Computer Sciences Commons^™

Call Graph Based Metrics To Evaluate Software Design Quality, H. Abandah, Izzat M. Alsmadi

Computer Science Faculty Publications (Archived)

Software defects prediction was introduced to support development and maintenance activities such as improving the software quality through finding errors or patterns of errors early in the software development process. Software defects prediction is playing the role of maintenance facilitation in terms of effort, time and more importantly the cost prediction for software maintenance and evolution activities. In this research, software call graph model is used to evaluate its ability to predict quality related attributes in developed software products. As a case study, the call graph model is generated for several applications in order to represent and reflect the degree …

Efficient Assessment And Evaluation For Websites Vulnerabilities Using Snort, M. Dabbour, Izzat M. Alsmadi, E. Alsukhni

Computer Science Faculty Publications (Archived)

An endless number of methods or ways exists to access illegally a web server or a website. The task of defending a system (e.g. network, server, website, etc.) is complex and challenging. SNORT is one of the popular open source tools that can be used to detect and possibly prevent illegal access and attacks for networks and websites. However, this largely depends on the way SNORT rules are designed and implemented. In this paper, we investigated in details several examples of SNORT rules and how they can be tuned to improve websites protection. We demonstrated practical methods to design and …

Impact Of Programming Features On Code Readability, Y. Tashtoush, Z. Odat, Izzat M. Alsmadi, M. Yatim

Computer Science Faculty Publications (Archived)

Readability is one important quality attributes for software source codes. Readability has also significant relation or impact with other quality attributes such as: reusability, maintainability, reliability, complexity, and portability metrics. This research develops a novel approach called Impact of Programming Features on Code Readability (IPFCR), to examine the influence of various programming features and the effect of these features on code readability. A code Readability Tool (CRT) is developed to evaluate the IPFCR readability features or attributes. In order to assess the level if impact that each one of the 25 proposed readability features may have, positively or negatively on …

Software Development For A 3d Gravity Inversion And Application To Study Of The Border Ranges Fault System, South-Central Alaska, Rolando Cardenas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Border Ranges Fault System (BRFS) bounds the Cook Inlet and Susitna Basins, and is an important petroleum province within south-central Alaska. A primary goal of our research is to test several plausible models of structure along the BRFS using a novel three-dimensional inversion technique utilizing gravity data, constrained with other geophysical, borehole and surface geological information. This research involves the development of 3D inversion modeling software using C++ Builder from Embarcadero's XE2 Suite. The novel inversion approach directly models known geology with a priori uncertainties assigned to the geologic model to allow researchers to compare alternative interpretations. This technique …

Automatic Memory Management Policies For Low Power, Memory Limited, And Delay Intolerant Devices, Md Abu Jahid

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are energy and memory limited, and implement graphical user interfaces that are intolerant of computational delays. Mobile device platforms supporting apps implemented in languages that require automatic memory man- agement, such as the Dalvik (Java) virtual machine within Google's Android, have become dominant. It is essential that automatic memory management avoid causing unacceptable interface delays while responsibly managing energy and memory resource usage. Dalvik's automatic memory management policies for heap growth and garbage collection scheduling utilize heuristics tuned to minimize memory footprint. These policies result in only marginally acceptable response times and garbage …

Using Emotion As Inferred From Prosody In Language Modeling, Shreyas Ashok Karkhedkar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Research has focused on using prosody as an alternative source of information for language modeling. However, prosody is a surface phenomenon and to develop deeper models of language production, the underlying mental processes need to be considered. There are several cognitive factors, such as dialog-states and formulation, that have been given attention. However, emotion { as a cognitive factor, has been neglected so far. Speakers' emotional state plays an important role in spoken dialog. Participants seem to infer each others emotional state from multiple cues and react accordingly. In particular, these states manifest themselves moment-by-moment in the speakers voice. This …

Model Fusion: A New Approach To Processing Heterogeneous Data, Omar Ochoa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In many practical situations, it is necessary to extract

information from data of different types. For example, in geosciences, several sources of data can be used to determine the interior structure of the earth: the first arriving waves from earthquakes and from man-made sources, measurements of the earth's gravity field, measurements of the dispersion of surface waves generated by earthquakes, etc. At present, most existing data processing techniques deal only with data of one type.

