Software Engineering Commons^™

Basketball Charts, Kevin Lewis

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project was to develop an interactive web application with access to a self-updating database of basketball statistics. This data would then be used to allow users to generate informative visuals about specific sets of players. Obtaining statistics from the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the 2018-19 season was the original target goal. By utilizing an open source and community driven API, this goal was successfully achieved. With the data in place, the development of the chart building tool that was intended to be the primary functionality of the web application could begin. Highcharts was used as …

U.S. Census Explorer: A Gui And Visualization Tool For The U.S. Census Data Api, Timothy Snyder

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

U.S. Census Explorer is a software application that is designed to provide tools for intuitive exploration and analysis of United States census data for non-technical users. The application serves as an interface into the U.S. Census Bureau’s data API that enables a complete workflow from data acquisition to data visualization without the need for technical intervention from the user. The suite of tools provided include a graphical user interface for dynamically querying U.S. census data, geographic visualizations, and the ability to download your work to common spreadsheet and image formats for inclusion in external works.

Russia Today, Cyberterrorists Tomorrow: U.S. Failure To Prepare Democracy For Cyberspace, Jonathan F. Lancelot

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper is designed to expose vulnerabilities within the US electoral system, the use of cyberspace to exploit weaknesses within the information assurance strategies of the democratic and republican party organizations, and deficiencies within the social media communications and voting machine exploits. A brief history of discriminatory practices in voting rights and voting access will be set as the foundation for the argument that the system is vulnerable in the cyber age, and the need for reform at the local, state and national levels will be emphasized. The possibility of a foreign nation-state influencing the outcome of an election by …

Gradubique: An Academic Transcript Database Using Blockchain Architecture, Thinh Nguyen

Master's Projects

Blockchain has been widely adopted in the last few years even though it is in its infancy. The first well-known application built on blockchain technology was Bitcoin, which is a decentralized and distributed ledger to record crypto-currency transactions. All of the transactions in Bitcoin are anonymously transferred and validated by participants in the network. Bitcoin protocol and its operations are so reliable that technologists have been inspired to enhance blockchain technologies and deploy it outside of the crypto-currency world. The demand for private and non-crypto-currency solutions have surged among consortiums because of the security and fault tolerant features of blockchain. …

Open Source Foundations For Spatial Decision Support Systems, Jochen Albrecht

Publications and Research

Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS) were a hot topic in the 1990s, when researchers tried to imbue GIS with additional decision support features. Successful practical developments such as HAZUS or CommunityViz have since been built, based on commercial desktop software and without much heed for theory other than what underlies their process models. Others, like UrbanSim, have been completely overhauled twice but without much external scrutiny. Both the practical and the theoretical foundations of decision support systems have developed considerably over the past 20 years. This article presents an overview of these developments and then looks at what corresponding tools …

Comparison Mining From Text, Maksim Tkachenko

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Online product reviews are important factors of consumers' purchase decisions. They invade more and more spheres of our life, we have reviews on books, electronics, groceries, entertainments, restaurants, travel experiences, etc. More than 90 percent of consumers read online reviews before they purchase products as reported by various consumers surveys. This observation suggests that product review information enhances consumer experience and helps them to make better-informed purchase decisions. There is an enormous amount of online reviews posted on e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Apple, Yelp, TripAdvisor. They vary in information and may be written with different experiences and preferences.

If …

Eye Pressure Monitior, Andrea Nella Levy

Computer Engineering

The document describes a mobile application that takes information from an attached device which tests eye pressure. The device consists of an IOIO board connected to a custom device that measures the frequency of a given waveform. The device was designed by another student for their senior project, which I am taking over. This device is connected to an IOIO board which is a board designed by a Google employee which works with an android phone in order to create applications that work with embedded systems. The board comes with an API and connects to the phone via a micro-USB. …

Phr: Patient Health Record, Quinn Nelson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The rapid development of information technology systems has expanded into multiple disciplines and results in systems that are limited by initial design and implementation: the Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) space is no different. The introduction of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system has changed the way healthcare operates. Initial designs of these systems were focused on serving the needs of insurance companies and healthcare billing departments. Research shows that the design of EHR systems negatively impact provider-patient interactions and the care they receive. This capstone project capitalizes on the collaboration efforts between UNO and UNMC – by joining a research …

