Software Engineering Commons^™

Client/Server Data Synchronization In Ios Development, Dmitry Tumanov

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Electronic gadgets such as touchpads and smartphones are becoming more popular in business and everyday life. The main advantage of mobile devices over personal computers is their portability. Cellular data plans allow Internet access without having permanent access point. There is a number of web-based applications available for gadgets. The primary goal of these apps is to provide their services through constant Internet access. However, it may affect the operation of both devices and applications. The objective of this thesis is to find a better way of client/server data synchronization in iOS development that can reduce the negative consequences of …

Band Selection For Hyperspectral Images Using Probabilistic Memetic Algorithm, Liang Feng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Meng-Hiot Lim, Si Wei Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Band selection plays an important role in identifying the most useful and valuable information contained in the hyperspectral images for further data analysis such as classification, clustering, etc. Memetic algorithm (MA), among other metaheuristic search methods, has been shown to achieve competitive performances in solving the NP-hard band selection problem. In this paper, we propose a formal probabilistic memetic algorithm for band selection, which is able to adaptively control the degree of global exploration against local exploitation as the search progresses. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed probabilistic mechanism, empirical studies conducted on five well-known hyperspectral images against two …

Gta-M: Greedy Trajectory-Aware (M Copies) Routing For Airborne Networks, Xiaoping Ma, Hwee Xian Tan, Alvin C. Valera

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Airborne networks have potential applications in both civilian and military domains - such as passenger in-flight Internet connectivity, air traffic control and in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) activities. However, airborne networks suffer from frequent disruptions due to high node mobility, ad hoc connectivity and line-of-sight blockages. These challenges can be alleviated through the use of disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) techniques. In this paper, we propose GTA-m, a multi-copy greedy trajectory-aware routing protocol for airborne networks. GTA-m employs DTN capabilities and exploits the use of flight information to forwarded bundles greedily to intended destination(s). To alleviate the local minima issues that …

Structure Preserving Large Imagery Reconstruction, Ju Shen, Jianjun Yang, Sami Taha Abu Sneineh, Bryson Payne, Markus Hitz

Computer Science Faculty Publications

With the explosive growth of web-based cameras and mobile devices, billions of photographs are uploaded to the internet. We can trivially collect a huge number of photo streams for various goals, such as image clustering, 3D scene reconstruction, and other big data applications. However, such tasks are not easy due to the fact the retrieved photos can have large variations in their view perspectives, resolutions, lighting, noises, and distortions. Furthermore, with the occlusion of unexpected objects like people, vehicles, it is even more challenging to find feature correspondences and reconstruct realistic scenes. In this paper, we propose a structure-based image …

Pre-R: Making Health Care Healthier, Grant Ramil, Mark Corpuz, Eliot Mestre, Akshay Rangnekar, Alex Lin

Computer Engineering

The Pre-R project provides a central database of medical service fees offered by hospitals across the United States. The database is crowdsourced and all data points are provided by end users or by hospital providers themselves. The fees are searchable through a website (www.pre-r.com) and iOS and Android applications. The mobile applications also provide a way for users to capture a picture of any medical bill and upload it for analysis and entry to our database.

Contextual Anomaly Detection In Big Sensor Data, Michael Hayes, Miriam A M Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Performing predictive modelling, such as anomaly detection, in Big Data is a difficult task. This problem is compounded as more and more sources of Big Data are generated from environmental sensors, logging applications, and the Internet of Things. Further, most current techniques for anomaly detection only consider the content of the data source, i.e. the data itself, without concern for the context of the data. As data becomes more complex it is increasingly important to bias anomaly detection techniques for the context, whether it is spatial, temporal, or semantic. The work proposed in this paper outlines a contextual anomaly detection …

Socio-Physical Analytics: Challenges & Opportunities, Archan Misra, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Shriguru Nayak, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we argue for expanded research into an area called Socio-Physical Analytics, that focuses on combining the behavioral insight gained from mobile-sensing based monitoring of physical behavior with the inter-personal relationships and preferences deduced from online social networks. We highlight some of the research challenges in combining these heterogeneous data sources and then describe some examples of our ongoing work (based on real-world data being collected at SMU) that illustrate two aspects of socio-physical analytics: (a) how additional demographic and online analytics based attributes can potentially provide better insights into the preferences and behaviors of individuals or groups …