A joint use of all the information derived from multiple types of data sources is an important theoretical and practical challenge. Such a joint use …

Strong Coupled Quark Matter And Drawbacks Of Its Bcs-Bec Crossover, Israel Portillo Vazquez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

It was found many years ago, that the ground state wave functions of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieer (BCS) superconductivity in a degenerate Fermi gas and the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of composite molecules are essentially the same, and those two states can be smoothly connected through a crossover. This BCS-BEC crossover has being recently extended to relativistic Fermi System. This thesis is dedicated to exploring the possible crossover from BEC to BCS phase on strong-interacting matter and its implications for the system Equation of State. The study will be concentrated on dierent phases of dense quark-matter for vanishing temperatures and densities beyond hadronic …

Extracting Fuzzy Measures From Sample Data: Optimization Algorithms And Applications, Xiaojing Wang

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), decisions are based on several criteria that are usually conflicting and non-homogenously satisfied. We use non-additive (fuzzy) measures combined with the Choquet integral to solve MCDM problems, for they allow to model and aggregate the levels of satisfaction of the several criteria of the problem at hand by considering the relationship between these criteria. In practice, it is difficult to identify such fuzzy measures. An automated process is then necessary and can be used when sample data is available. Several optimization approaches have been used to extract fuzzy measures from sample data, for example, genetic …

Determining The Benefit Of Human Input In Human-In-The-Loop Robotic Systems, Christine Elizabeth Bringes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work analyzes human-in-the-loop robotic systems to determine where human input can be most beneficial to a collaborative task. This is accomplished by implementing a pick-and-place task using a human-in-the-loop robotic system and determining which segments of the task, when replaced by human guidance, provide the most improvement to overall task performance and require the least cognitive effort.

The first experiment entails implementing a pick and place task on a commercial robotic arm. Initially, we look at a pick-and-place task that is segmented into two main areas: coarse approach towards a goal object and fine pick motion. For the fine …

Efficient And Private Processing Of Analytical Queries In Scientific Datasets, Anand Kumar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Large amount of data is generated by applications used in basic-science research and development applications. The size of data introduces great challenges in storage, analysis and preserving privacy. This dissertation proposes novel techniques to efficiently analyze the data and reduce storage space requirements through a data compression technique while preserving privacy and providing data security.

We present an efficient technique to compute an analytical query called spatial distance histogram (SDH) using spatiotemporal properties of the data. Special spatiotemporal properties present in the data are exploited to process SDH efficiently on the fly. General purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU or just …

Detecting Semantic Method Clones In Java Code Using Method Ioe-Behavior, Rochelle Elva

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The determination of semantic equivalence is an undecidable problem; however, this dissertation shows that a reasonable approximation can be obtained using a combination of static and dynamic analysis. This study investigates the detection of functional duplicates, referred to as semantic method clones (SMCs), in Java code. My algorithm extends the input-output notion of observable behavior, used in related work [1, 2], to include the effects of the method. The latter property refers to the persistent changes to the heap, brought about by the execution of the method. To differentiate this from the typical input-output behavior used by other researchers, I …

Development And Testing Of A Survey Instrument To Assess Ethical Perceptions Of It And Is Students, Omosalewa Aderonmu, Cheryl L. Aasheim, Paige Rutner

Information Technology: Faculty Publications

The purpose of this research study is to design a survey instrument to determine the effectiveness of the information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) programs in teaching ethics and ethical behavior as it relates to the IT profession. As researchers and as teachers, we want to know if students learn what constitutes ethical behavior in the information technology and information system programs and understand the obligations of an information technology professional with regards to ethical behavior in the workplace. A survey was

designed as a tool to assess the effectiveness of teaching ethics in IT and IS curricula. The …

Notice And Consent In A World Of Big Data, Fred H. Cate, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

Articles by Maurer Faculty

• Nowadays individuals are often presented with long and complex privacy notices routinely written by lawyers for lawyers, and are then requested to either ‘consent’ or abandon the use of the desired service.
• The over-use of notice and consent presents increasing challenges in an age of ‘Big Data’.
• These phenomena are receiving attention particularly in the context of the current review of the OECD Privacy Guidelines.
• In 2012 Microsoft sponsored an initiative designed to engage leading regulators, industry executives, public interest advocates, and academic experts in frank discussions about the role of individual control and notice and consent in data protection …

Gpu Ray Tracing With Cuda, Thomas A. Pitkin

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

"Ray Tracing is a rendering method that generates high quality images by simulating how light rays interact with objects in a virtual scene. The ray tracing technique can accurately portray advanced optical effects, such as reflections, refractions, and shadows, but at a greater computational cost and rendering time than other rendering methods. Fortunately, technological advances in GPU computing have provided the means to accelerate the ray tracing process to produce images in a significantly shorter time. This paper attempts to clearly illustrate the difference in rendering speed and design by developing and comparing a sequential CPU and parallel GPU implementation …

Towards A Tight Integration Of Syntactic Parsing With Semantic Disambiguation By Means Of Declarative Programming, Yuliya Lierler, Peter Schüller

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

We propose and advocate the use of an advanced declarative programming paradigm – answer set programming – as a uniform platform for integrated approach towards syntax-semantic processing in natural language. We illustrate that (a) the parsing technology based on answer set programming implementation reaches performance sufficient for being a useful NLP tool, and (b) the proposed method for incorporating semantic information from FRAMENET into syntactic parsing may prove to be useful in allowing semantic-based disambiguation of syntactic structures.

Prolog And Asp Inference Under One Roof, Marcello Balduccini, Yuliya Lierler, Peter Schüller

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Answer set programming (ASP) is a declarative programming paradigm stemming from logic programming that has been successfully applied in various domains. Despite amazing advancements in ASP solving, many applications still pose a challenge that is commonly referred to as grounding bottleneck. Devising, implementing, and evaluating a method that alleviates this problem for certain application domains is the focus of this paper. The proposed method is based on combining backtracking-based search algorithms employed in answer set solvers with SLDNF resolution from PROLOG. Using PROLOG inference on non-ground portions of a given program, both grounding time and the size of the ground …

Modular Answer Set Solving, Yuliya Lierler, Miroslaw Truszczyński

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Modularity is essential for modeling large-scale practical applications.We propose modular logic programs as a modular version of answer set programming and study the relationship of our formalism to an earlier concept of lp-modules.

Logic Programs Vs. First-Order Formulas In Textual Inference, Yuliya Lierler, Vladimir Lifschitz

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

In the problem of recognizing textual entailment, the goal is to decide, given a text and a hypothesis expressed in a natural language, whether a human reasoner would call the hypothesis a consequence of the text. One approach to this problem is to use a first-order reasoning tool to check whether the hypothesis can be derived from the text conjoined with relevant background knowledge, after expressing all of them by first-order formulas. Another possibility is to express the hypothesis, the text, and the background knowledge in a logic programming language, and use a logic programming system. We discuss the relation …

Abstract Modular Systems And Solvers, Yuliya Lierler, Miroslaw Truszczyński

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Integrating diverse formalisms into modular knowledge representation systems offers increased expressivity, modeling convenience and computational benefits. We introduce concepts of abstract modules and abstract modular systems to study general principles behind the design and analysis of modelfinding programs, or solvers, for integrated heterogeneous multi-logic systems. We show how abstract modules and abstract modular systems give rise to transition systems, which are a natural and convenient representation of solvers pioneered by the SAT community. We illustrate our approach by showing how it applies to answer set programming and propositional logic, and to multi-logic systems based on these two formalisms.

Hybrid Automated Reasoning Tools: From Black-Box To Clear-Box Integration, Marcello Balduccini, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Recently, researchers in answer set programming and constraint programming spent significant efforts in the development of hybrid languages and solving algorithms combining the strengths of these traditionally separate fields. These efforts resulted in a new research area: constraint answer set programming (CASP). CASP languages and systems proved to be largely successful at providing efficient solutions to problems involving hybrid reasoning tasks, such as scheduling problems with elements of planning. Yet, the development of CASP systems is difficult, requiring non-trivial expertise in multiple areas. This suggests a need for a study identifying general development principles of hybrid systems. Once these principles …

Making Solution Pluralism In Policy Making Accessible: Optimization Of Design And Services For Constituent Well-Being, Margeret A. Hall, Steven O. Kimbrough, Wibke Michalk, Jefff Schneider, Christof Weinhardt

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Policy makers are increasingly turning to computational support mechanisms for managing uncertainty, and constituent focused-decisions. Utilization and standardization of human-computer interaction principles to create solution pluralism (the condition of having a consideration set containing a multiplicity of credible solutions) is a fundamental to fulfilling this need. There is a need for standardized applications and user interfaces to deliver a higher quality of service, which assists policy makers in maintaining or increasing constituent well-being.

A Parallel Template For Implementing Filters For Biological Correlation Networks, Kathryn Dempsey Cooper, Vladimir Ufimtsev, Sanjukta Bhowmick, Hesham Ali

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Publications

High throughput biological experiments are critical for their role in systems biology – the ability to survey the state of cellular mechanisms on the broad scale opens possibilities for the scientific researcher to understand how multiple components come together, and what goes wrong in disease states. However, the data returned from these experiments is massive and heterogeneous, and requires intuitive and clever computational algorithms for analysis. The correlation network model has been proposed as a tool for modeling and analysis of this high throughput data; structures within the model identified by graph theory have been found to represent key players …

Real-Time Embodied Agent Adaptation, Ryan M. Schuetzler, David W. Wilson

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This paper reports on initial investigation of two emerging technologies, FaceFX and Smartbody, capable of creating life-like animations for embodied conversational agents (ECAs) such as the AVATAR agent. Real-time rendering and animation generation technologies can enable rapid adaptation of ECAs to changing circumstances. The benefits of each package are discussed.

Information And Communication Technologies Effects On Economic Growth, Nancy Jimenez, Lotfollah Najjar, Sajda Qureshi, Dwight Haworth

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

While Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are seen to be drivers of economic growth, it is unclear how this change takes place, especially since social and human factors are often seen to change as a result of ICTs. This paper investigates the effects of ICTs, and social and human factors in terms of skills, education, and labor, on economic growth. An augmented production function is used to quantify the effects that infodensity levels, defined as the combination of ICT networks and skills, education, and labor, have on the economic growth of high and low-to-middle income economies. This research draws upon …

Factors That Affect Information And Communication Technology Adoption By Small Businesses In China, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi, Lotfollah Najjar

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Emerging economies appear to be powering growth in their regions. While China is seen to lead growth in the emerging markets of Asia, 98% of its manufacturing and production base is powered by small businesses. These businesses represent the majority of all businesses in emerging countries and their growth increases with their successful adoption of Information Technology. As the driving force behind the economic growth of China, Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) are shaping the ways in which small businesses are able to grow. The majority of current research into the user acceptance and adoption of ICTs focusses on the …

The Role Of Human Capital In Information And Communication Technology Adoption For Development: Evidence From China, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi, Lotfollah Najjar

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Emerging economies, in particular China, are powering growth in Asia. While China is seen to lead growth in the emerging markets of Asia, 98% of its manufacturing and production base is powered by small businesses. These businesses represent the majority of all businesses in emerging countries and the growth of these businesses increases with their successful adoption of Information Technology. This paper uses a well-known model in Information Systems Adoption to analyze ICT usage, the effect ICT usage and human capital in the development of the small businesses in China. The reason this model is used is to find out …

A Model Of Icts Adoption For Sustainable Development: An Investigation Of Small Business In The United States And China, Jie Xiong, Sajda Qureshi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

No abstract provided.

Improving Usability: Evaluating The Effect Of Changing Environmental Factors On Cognitive Load, Robin J. Deegan

Theses

Mobile devices are now truly ubiquitous. Their pervasiveness in all facets of our lives brings many advantages. Principle to these advantages is the notion that mobile devices can be used “Anytime, Anywhere”. The size, portability, battery life and computational power of mobile devices mean that they can be used for a diverse range of uses in an equally diverse range of environments.

Usability is primarily concerned with “ease of use” and “learnability”. Mobile devices are challenging this notion of Usability as they are used in new ways. Firstly mobile devices arc used in complex distracting environments and these distractions interfere …

Visual Semantic Segmentation And Its Applications, Jizhou Gao

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

This dissertation addresses the difficulties of semantic segmentation when dealing with an extensive collection of images and 3D point clouds. Due to the ubiquity of digital cameras that help capture the world around us, as well as the advanced scanning techniques that are able to record 3D replicas of real cities, the sheer amount of visual data available presents many opportunities for both academic research and industrial applications. But the mere quantity of data also poses a tremendous challenge. In particular, the problem of distilling useful information from such a large repository of visual data has attracted ongoing interests in …