Applying Design Thinking To Student Outreach Projects: Experiences From An Information Systems School, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Alan Megargel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As countries turn into Smart Nations, Infocom Technology plays a key role in enhancing their competitiveness through high skilled workforces. Reaching to younger generations and attracting them to computing programs such as Information Systems (IS) and Computer Science (CS) is a key challenge faced by universities. Many high quality students from junior colleges either don’t choose IS programs or choose IS programs as their last option during the application process. A School of Information Systems (SIS) from a large metropolitan university decided to implement an innovative outreach program to attract high quality high school aka Junior College (JC) students. JC …

Learning Generalized Video Memory For Automatic Video Captioning, Poo-Hee Chang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent video captioning methods have made great progress by deep learning approaches with convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN). While there are techniques that use memory networks for sentence decoding, few work has leveraged on the memory component to learn and generalize the temporal structure in video. In this paper, we propose a new method, namely Generalized Video Memory (GVM), utilizing a memory model for enhancing video description generation. Based on a class of self-organizing neural networks, GVM’s model is able to learn new video features incrementally. The learned generalized memory is further exploited to decode the …

An Interpretable Neural Fuzzy Inference System For Predictions Of Underpricing In Initial Public Offerings, Di Wang, Xiaolin Qian, Chai Quek, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao, Xiaofeng Zhang, Geok See Ng, You Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to their aptitude in both accurate data processing and human comprehensible reasoning, neural fuzzy inference systems have been widely adopted in various application domains as decision support systems. Especially in real-world scenarios such as decision making in financial transactions, the human experts may be more interested in knowing the comprehensive reasons of certain advices provided by a decision support system in addition to how confident the system is on such advices. In this paper, we apply an integrated autonomous computational model termed genetic algorithm and rough set incorporated neural fuzzy inference system (GARSINFIS) to predict underpricing in initial public …

A Learning And Masking Approach To Secure Learning, Linh Nguyen, Sky Wang, Arunesh Sinha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been shown to be vulnerable against adversarial examples, which are data points cleverly constructed to fool the classifier. Such attacks can be devastating in practice, especially as DNNs are being applied to ever increasing critical tasks like image recognition in autonomous driving. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective on the problem. We do so by first defining robustness of a classifier to adversarial exploitation. Next, we show that the problem of adversarial example generation can be posed as learning problem. We also categorize attacks in literature into high and low perturbation attacks; well-known …

A Hybrid Model For Identity Obfuscation By Face Replacement, Qianru Sun, Ayush Tewari, Weipeng Xu, Mario Fritz, Christian Theobalt, Bernt Schiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As more and more personal photos are shared and tagged in social media, avoiding privacy risks such as unintended recognition, becomes increasingly challenging. We propose a new hybrid approach to obfuscate identities in photos by head replacement. Our approach combines state of the art parametric face synthesis with latest advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for data-driven image synthesis. On the one hand, the parametric part of our method gives us control over the facial parameters and allows for explicit manipulation of the identity. On the other hand, the data-driven aspects allow for adding fine details and overall realism as …

Unusual Events In Github Repositories, Christoph Treude, Larissa Leite, Maurício Aniche

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In large and active software projects, it becomes impractical for a developer to stay aware of all project activity. While it might not be necessary to know about each commit or issue, it is arguably important to know about the ones that are unusual. To investigate this hypothesis, we identified unusual events in 200 GitHub projects using a comprehensive list of ways in which an artifact can be unusual and asked 140 developers responsible for or affected by these events to comment on the usefulness of the corresponding information. Based on 2,096 answers, we identify the subset of unusual events …

Autonomous Agents In Snake Game Via Deep Reinforcement Learning, Zhepei Wei, Di Wang, Ming Zhang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao, You Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Since DeepMind pioneered a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model to play the Atari games, DRL has become a commonly adopted method to enable the agents to learn complex control policies in various video games. However, similar approaches may still need to be improved when applied to more challenging scenarios, where reward signals are sparse and delayed. In this paper, we develop a refined DRL model to enable our autonomous agent to play the classical Snake Game, whose constraint gets stricter as the game progresses. Specifically, we employ a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained with a variant of Q-learning. Moreover, we …

Analysis Of Public Transportation Patterns In A Densely Populated City With Station-Based Shared Bikes, Di Wang, Evan Wu, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Densely populated cities face great challenges of high transportation demand and limited physical space. Thus, in these cities, the public transportation system is heavily relied on. Conventional public transportation modes such as bus, taxi and subway have been globally deployed over the past century. In the last decade, a new type of public transportation mode, shared bike, emerged in many cities. These shared bikes are deployed by either government-regulated or profit-driven companies and are either station-based or station-less. Nonetheless, all of them are designed to better solve the last-mile problem in densely populated cities as complements to the conventional public …

Kbase: The United States Department Of Energy Systems Biology Knowledgebase, Adam P. Arkin, Robert W. Cottingham, Christopher S. Henry, Nomi L. Harris, Rick L. Stevens, Sergei Maslov, Doreen Ware, Fernando Perez, Shane Canon, Michael W. Sneddon, Matthew L. Henderson, William J. Riehl, Dan Murphy-Olson, Stephen Y. Chan, Roy T. Kamimura, Sunita Kumari, Meghan M. Drake, Thomas S. Brettin, Elizabeth M. Glass, Dylan Chivian, Dan Gunter, David J. Weston, Benjamin H. Allen, Jason Baumohl, Nathan L. Tintle

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Endgame Tablebases On Modern Chess Engines, Christopher D. Peterson

Computer Engineering

Modern chess engines have the ability to augment their evaluation by using massive tables containing billions of positions and their memorized solutions. This report examines the importance of these tables to better understand the circumstances under which they should be used. The analysis conducted in this paper empirically examines differences in size and speed of memorized positions and their impacts on engine strength. Using this technique, situations where memorized tables improve play (and situations where they do not) are discovered.

Region-Aware Reflection Removal With Unified Content And Gradient Priors, Renjie Wan, Boxin Shi, Ling-Yu Duan, Ah-Hwee Tan, Wen Gao, Alex C. Kot

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Removing the undesired reflections in images taken through the glass is of broad application to various image processing and computer vision tasks. Existing single image-based solutions heavily rely on scene priors such as separable sparse gradients caused by different levels of blur, and they are fragile when such priors are not observed. In this paper, we notice that strong reflections usually dominant a limited region in the whole image, and propose a region-aware reflection removal approach by automatically detecting and heterogeneously processing regions with and without reflections. We integrate content and gradient priors to jointly achieve missing contents restoration, as …

Libraryguru: Api Recommendation For Android Developers, Weizhao Yuan, Hoang H. Nguyen, Lingxiao Jiang, Yuting Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developing modern mobile applications often require the uses of many libraries specific for the mobile platform, which can be overwhelmingly too many for application developers to find what are needed for a functionality and where and how to use them properly. This paper presents a tool, named LibraryGuru, to recommend suitable Android APIs for given functionality descriptions. It not only recommends functional APIs that can be invoked for implementing the functionality, but also recommends event callback APIs that are inherent in the Android framework and need to be overridden in the application. LibraryGuru internally builds correlation databases among various functionality …

How Does Developer Interaction Relate To Software Quality? An Examination Of Product Development Data, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Industrial software systems are being increasingly developed by large and distributed teams. Tools like collaborative development environments (CDE) are used to facilitate interaction between members of such teams, with the expectation that social factors around the interaction would facilitate team functioning. In this paper, we first identify typically social characteristics of interaction in a software development team: reachability, connection, association, and clustering. We then examine how these factors relate to the quality of software produced by a team, in terms of the number of defects, through an empirical study of 70+ teams, involving 900+ developers in total, spread across 30+ …

Semantic Data Storage In Information Systems, Jean Vincent Fonou Dombeu, Raoul Kwuimi

The African Journal of Information Systems

The storage and retrieval of information are important functions of information systems (IS). These IS functions have been realized for decades, due to the maturity of the relational database technology. In recent years, the concept of Semantic Information System (SIS) has emerged as IS in which information is represented with explicit semantic based on its meaning rather than its syntax to enable its automatic and intelligent processing by computers. At present, there is a shortage of discussions on the topic of semantic data storage in IS as compared to the relational database storage counterpart. This study uses a combination of …

Cslc Tutoring Portal, Brian Hodges

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

A web portal designed for the Computer Science Learning Center to track students requesting help

Recommending Apis For Software Evolution, Ferdian Thung

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Softwares are constantly evolving. This evolution has been made easier through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). By leveraging APIs, developers reuse previously implemented functionalities and concentrate on writing new codes. These APIs may originate from either third parties or internally from other compo- nents of the software that are currently developed. In the first case, developers need to know how to find and use third party APIs. In the second case, developers need to be aware of internal APIs in their own software. In either case, there is often too much information to digest. For instance, finding the …

Anflo: Detecting Anomalous Sensitive Information Flows In Android Apps, Biniam Fisseha Demissie, Mariano Ceccato, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smartphone apps usually have access to sensitive user data such as contacts, geo-location, and account credentials and they might share such data to external entities through the Internet or with other apps. Confidentiality of user data could be breached if there are anomalies in the way sensitive data is handled by an app which is vulnerable or malicious. Existing approaches that detect anomalous sensitive data flows have limitations in terms of accuracy because the definition of anomalous flows may differ for different apps with different functionalities; it is normal for “Health” apps to share heart rate information through the Internet …

Creating A Reproducible Metadata Transformation Pipeline Using Technology Best Practices, Cara Key, Mike Waugh

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Over the course of two years, a team of librarians and programmers from LSU Libraries migrated the 186 collections of the Louisiana Digital Library from OCLC's CONTENTdm platform over to the open-source Islandora platform.

Early in the process, the team understood the value of creating a reproducible metadata transformation pipeline, because there were so many unknowns at the beginning of the process along with the certainty that mistakes would be made. This presentation will describe how the team used innovative and collaborative tools, such as Trello, Ansible, Vagrant, VirtualBox, git and GitHub to accomplish the task.

Domain-Specific Cross-Language Relevant Question Retrieval, Bowen Xu, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Chinese developers often cannot effectively search questions in English, because they may have difficulties in translating technical words from Chinese to English and formulating proper English queries. For the purpose of helping Chinese developers take advantage of the rich knowledge base of Stack Overflow and simplify the question retrieval process, we propose an automated cross-language relevant question retrieval (CLRQR) system to retrieve relevant English questions for a given Chinese question. CLRQR first extracts essential information (both Chinese and English) from the title and description of the input Chinese question, then performs domain-specific translation of the essential Chinese information into English, …

The Impact Of Rapid Release Cycles On The Integration Delay Of Fixed Issues, Daniel Alencar Da Costa, Shane Mcintosh, Christoph Treude, Uirá Kulesza, Ahmed E. Hassan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The release frequency of software projects has increased in recent years. Adopters of so-called rapid releases—short release cycles, often on the order of weeks, days, or even hours—claim that they can deliver fixed issues (i.e., implemented bug fixes and new features) to users more quickly. However, there is little empirical evidence to support these claims. In fact, our prior work shows that code integration phases may introduce delays for rapidly releasing projects—98% of the fixed issues in the rapidly releasing Firefox project had their integration delayed by at least one release. To better understand the impact that rapid release cycles …

Cora: Commingled Remains And Analytics – An Open Community Ecosystem, Nicole Mcelroy, Ryan Ernst

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Anthropologists at organizations such as the DPAA (Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency) have the tough job of sorting through commingled remains of fallen soldiers. Under the direction of Professor Pawaskar at the College of IS&T, Ryan Ernst and I are currently developing a web application for the DPAA that will help them inventory the bones and record all the appropriate associations. After the inventory web application is built we will begin the analysis process using graph theory and other mathematical algorithms. This will ultimately help organizations like the DPAA get closer to the end goal of identifying fallen soldiers from commingled …

Visualizing Research Impact Through Citation Data, Yong Wang, Conglei Shi, Liangyue Li, Hanghang Tong, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Research impact plays a critical role in evaluating the research quality and influence of a scholar, a journal, or a conference. Many researchers have attempted to quantify research impact by introducing different types of metrics based on citation data, such as h-index, citation count, and impact factor. These metrics are widely used in the academic community. However, quantitative metrics are highly aggregated in most cases and sometimes biased, which probably results in the loss of impact details that are important for comprehensively understanding research impact. For example, which research area does a researcher have great research impact on? How does …