designed structure ensures that users retrieve information quickly. As a whole, NLPStats enables anyone, regardless of NLP experience, to extract important information about the text of a document.

Computational Science, Demystified...The Future, Revealed...And Cise, 2013, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

What are some of the exciting avenues that computational science is exploring, and how can we best give a voice to such emerging ideas?

Introducing Computer Science In An Integrated Science Course, Barry Lawson, Doug Szajda, Lewis Barnett Iii

Department of Math & Statistics Faculty Publications

This paper describes our implementation and experience of incorporating computer science concepts into a team-taught, first-year interdisciplinary course for prospective science majors at the University of Richmond. The course integrates essential concepts from each of five STEM disciplines: biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, and physics. Including computer science in this course faces three primary challenges: few of the students have any CS background; the time devoted to CS instruction is reduced compared to a traditional introductory CS course; and the spirit of the course requires the CS material to be highly integrated with the other disciplines. Here we discuss our …

Mind The Gaps, Paul Bankston

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Rattus Model Utilizing Selective Pulmonary Ischemia Induces Bronchiolitis Obliterans Organizing Pneumonia, John C. Densmore, Paul M. Jeziorczak, Anne V. Clough, Kirkwood A. Pritchard Jr, Breana Cummens, Meetha Medhora, Arjun Rao, Elizabeth R. Jacobs

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Bronchiolitis obliterans organizing pneumonia (BOOP), a morbid condition when associated with lung transplant and chronic lung disease, is believed to be a complication of ischemia. Our goal was to develop a simple and reliable model of lung ischemia in the Sprague-Dawley rat that would produce BOOP. Unilateral ischemia without airway occlusion was produced by an occlusive slipknot placed around the left main pulmonary artery. Studies were performed 7 days later. Relative pulmonary and systemic flow to each lung was measured by injection of technetium Tc 99m macroaggregated albumin. Histological sections were examined for structure and necrosis and scored for BOOP. …

A Graph-Theoretical Approach To The Selection Of The Minimum Tiling Path From A Physical Map, Serdar Bozdag

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

The problem of computing the minimum tiling path (MTP) from a set of clones arranged in a physical map is a cornerstone of hierarchical (clone-by-clone) genome sequencing projects. We formulate this problem in a graph theoretical framework, and then solve by a combination of minimum hitting set and minimum spanning tree algorithms. The tool implementing this strategy, called FMTP, shows improved performance compared to the widely used software FPC. When we execute FMTP and FPC on the same physical map, the MTP produced by FMTP covers a higher portion of the genome, and uses a smaller number of clones. For …

Image Collection Summarization Via Dictionary Learning For Sparse Representation, Chunlei Yang, Jialie Shen, Jinye Peng, Jianping Fan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, a novel approach is developed to achieve automatic image collection summarization. The effectiveness of the summary is reflected by its ability to reconstruct the original set or each individual image in the set. We have leveraged the dictionary learning for sparse representation model to construct the summary and to represent the image. Specifically we reformulate the summarization problem into a dictionary learning problem by selecting bases which can be sparsely combined to represent the original image and achieve a minimum global reconstruction error, such as MSE (Mean Square Error). The resulting “Sparse Least Square” problem is NP-hard, …

Predicting Project Outcome Leveraging Socio-Technical Network Patterns, Didi Surian, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Hong Cheng, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There are many software projects started daily, some are successful, while others are not. Successful projects get completed, are used by many people, and bring benefits to users. Failed projects do not bring similar benefits. In this work, we are interested in developing an effective machine learning solution that predicts project outcome (i.e., success or failures) from developer socio-technical network. To do so, we investigate successful and failed projects to find factors that differentiate the two. We analyze the socio-technical aspect of the software development process by focusing at the people that contribute to these projects and the interactions among …

Empirical Evaluation Of Bug Linking, Tegawende F. Bissyande, Ferdian Thung, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Laurent Reveillere

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To collect software bugs found by users, development teams often setup bug trackers using systems such as Bugzilla. Developers would then fix some of the bugs and commit corresponding code changes into version control systems such as svn or git. Unfortunately, the links between bug reports and code changes are missing for many software projects as the bug tracking and version control systems are often maintained separately. Yet, linking bug reports to fix commits is important as it could shed light into the nature of bug fixing processes and expose patterns in software management. Bug linking solutions, such as ReLink, …

Understanding Widespread Changes: A Taxonomic Study, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion Strategy For Online Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao, Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online portfolio selection has been attracting increasing attention from the data mining and machine learning communities. All existing online portfolio selection strategies focus on the first order information of a portfolio vector, though the second order information may also be beneficial to a strategy. Moreover, empirical evidence shows that relative stock prices may follow the mean reversion property, which has not been fully exploited by existing strategies. This article proposes a novel online portfolio selection strategy named Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion (CWMR). Inspired by the mean reversion principle in finance and confidence weighted online learning technique in machine learning, CWMR …