Handling Location Uncertainty In Event Driven Experimentation, Kartik Muralidharan, Srinivasan Seshan, Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The wide spread use of smart phones has ushered in a wave of context-based advertising services that operate on pre-defined user events. A prime example is Location Based Advertising. What is missing though, is the ability to experiment with these services under varying event conditions with real users using their regular phones in real-world environments. Such experiments provide greater insight into user needs for and responsiveness towards context-based advertising applications. However, these event-driven experiments rely on data that arrive from sources such as mobile sensors which have inherent uncertainties associated with them. This effects the interpretation of the outcome of …

[Sabbatical Report], Huanjing Wang

Sabbatical Reports

My sabbatical leave was conducted during Spring semester 2014. The leave was successful because it strengthened my research in data mining and software engineering domains and resulted four full-paper publications in peer-reviewed international conferences and one journal paper (to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal). The purpose of my sabbatical was to complete two main projects: (1) Investigate the stability and defect prediction model performance of feature selection techniques together on real-world software metrics data and (2) Design a novel, robust, and efficient metric selection method for imbalanced data.

Automatic Objects Removal For Scene Completion, Jianjun Yang, Yin Wang, Honggang Wang, Kun Hua, Wei Wang, Ju Shen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

With the explosive growth of Web-based cameras and mobile devices, billions of photographs are uploaded to the Internet. We can trivially collect a huge number of photo streams for various goals, such as 3D scene reconstruction and other big data applications. However, this is not an easy task due to the fact the retrieved photos are neither aligned nor calibrated. Furthermore, with the occlusion of unexpected foreground objects like people, vehicles, it is even more challenging to find feature correspondences and reconstruct realistic scenes. In this paper, we propose a structure-based image completion algorithm for object removal that produces visually …

Cimloc: A Crowdsourcing Indoor Digital Map Construction System For Localization, Xiuming Zhang, Yunye Jin, Hwee Xian Tan, Wee-Seng Soh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Indoor maps, as crucial prerequisites for many indoor localization and navigation systems, are sometimes inaccessible. The absence of an indoor map database and the high cost of manually constructing an indoor map produce a need for an inexpensive and efficient way to dynamically construct indoor maps. The ubiquity of sensor-equipped mobile devices enables us to crowdsource user trajectories, out of which indoor digital maps can be automatically constructed at low costs. Similar to other crowdsourced data, the collected user trajectories are often noisy and of low fidelity, which poses a challenge to the accurate map construction. To alleviate this problem, …

A Trust-Aware System For Personalized User Recommendations In Social Networks, Magdalini Eirinaki, Malamati Louta, Iraklis Varlamis

Faculty Publications

Social network analysis has recently gained a lot of interest because of the advent and the increasing popularity of social media, such as blogs, social networking applications, microblogging, or customer review sites. In this environment, trust is becoming an essential quality among user interactions and the recommendation for useful content and trustful users is crucial for all the members of the network. In this paper, we introduce a framework for handling trust in social networks, which is based on a reputation mechanism that captures the implicit and explicit connections between the network members, analyzes the semantics and dynamics of these …

Semantic Privacy Policies For Service Description And Discovery In Service-Oriented Architecture, Diego Z. Garcia, Miriam A M Capretz, M. Beatriz F. Toledo

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Privacy preservation in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an open problem. This paper focuses on the areas of service description and discovery. The problems in these areas are that currently it is not possible to describe how a service provider deals with information received from a service consumer as well as discover a service that satisfies the privacy preferences of a consumer. There is currently no framework which offers a solution that supports a rich description of privacy policies and their integration in the process of service discovery. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to propose a privacy preservation …

Extended Comprehensive Study Of Association Measures For Fault Localization, Lucia Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Ferdian Thung, Aditya Budi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spectrum-based fault localization is a promising approach to automatically locate root causes of failures quickly. Two well-known spectrum-based fault localization techniques, Tarantula and Ochiai, measure how likely a program element is a root cause of failures based on profiles of correct and failed program executions. These techniques are conceptually similar to association measures that have been proposed in statistics, data mining, and have been utilized to quantify the relationship strength between two variables of interest (e.g., the use of a medicine and the cure rate of a disease). In this paper, we view fault localization as a measurement of the …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …