Software Engineering Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

Developing Digital Field Guides For Plants: A Study From The Perspective Of Users, Emily Roseanne Schwarz

Master's Theses

A field guide is a tool to identify an object of natural history. Field guides
cover a wide range of topics from plants to fungi, birds to mammals, and shells to minerals. Traditionally, field guides are books, usually small enough to be carried outdoors . They enjoy wide popularity in modern life; almost every American home and library owns at least one field guide, and the same is also true for other areas of the world.

At this time, companies, non-profits, and universities are developing computer
technologies to replace printed field guides for identifying plants. This thesis
examines the state …

Adaptation Of The Nevada Climate Change Data Portal Web Interface To Small-Screen Mobile Devices, Tsvetan Komarov

Festival of Communities: UG Symposium (Posters)

Robust and convenient access to the Nevada Climate Change Data Portal is vital for the project’s success, because of the researchers’ need to gather and analyze large volumes of data with minimal effort. However, the current version of the data portal web interface is not optimized for small-screen mobile devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, iPads, NetBooks, and others. The proposed research will address this issue by exploring the current methods for creating a client-aware web interface adaptable to the variety of small-screen devices, designing and implementing the most appropriate solution, and finally, user testing of the implemented solution.

Evolution Of Developer Collaboration On The Jazz Platform: A Study Of A Large Scale Agile Project, Subhajit Datta, Renuka Sindhgatta, Bikram Sengupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaboration is a key aspect of the agile philosophy of software development. As a software system matures over iterations, trends of developer collaboration can offer valuable insights into project dynamics. In this paper, we study evolution of developer collaboration for a large scale agile project on the Jazz platform. We construct networks of collaboration based on developer affiliations across comments on work items and file changes; and then compare parameters of such networks with established results from networks of scientific collaborations. The comparisons illuminate interesting facets of developer collaboration on the Jazz platform. Such perception helps deeper understanding of the …

Automated Case Review System For Transitional Assistance, Don Minh Le

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project was to create an automated Case Review System. The current Case Review System is a manual process that is being performed by Eligibility Lead Workers and Eligibility Worker Supervisors. The reviewers utilize an Excel sheet to record every individual reviewers results and print out many copies for the appropriate parties. The automated system is designed to track, and catch mistakes in determining eligibility of the welfare applicants. Moreover, Case Review System provides the Transitional Assistance Department (TAD) the ability to report error trends as a training tool to reduce future case errors. This system shall …

Towards Evaluating The Quality Of A Spreadsheet: The Case Of The Analytical Spreadsheet Model, Thomas A. Grossman Jr., Vijay Mehrotra, J Sander

Business Analytics and Information Systems

We consider the challenge of creating guidelines to evaluate the quality of a spreadsheet model. We suggest four principles. First, state the domain—the spreadsheets to which the guidelines apply. Second, distinguish between the process by which a spreadsheet is constructed from the resulting spreadsheet artifact. Third, guidelines should be written in terms of the artifact, independent of the process. Fourth, the meaning of “quality” must be defined. We illustrate these principles with an example. We define the domain of “analytical spreadsheet models”, which are used in business, finance, engineering, and science. We propose for discussion a framework and terminology for …

A Unit Test Approach For Database Schema Evolution, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam A M Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Context: The constant changes in today’s business requirements demand continuous database revisions. Hence, database structures, not unlike software applications, deteriorate during their lifespan and thus require refactoring in order to achieve a longer life span. Although unit tests support changes to application programs and refactoring, there is currently a lack of testing strategies for database schema evolution.

Objective: This work examines the challenges for database schema evolution and explores the possibility of using various testing strategies to assist with schema evolution. Specifically, the work proposes a novel unit test approach for the application code that accesses databases with the objective …

In-Degree Dynamics Of Large-Scale P2p Systems, Zhongmei Yao, Daren B. H. Cline, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper builds a complete modeling framework for understanding user churn and in-degree dynamics in unstructured P2P systems in which each user can be viewed as a stationary alternating renewal process. While the classical Poisson result on the superposition of n stationary renewal processes for n→∞ requires that each point process become sparser as n increases, it is often difficult to rigorously show this condition in practice. In this paper, we first prove that despite user heterogeneity and non-Poisson arrival dynamics, a superposition of edge-arrival processes to a live user under uniform selection converges to a Poisson process when …

Global Dimension Of Ci: Compete Or Collaborate, Arden L. Bement Jr.

PPRI Digital Library

No abstract provided.

Mining Collaboration Patterns From A Large Developer Network, Didi Surian, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this study, we extract patterns from a large developer collaborations network extracted from Source Forge. Net at high and low level of details. At the high level of details, we extract various network-level statistics from the network. At the low level of details, we extract topological sub-graph patterns that are frequently seen among collaborating developers. Extracting sub graph patterns from large graphs is a hard NP-complete problem. To address this challenge, we employ a novel combination of graph mining and graph matching by leveraging network-level properties of a developer network. With the approach, we successfully analyze a snapshot of …

Customer Communicator, Eddie Tavarez

Computer Science and Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

Personalization By Website Transformation: Theory And Practice, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present an analysis of a progressive series of out-of-turn transformations on a hierarchical website to personalize a user’s interaction with the site. We formalize the transformation in graph-theoretic terms and describe a toolkit we built that enumerates all of the traversals enabled by every possible complete series of these transformations in any site and computes a variety of metrics while simulating each traversal therein to qualify the relationship between a site’s structure and the cumulative effect of support for the transformation in a site. We employed this toolkit in two websites. The results indicate that the transformation enables users …

A Social Network Based Study Of Software Team Dynamics, Subhajit Datta, Vikrant S. Kaulgoud, Vibhu Saujanya Sharma, Nishant Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Members of software project teams have specific roles and responsibilities which are formally defined during project inception or at the start of a life cycle activity. Often, the team structure undergoes spontaneous changes as delivery deadlines draw near and critical tasks have to be completed. Some members -- depending on their skill or seniority -- need to take on more responsibilities, while others end up being peripheral to the project's execution. We posit that this kind of ad hoc reorganization of a team's structure can be discerned from the project's bug tracker. In this paper, we extract a social network …

Bay Audio Repair Website & Data Management Application, Michael Shelley

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to build a website and software application to receive and manage audio equipment repair requests for a small startup company called Bay Audio Repair (BAR). Furthermore, it allowed me to gain experience in web development and software engineering practices, specifically requirements gathering, design and implementation. The website provides an online interface for BAR’s customers to request repairs and the application allows BAR employees to update the progress of a repair. Several technologies were used in the system’s construction: HTML, XML, PHP, and C#.

Creating An Immersive Game World With Evolutionary Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, Yundong Cai, Ah-Hwee Tan, Zhiqi Shen, Boyang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An increasing number of serious games have been developed to enhance the user experiences in education and training. In order to bridge the gap of game experiences in the virtual environment and in the real life, it is crucial to generate believable characters and contexts in real-time. However, the variables to be simulated for a large-scale serious game are numerous. These variables are involved in complex causal relationships and their values change over time. In view that world modeling has not been well addressed with conventional models, this paper uses a computational model Evolutionary Fuzzy Cognitive Map (EFCM) to model …

Spreadsheets Grow Up: Three Spreadsheet Engineering Methodologies For Large Financial Planning Models, Thomas A. Grossman Jr., O Ozluk

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Many large financial planning models are written in a spreadsheet programming language (usually Microsoft Excel) and deployed as a spreadsheet application. Three groups, FAST Alliance, Operis Group, and BPM Analytics (under the name “Spreadsheet Standards Review Board”) have independently promulgated standardized processes for efficiently building such models. These spreadsheet engineering methodologies provide detailed guidance on design, construction process, and quality control. We summarize and compare these methodologies. They share many design practices, and standardized, mechanistic procedures to construct spreadsheets. We learned that a written book or standards document is by itself insufficient to understand a methodology. These methodologies represent a …

Online Administration System For Small And Medium-Sized Running Events, Steinar Johansen

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project is to address inefficiency at small to medium-sized running events with regards to registration, race timing, and result service. As a race coordinator or participant, it is important that the race timing is correct and that the result service can be delivered as soon as possible after the event in finished. Contains source code.