Software Engineering Commons^™

Los And Nlos Classification For Underwater Acoustic Localization, Roee Diamant, Hwee-Pink Tan, Lutz Lampe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The low sound speed in water makes propagation delay (PD)-based range estimation attractive for underwater acoustic localization (UWAL). However, due to the long channel impulse response and the existence of reflectors, PD-based UWAL suffers from significant degradation when PD measurements of nonline-of-sight (NLOS) communication links are falsely identified as line-of-sight (LOS). In this paper, we utilize expected variation of PD measurements due to mobility of nodes and present an algorithm to classify the former into LOS and NLOS links. First, by comparing signal strength-based and PD-based range measurements, we identify object-related NLOS (ONLOS) links, where signals are reflected from objects …

An Active Learning Module For An Introduction To Software Engineering Course, A. Frank Ackerman, Ph.D.

Computer Science & Software Engineering

Many schools do not begin to introduce college students to software engineering until they have had at least one semester of programming. Since software engineering is a large, complex, and abstract subject it is difficult to construct active learning exercises that build on the students’ elementary knowledge of programming and still teach basic software engineering principles. It is also the case that beginning students typically know how to construct small programs, but they have little experience with the techniques necessary to produce reliable and long-term maintainable modules. I have addressed these two concerns by defining a local standard (Montana Tech …

Neutrosophic Logic Approaches Applied To ”Rabot” Real Time Control, Alexandru Gal, Luige Vladareanu, Florentin Smarandache, Hongnian Yu, Mincong Deng

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this paper we present a way of deciding which control law should operate at a time for a mobile walking robot. The proposed deciding method is based on the new research field, called Neutrosophic Logic. The results are presented as a simulated system for which the output is related to the inputs according to the Neutrosophic Logic.

Measuring And Modelling The Thermal Performance Of The Tamar Suspension Bridge Using A Wireless Sensor Network, Nicholas De Battista, James M. W. Brownjohn, Hwee-Pink Tan, Ki Young Koo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A study on the thermal performance of the Tamar Suspension Bridge deck in Plymouth, UK, is presented in this paper. Ambient air, suspension cable, deck and truss temperatures were acquired using a wired sensor system. Deck extension data were acquired using a two-hop wireless sensor network. Empirical models relating the deck extension to various combinations of temperatures were derived and compared. The most accurate model, which used all the four temperature variables, predicted the deck extension with an accuracy of 99.4%. Time delays ranging from 10 to 66 min were identified between the daily cycles of the air temperature and …

Using Software-Based Decision Procedures To Control Instruction-Level Execution, William B. Kimball

AFIT Patents

An apparatus, method and program product are provided for securing a computer system. A digital signature of an application is checked, which is loaded into a memory of the computer system configured to contain memory pages. In response to finding a valid digital signature, memory pages containing instructions of the application are set as executable and memory pages other than those containing instructions of the application are set as non-executable. Instructions in executable memory pages are executed. Instructions in non-executable memory pages are prevented from being executed. A page fault is generated in response to an attempt to execute an …

Next Generation Crystal Viewing Tool, Zach Schaffter, Gerhard Klimeck

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The science and engineering community is limited when it comes to crystal viewing software tools. Each tool lacks in a different area such as customization of structures or visual output. Crystal Viewer 2.0 was created to have all of these features in one program. This one tool simulates virtually any crystal structure with any possible material. The vtkvis widget offers users advanced visual options not seen in any other crystal viewing software. In addition, the powerful engine behind Crystal Viewer 2.0, nanoelectronic modeling 5 or (NEMO5), performs intensive atomic calculations depending on user input. A graphical user interface, or GUI, …

Clustering Algorithms For Maximizing The Lifetime Of Wireless Sensor Networks With Energy-Harvesting Sensors, Pengfei Zhang, Gaoxi Xiao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motivated by recent developments in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), we present several efficient clustering algorithms for maximizing the lifetime of WSNs, i.e., the duration till a certain percentage of the nodes die. Specifically, an optimization algorithm is proposed for maximizing the lifetime of a single-cluster network, followed by an extension to handle multi-cluster networks. Then we study the joint problem of prolonging network lifetime by introducing energy-harvesting (EH) nodes. An algorithm is proposed for maximizing the network lifetime where EH nodes serve as dedicated relay nodes for cluster heads (CHs). Theoretical analysis and extensive simulation results show that the proposed …

An Experimental Study For Inter-User Interference Mitigation In Wireless Body Sensor Networks, Bin Cao, Yu Ge, Chee Wee Kim, Gang Feng, Hwee-Pink Tan, Yun Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inter-user interference degrades the reliability of data delivery in wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) in dense deployments when multiple users wearing WBSNs are in close proximity to one another. The impact of such interference in realistic WBSN systems is significant but is not well explored. To this end, we investigate and analyze the impact of inter-user interference on packet delivery ratio (PDR) and throughput. We conduct extensive experiments based on the TelosB WBSN platform, considering unslotted carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) with collision avoidance (CA) and slotted CSMA/CA modes in IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, respectively. In order to mitigate interuser interference, …

Control System Of An Atomic Layer Deposition (Ald) Machine, Nitin Vishnu Hegde

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Atomic Layer Deposition is one of the most efficient deposition processes for obtaining ultrathin films. The deposition by this process happens one atomic layer at a time. ALD is known for its precision and ability to develop quality films with great thickness control. ALD machines simultaneously control DC and AC currents, low pressure operations, temperature control and heating (up to 500'C), precision flow control, precision timing intervals for deposition (milli-second intervals) and constantly monitor temperature. Such a high control comes at a high price. Furthermore, at the university level, the capacity to modify or enhance a machine is critical but …

Using Meta-Ethnography To Synthesize Research: A Worked Example Of The Relations Between Personality On Software Team Processes, Fabio Q. B. Silva Dr., Shirley S. J. O. Cruz, Tatiana B. Gouveia, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Context: The increase in the number of qualitative and mixed-methods research published in software engineering has created an opportunity for further knowledge generation through the synthesis of studies with similar aims. This is particularly true in the research on human aspects because the phenomena of interest are often better understood using qualitative research. However, the use of qualitative synthesis methods is not widespread and worked examples of their consistent application in software engineering are needed. Objective: To explore the use of meta-ethnography in the synthesis of empirical studies in software engineering through an example using studies about the relations between …

Securearray: Improving Wifi Security With Fine-Grained Physical-Layer, Jie Xiong, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the important role that WiFi networks play in home and enterprise networks they are relatively weak from a security standpoint. With easily available directional antennas, attackers can be physically located off-site, yet compromise WiFi security protocols such as WEP, WPA, and even to some extent WPA2 through a range of exploits specific to those protocols, or simply by running dictionary and human-factors attacks on users' poorly-chosen passwords. This presents a security risk to the entire home or enterprise network. To mitigate this ongoing problem, we propose SecureArray, a system designed to operate alongside existing wireless security protocols, adding defense …

Inferring Ongoing Human Activities Based On Recurrent Self-Organizing Map Trajectory, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatically inferring ongoing activities is to enable the early recognition of unfinished activities, which is quite meaningful for applications, such as online human-machine interaction and security monitoring. State-of-the-art methods use the spatiotemporal interest point (STIP) based features as the low-level video description to handle complex scenes. While the existing problem is that typical bag-of-visual words (BoVW) focuses on the statistical distribution of features but ignores the inherent contexts in activity sequences, resulting in low discrimination when directly dealing with limited observations. To solve this problem, the Recurrent Self-Organizing Map (RSOM), which was designed to process sequential data, is novelly adopted …

Learning Spatio-Temporal Co-Occurrence Correlograms For Efficient Human Action Classification, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based features show great promises in human action analysis with high efficiency and robustness. However, they typically focus on bag-of-visual words (BoVW), which omits any correlation among words and shows limited discrimination in real-world videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to add the spatio-temporal co-occurrence relationships of visual words to BoVW for a richer representation. Rather than assigning a particular scale on videos, we adopt the normalized google-like distance (NGLD) to measure the words' co-occurrence semantics, which grasps the videos' structure information in a statistical way. All pairwise distances in spatial and temporal …

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 …

Solving The Search For Source Code, Kathryn T. Stolee

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Programmers frequently search for source code to reuse using keyword searches. When effective and efficient, a code search can boost programmer productivity, however, the search effectiveness depends on the programmer's ability to specify a query that captures how the desired code may have been implemented. Further, the results often include many irrelevant matches that must be filtered manually. More semantic search approaches could address these limitations, yet existing approaches either do not scale, are not flexible enough to find approximate matches, or require complex specifications.

We propose a novel approach to semantic search that addresses some of these limitations and …

Channels: Easy Video Content Consumption, Alexander R. Ledwith

Computer Engineering

The idea for this project is to take a user’s digital movie and television show library, and organize the individual videos into lists that will continuously and concurrently play like cable TV channels. This means that when a list of channels is switched to, video content will automatically start playing, possibly in the middle, based on a schedule. It should serve the needs of the user by allowing the user to quickly watch any of their existing channels, easily add a new channel based on chosen criteria or manual selection, and easily add new video content. In addition, the product …

Protocases, Christopher M. Polis

Computer Engineering

Design and implementation of a 3D printing web application.

Integrated Collision Avoidance System Sensor Evaluation Final Design Project, Alex F. Graebe, Bridgette S. