Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

Trustworthiness Of Web Services, Britto N. Arockiasamy

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Workflow systems orchestrate various business tasks to attain an objective. Web services can be leveraged to handle individual tasks. Before anyone intends to leverage service components, it is imperative and essential to evaluate the trustworthiness of these services. Therefore, choosing a trustworthy service has become an important decision while designing a workflow system. Trustworthiness can be defined as the likelihood of a service functioning as it is intended.

Selection of a service that satisfies business goals involves collecting relevant information such as security mechanisms, reliability, performance and availability. It is important to arrive at total trustworthiness, which incorporates all of …

Inferring The Untold: Mining Software Engineering Research Publication Networks, Santonu Sarkar, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Since the inception of organized research publication in software engineering in 1975, the discipline has gained maturity. This journey has been guided by the synergy of ideas and interactions of individuals. In this paper, we discuss a method for aggregating the corpus of 19,000+ papers and 21,000+ authors across 16 specialized software engineering venues. We focus on the approach of data collection, processing and storage. It can be used to address questions by the software engineering research community. We evaluate three questions: patterns of research topics with time, factors influencing the contribution of individual researchers, and the interaction among the …

A Hybrid Approach To Music Recommendation: Exploiting Collaborative Music Tags And Acoustic Features, Jaime C. Kaufman

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recommendation systems make it easier for an individual to navigate through large datasets by recommending information relevant to the user. Companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, and others utilize these types of systems in order to increase revenue by providing personalized recommendations. Recommendation systems generally use one of the two techniques: collaborative filtering (i.e., collective intelligence) and content-based filtering.

Systems using collaborative filtering recommend items based on a community of users, their preferences, and their browsing or shopping behavior. Examples include Netflix, Amazon shopping, and Last.fm. This approach has been proven effective due to increased popularity, and …

Skyhunter: A Multi-Surface Environment For Supporting Oil And Gas Exploration, Teddy Seyed, Mario Costa Sousa, Frank Maurer, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The process of oil and gas exploration and its result, the decision to drill for oil in a specific location, relies on a number of distinct but related domains. These domains require effective collaboration to come to a decision that is both cost effective and maintains the integrity of the environment. As we show in this paper, many of the existing technologies and practices that support the oil and gas exploration process overlook fundamental user issues such as collaboration, interaction and visualization. The work presented in this paper is based upon a design process that involved expert users from an …

A Robust Rgbd Slam System For 3d Environment With Planar Surfaces, Po-Chang Su, Ju Shen, Sen-Ching S. Cheung

Computer Science Faculty Publications

With the increasing popularity of RGB-depth (RGB-D) sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect, there have been much research on capturing and reconstructing 3D environments using a movable RGB-D sensor. The key process behind these kinds of simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) systems is the iterative closest point or ICP algorithm, which is an iterative algorithm that can estimate the rigid movement of the camera based on the captured 3D point clouds. While ICP is a well-studied algorithm, it is problematic when it is used in scanning large planar regions such as wall surfaces in a room. The lack of depth …

Oyster Sustainability Modeling As A Public Resource, Nathan A. Cooper

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A simulation algorithm based on biological references points proposed by Powell and Klink (2007) is implemented for predicting the total allowable catch of eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) from Louisiana’s coast. The model accepts initial per-square-meter shell mass and oyster size distributions as input. Fishing effort is provided as fractions removed of each resource for each month of the season. The model outputs the expected remaining shell mass and harvests of sack and seed oysters after discrete fishing months. Oyster mortality credits the shell budget, while fishing fractions debit oyster and shell resources. Surviving oysters grow larger along a …

Forensic Analysis Of Whatsapp On Android Smartphones, Neha S. Thakur

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Android forensics has evolved over time offering significant opportunities and exciting challenges. On one hand, being an open source platform Android is giving developers the freedom to contribute to the rapid growth of the Android market whereas on the other hand Android users may not be aware of the security and privacy implications of installing these applications on their phones. Users may assume that a password-locked device protects their personal information, but applications may retain private information on devices, in ways that users might not anticipate. In this thesis we will be concentrating on one such application called 'WhatsApp', a …

Reaper – Toward Automating Mobile Cloud Communication, Daniel R. Ward

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Mobile devices connected to cloud based services are becoming a mainstream method of delivery up-to-date and context aware information to users. Connecting mobile applications to cloud service require significant developer effort. Yet this communication code usually follows certain patterns, varying accordingly to the specific type of data sent and received from the server. By analyzing the causes of theses variations, we can create a system that can automate the code creation for communication from a mobile device to a cloud server. To automate code creation, a general pattern must extracted. This general solution can then be applied to any database …

Open Source Software Development Process Model – A Grounded Theory Approach, Keng Siau, Y. Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The open source movement has provided software users with more choices, lower software acquisition cost, more flexible software customization, and possibly higher quality software product. Although the development of open source software is dynamic and it encourages innovations, the process can be chaotic. An Open Source Software Development (OSSD) process model to enhance the survivability of OSSD projects is needed. This research uses the grounded theory approach to derive a Phase-Role-Skill-Responsibility (PRSR) OSSD process model. The three OSSD process phases -- Launch Stage, Before the First Release, and Between Releases -- address the characteristics of the OSSD process as well …

Ikriya: Simulating Software Quality Enhancement With Selected Replacement Policies, Sindhu Dharani Murthy

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The quality of information systems in any organization helps to determine the
efficiency of the organization. Many organizations maintain a custom software portfolio, whose quality is important to the organization. Management would like to optimize the portfolio’s quality. Decisions about software replacement or enhancement are made based on organizational needs and priorities. The development resources allocated help in determining the quality of new software, and should be put to optimal use. Enhancing existing software might sound cheap and easy but it is not always efficient. This thesis proposes a simulation model - iKriya - for this problem. It explores the …

Knowledge As A Service Framework For Disaster Data Management, Katarina Grolinger, Emna Mezghani, Miriam Am Capretz, Ernesto Exposito

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Each year, a number of natural disasters strike across the globe, killing hundreds and causing billions of dollars in property and infrastructure damage. Minimizing the impact of disasters is imperative in today’s society. As the capabilities of software and hardware evolve, so does the role of information and communication technology in disaster mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery. A large quantity of disaster-related data is available, including response plans, records of previous incidents, simulation data, social media data, and Web sites. However, current data management solutions offer few or no integration capabilities. Moreover, recent advances in cloud computing, big data, and …

Neural Modeling Of Episodic Memory: Encoding, Retrieval, And Forgetting, Wenwen Wang, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Janusz A. Starzyk

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a neural model that learns episodic traces in response to a continuous stream of sensory input and feedback received from the environment. The proposed model, based on fusion Adaptive Resonance Theory (fusion ART) network, extracts key events and encodes spatio-temporal relations between events by creating cognitive nodes dynamically. The model further incorporates a novel memory search procedure, which performs parallel search of stored episodic traces continuously. Combined with a mechanism of gradual forgetting, the model is able to achieve a high level of memory performance and robustness, while controlling memory consumption over time. We present experimental studies, …

Talk Versus Work: Characteristics Of Developer Collaboration On The Jazz Platform, Subhajit Datta, Renuka Sindhgatta, Bikram Sengupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

IBM's Jazz initiative offers a state-of-the-art collaborative development environment (CDE) facilitating developer interactions around interdependent units of work. In this paper, we analyze development data across two versions of a major IBM product developed on the Jazz platform, covering in total 19 months of development activity, including 17,000+ work items and 61,000+ comments made by more than 190 developers in 35 locations. By examining the relation between developer talk and work, we find evidence that developers maintain a reasonably high level of connectivity with peer developers with whom they share work dependencies, but the span of a developer's communication goes …

Mydeal: The Context-Aware Urban Shopping Assistant, Kartik Muralidharan, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common problem in large Urban cities, of the sort seen in Asia, is the huge number of retail options available in the city. In particular, it is not uncommon to find multiple malls, each with hundreds of stores inside, just a short distance from each other in almost every part of these cities. These factors make it incredibly hard for consumers to identify stores of interest to them in any particular mall.In response, a number of shopping assistance applications have been created for mobile phones.However, these applications mostly just allow users to know which stores are where or to …

Formal Analysis Of Pervasive Computing Systems, Yan Liu, Xian Zhang, Jin Song Dong, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jit Biswas, Mounir Mokhtari

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pervasive computing systems are heterogenous and complex as they usually involve human activities, various sensors and actuators as well as middleware for system controlling. Therefore, analyzing such systems is highly nontrivial. In this work, we propose to use formal methods for analyzing pervasive computing systems. Firstly, a formal modeling framework is proposed to cover the main characteristics of pervasive computing systems (e.g., context-awareness, concurrent communications, layered architectures). Secondly, we identify the safety requirements (e.g., free of deadlocks and conflicts etc.) and propose their specifications as safety and liveness properties. Finally, we demonstrate our ideas using a case study of a …

A Novel Unbalanced Tree Structure For Low-Cost Authentication Of Streaming Content On Mobile And Sensor Devices, Thivya Kandappu, Vijay Sivaraman, Roksana Boreli

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider stored content being streamed to a resource-poor device (such as a sensor node or a mobile phone), and address the issue of authenticating such content in realtime at the receiver. Per-packet digital signatures incur high computational cost, while per-block signatures impose high delays. A Merkle hash tree combines the benefits of the two by having a single signature per-block (at the root of the tree), while allowing immediate per-packet verification by following a hash-path logarithmic in the number of packets. In this paper we explore how the structure of the Merkle tree can be adapted to improve playback …

Overcoming The Challenges In Cost Estimation For Distributed Software Projects, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe how we studied, in-situ, the operational processes of three large high process maturity distributed software development companies and discovered three common problems they faced with respect to early stage project cost estimation. We found that project managers faced significant challenges to accurately estimate project costs because the standard metrics-based estimation tools they used (a) did not effectively incorporate diverse distributed project configurations and characteristics, (b) required comprehensive data that was not fully available for all starting projects, and (c) required significant domain experience to derive accurate estimates. To address these challenges, we collaborated with practitioners at the three …

A Software Framework For Augmentative And Alternative Communication, Adam Loup

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

By combining context awareness and analytical based relevance computing software, the proposed Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) framework aims provide a foundation to create communication systems to dramatically increase the words available to AAC users. The framework will allow the lexicon available to the user to be dynamically updated by varying sources and to promote words based on contextual relevance. This level of customization enables the development of highly customizable AAC devices that evolve with use to become more personal while also broadening the expressiveness of the user. In order to maximize the efficient creation of conversation for AAC users, …

The Social Network Of Software Engineering Research, Subhajit Datta, Nishant Kumar, Santonu Sarkar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The social network perspective has served as a useful framework for studying scientific research collaboration in different disciplines. Although collaboration in computer science research has received some attention, software engineering research collaboration has remained unexplored to a large extent. In this paper, we examine the collaboration networks based on co-authorship information of papers from ten software engineering publication venues over the 1976-2010 time period. We compare time variations of certain parameters of these networks with corresponding parameters of collaboration networks from other disciplines. We also explore whether software engineering collaboration networks manifest symptoms of the small-world phenomenon, conform to the …

Mitigating The True Cost Of Advertisement-Supported "Free" Mobile Applications, Azeem J. Khan, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Archan Misra, Srinivasan Seshan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The dominant, "ad-supported free application" model for consumer-oriented mobile computing is seemingly imperiled by the growing global adoption of metered data pricing plans by mobile operators. In this paper, we explore the opportunities for addressing this emerging conflict by enabling more intelligent ad delivery to such mobile devices. One especially promising path is leveraging the increasing availability of heterogeneous wireless access technologies (e.g., WiFi, femtocells) that offer less restrictive and more energy-efficient transport substrates for such data traffic. To understand the possibilities that exist, we first profile the advertisement traffic characteristics for some of the most popular advertisement-supported consumer applications, …

Autonomic Database Management: State Of The Art And Future Trends, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

In recent years, Database Management Systems (DBMS) have increased significantly in size and complexity, increasing the extent to which database administration is a time-consuming and expensive task. Database Administrator (DBA) expenses have become a significant part of the total cost of ownership. This results in the need to develop Autonomous Database Management systems (ADBMS) that would manage themselves without human intervention. Accordingly, this paper evaluates the current state of autonomous database systems and identifies gaps and challenges in the achievement of fully autonomic databases. In addition to highlighting technical challenges and gaps, we identify one human factor, gaining the trust …

Ontology–Based Representation Of Simulation Models, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam A.M. Capretz, José R. Marti, Krishan D. Srivastava

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Ontologies have been used in a variety of domains for multiple purposes such as establishing common terminology, organizing domain knowledge and describing domain in a machine-readable form. Moreover, ontologies are the foundation of the Semantic Web and often semantic integration is achieved using ontology. Even though simulation demonstrates a number of similar characteristics to Semantic Web or semantic integration, including heterogeneity in the simulation domain, representation and semantics, the application of ontology in the simulation domain is still in its infancy. This paper proposes an ontology-based representation of simulation models. The goal of this research is to facilitate comparison among …

An Iterative Association Rule Mining Framework To K-Anonymize A Dataset, Michael Hayes, Miriam A M Capretz, Jefferey Reed, Cheryl Forchuk

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Preserving and maintaining client privacy and anonymity is of utmost importance in any domain and specially so in healthcare, as loss of either of these can result in legal and ethical implications. Further, it is sometimes important to extract meaningful and useful information from existing data for research or management purposes. In this case it is necessary for the organization who manages the dataset to be certain that no attributes can identify individuals or group of individuals. This paper proposes an extendable and generalized framework to anonymize a dataset using an iterative association rule mining approach. The proposed framework also …

Coping With Distance: An Empirical Study Of Communication On The Jazz Platform, Renuka Sindhgatta, Bikram Sengupta, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Global software development - which is characterized by teams separated by physical distance and/or time-zone differences - has traditionally posed significant communication challenges. Often these have caused delays in completing tasks, or created misalignment across sites leading to re-work. In recent years, however, a new breed of development environments with rich collaboration features have emerged to facilitate cross-site work in distributed projects. In this paper we revisit the question "does distance matter?" in the context of IBM Jazz Platform -- a state-of-the-art collaborative development environment. We study the ecosystem of a large distributed team of around 300 members across 35 …

Finding Relevant Answers In Software Forums, Swapna Gottopati, David Lo, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online software forums provide a huge amount of valuable content. Developers and users often ask questions and receive answers from such forums. The availability of a vast amount of thread discussions in forums provides ample opportunities for knowledge acquisition and summarization. For a given search query, current search engines use traditional information retrieval approach to extract webpages containing relevant keywords. However, in software forums, often there are many threads containing similar keywords where each thread could contain a lot of posts as many as 1,000 or more. Manually finding relevant answers from these long threads is a painstaking task to …

Software Process Evaluation: A Machine Learning Approach, Ning Chen, Steven C. H. Hoi, Xiaokui Xiao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software process evaluation is essential to improve software development and the quality of software products in an organization. Conventional approaches based on manual qualitative evaluations (e.g., artifacts inspection) are deficient in the sense that (i) they are time-consuming, (ii) they suffer from the authority constraints, and (iii) they are often subjective. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel semi-automated approach to software process evaluation using machine learning techniques. In particular, we formulate the problem as a sequence classification task, which is solved by applying machine learning algorithms. Based on the framework, we define a new quantitative indicator to …

Enabling Gpu Acceleration With Messaging Middleware, Randall E. Duran, Li Zhang, Tom Hayhurst

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graphics processing units (GPUs) offer great potential for accelerating processing for a wide range of scientific and business applications. However, complexities associated with using GPU technology have limited its use in applications. This paper reviews earlier approaches improving GPU accessibility, and explores how integration with middleware messaging technologies can further improve the accessibility and usability of GPU-enabled platforms. The results of a proof-of-concept integration between an open-source messaging middleware platform and a general-purpose GPU platform using the CUDA framework are presented. Additional applications of this technique are identified and discussed as potential areas for further research.

Cooperative Reinforcement Learning In Topology-Based Multi-Agent Systems, Dan Xiao, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topology-based multi-agent systems (TMAS), wherein agents interact with one another according to their spatial relationship in a network, are well suited for problems with topological constraints. In a TMAS system, however, each agent may have a different state space, which can be rather large. Consequently, traditional approaches to multi-agent cooperative learning may not be able to scale up with the complexity of the network topology. In this paper, we propose a cooperative learning strategy, under which autonomous agents are assembled in a binary tree formation (BTF). By constraining the interaction between agents, we effectively unify the state space of individual …

Automatic Content Generation For Video Self Modeling, Ju Shen, Anusha Raghunathan, Sen-Ching S. Cheung, Ravi R. Patel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Video self modeling (VSM) is a behavioral intervention technique in which a learner models a target behavior by watching a video of him or herself. Its effectiveness in rehabilitation and education has been repeatedly demonstrated but technical challenges remain in creating video contents that depict previously unseen behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel system that re-renders new talking-head sequences suitable to be used for VSM treatment of patients with voice disorder. After the raw footage is captured, a new speech track is either synthesized using text-to-speech or selected based on voice similarity from a database of clean speeches. …

A Hybrid Agent Architecture Integrating Desire, Intention And Reinforcement Learning, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yew-Soon Ong, Akejariyawong Tapanuj

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a hybrid agent architecture that integrates the behaviours of BDI agents, specifically desire and intention, with a neural network based reinforcement learner known as Temporal DifferenceFusion Architecture for Learning and COgNition (TD-FALCON). With the explicit maintenance of goals, the agent performs reinforcement learning with the awareness of its objectives instead of relying on external reinforcement signals. More importantly, the intention module equips the hybrid architecture with deliberative planning capabilities, enabling the agent to purposefully maintain an agenda of actions to perform and reducing the need of constantly sensing the environment. Through reinforcement learning, plans can also be …