A Self-Training Framework For Automatic Identification Of Exploratory Dialogue, Zhongyu Wei, Yulan He, Simon Shum, Rebecca Ferguson, Wei Gao, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The dramatic increase in online learning materials over the last decade has made it difficult for individuals to locate information they need. Until now, researchers in the field of Learning Analytics have had to rely on the use of manual approaches to identify exploratory dialogue. This type of dialogue is desirable in online learning environments, since training learners to use it has been shown to improve learning outcomes. In this paper, we frame the problem of exploratory dialogue detection as a binary classification task, classifying a given contribution to an online dialogue as exploratory or non-exploratory. We propose a self-training …

Robust Image Analysis With Sparse Representation On Quantized Visual Features, Bingkun Bao, Guangyu Zhu, Jialie Shen, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent techniques based on Sparse Representation (SR) have demonstrated promising performance on high-level visual recognition, exemplified by the high-accuracy face recognition under occlusions and other sparse corruptions [1]. Most research in this area has focused on classification algorithms using raw image pixels, and very few have been proposed to utilize the quantized visual features, such as the popular Bagof- Words (BOW) feature abstraction. In such cases, besides the inherent quantization errors, ambiguity associated with visual word assignment and mis-detection of feature points due to factors such as visual occlusions and noises, constitutes the major causes to the dense corruptions of …

Infrastructure-Assisted Smartphone-Based Adl Recognition In Multi-Inhabitant Smart Environments, Nirmalya Roy, Archan Misra, Diane Cook

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a hybrid approach for recognizing complex Activities of Daily Living that lie between the two extremes of intensive use of body-worn sensors and the use of infrastructural sensors. Our approach harnesses the power of infrastructural sensors (e.g., motion sensors) to provide additional `hidden' context (e.g., room-level location) of an individual and combines this context with smartphone-based sensing of micro-level postural/locomotive states. The major novelty is our focus on multi-inhabitant environments, where we show how spatiotemporal constraints can be used to significantly improve the accuracy and computational overhead of traditional coupled-HMM based approaches. Experimental results on a smart home …

Understanding Widespread Changes: A Taxonomic Study, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many active research studies in software engineering, such as detection of recurring bug fixes, detection of copyand- paste bugs, and automated program transformation tools, are motivated by the assumption that many code changes (e.g., changing an identifier name) in software systems are widespread to many locations and are similar to one another. However, there is no study so far that actually analyzes widespread changes in software systems. Understanding the nature of widespread changes could empirically support the assumption, which provides insight to improve the research studies and related tools. Our study in this paper addresses such a need. We propose …

Adoption Of Software Testing In Open Source Projects: A Preliminary Study On 50,000 Projects, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Tegawende F. Bissyande, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In software engineering, testing is a crucial activity that is designed to ensure the quality of program code. For this activity, development teams spend substantial resources constructing test cases to thoroughly assess the correctness of software functionality. What is however the proportion of open source projects that include test cases? What kind of projects are more likely to include test cases? In this study, we explore 50,000 projects and investigate the correlation between the presence of test cases and various project development characteristics, including the lines of code and the size of development teams.

Using Enterprise Level Software For A Large Scale Compulsory Course In An Information Systems Undergraduate Program: An Example From Singapore, Ilse Baumgartner

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This conference contribution describes the design and delivery of a course on enterprise portal implementation at the senior undergraduate level at the School of Information Systems (SIS), Singapore Management University (SMU). In this course (entitled Enterprise Web Solutions), the focus is put on the design, development, deployment and governance of an enterprise portal as a way to understand the full life cycle of a complex enterprise-level solution. The Bachelor of Science (Information Systems Management) degree program offered at SIS has been designed to contextualise the study of information systems and business management and to acquire practical competencies and skills though …

Network Structure Of Social Coding In Github, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Study On Developer Interactions In Stackoverflow, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

StackOverflow provides a popular platform where developers post and answer questions. Recently, Treude et al. manually label 385 questions in StackOverflow and group them into 10 categories based on their contents. They also analyze how tags are used in StackOverflow. In this study, we extend their work to obtain a deeper understanding on how developers interact with one another on such a question and answer web site. First, we analyze the distributions of developers who ask and answer questions. We also investigate if there is a segregation of the StackOverflow community into questioners and answerers. We also perform automated text …

Accountable Authority Identity-Based Encryption With Public Traceability, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Yunlei Zhao, Jian Weng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

At Crypto’07, Goyal introduced the notion of accountable authority identity-based encryption (A-IBE) in order to mitigate the inherent key escrow problem in identity-based encryption, and proposed two concrete constructions. In an A-IBE system, if the private key generator (PKG) distributes a decryption key or produces an unauthorized decryption box for a user maliciously, it runs the risk of being caught and sued in the court of law with the help of a tracing algorithm. Subsequent efforts focused on constructions of A-IBE schemes with enhanced security. In these A-IBE constructions, the tracing algorithm needs to take a user’s decryption key as …

Semi-Supervised Heterogeneous Fusion For Multimedia Data Co-Clustering, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Dong Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Co-clustering is a commonly used technique for tapping the rich meta-information of multimedia web documents, including category, annotation, and description, for associative discovery. However, most co-clustering methods proposed for heterogeneous data do not consider the representation problem of short and noisy text and their performance is limited by the empirical weighting of the multi-modal features. In this paper, we propose a generalized form of Heterogeneous Fusion Adaptive Resonance Theory, called GHF-ART, for co-clustering of large-scale web multimedia documents. By extending the two-channel Heterogeneous Fusion ART (HF-ART) to multiple channels, GHF-ART is designed to handle multimedia data with an arbitrarily rich …

Almost Touching: Parent-Child Remote Communication Using The Sharetable System, Svetlana Yarosh, Anthony Tang, Sanika Mokashi, Gregory D. Abowd

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We deployed the ShareTable - a system that provides easy-to-initiate videochat and a shared tabletop task space - in four divorced households. Throughout the month of its use, the families employed the ShareTable to participate in shared activities, share emotional moments, and communicate closeness through metaphorical touch. The ShareTable provided a number of advantages over the phone and was easier to use than standard videoconferencing. However, it did also introduce concerns over privacy and new sources of conflict about appropriate calling practices. We relate our findings to the larger research landscape and present implications for future work.

Flip-Invariant Sift For Copy And Object Detection, Wan-Lei Zhao, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) feature has been widely accepted as an effective local keypoint descriptor for its invariance to rotation, scale, and lighting changes in images. However, it is also well known that SIFT, which is derived from directionally sensitive gradient fields, is not flip invariant. In real-world applications, flip or flip-like transformations are commonly observed in images due to artificial flipping, opposite capturing viewpoint, or symmetric patterns of objects. This paper proposes a new descriptor, named flip-invariant SIFT (or F-SIFT), that preserves the original properties of SIFT while being tolerant to flips. F-SIFT starts by estimating the dominant curl …

Improving Webide Through Delightful Design And Gamification, Michael Hilton

Master's Theses

WebIDE is a web-based online learning environment. WebIDE has been used

successfully to teach CS0 and CS1 students Java and C concepts and software

engineering best practices, specically Test Driven Development. Previous Web-

IDE development has concentrated on developing functionality. The main goal

of this eort is to improve two non-functional aspects of WebIDE. The rst is to

design a more delightful user interface. The second is to add a scoring mecha-

nism that encourages students to develop best practices. The scoring mechanism

rewards students who answer the question correctly on the rst attempt, dis-

couraging them from spamming the …

Spoons: Netflix Outage Detection Using Microtext Classification, Eriq A. Augusitne

Master's Theses

Every week there are over a billion new posts to Twitter services and many of those messages contain feedback to companies about their services. One company that recognizes this unused source of information is Netflix. That is why Netflix initiated the development of a system that lets them respond to the millions of Twitter and Netflix users that are acting as sensors and reporting all types of user visible outages. This system enhances the feedback loop between Netflix and its customers by increasing the amount of customer feedback that Netflix receives and reducing the time it takes for Netflix to …

Security-Policy Analysis With Extended Unix Tools, Gabriel A. Weaver

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

During our fieldwork with real-world organizations---including those in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), network configuration management, and the electrical power grid---we repeatedly noticed that security policies and related security artifacts are hard to manage. We observed three core limitations of security policy analysis that contribute to this difficulty. First, there is a gap between policy languages and the tools available to practitioners. Traditional Unix text-processing tools are useful, but practitioners cannot use these tools to operate on the high-level languages in which security policies are expressed and implemented. Second, practitioners cannot process policy at multiple levels of abstraction but they need …

Book Review: Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies And Practices. Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (Eds., 2008), Lydia Barza

All Works

No abstract provided.

Cliff Walls: Threats To Validity In Empirical Studies Of Open Source Forges, Landon James Pratt

Theses and Dissertations

Artifact-based research provides a mechanism whereby researchers may study the creation of software yet avoid many of the difficulties of direct observation and experimentation. Open source software forges are of great value to the software researcher, because they expose many of the artifacts of software development. However, many challenges affect the quality of artifact-based studies, especially those studies examining software evolution. This thesis addresses one of these threats: the presence of very large commits, which we refer to as "Cliff Walls." Cliff walls are a threat to studies of software evolution because they do not appear to represent incremental development. …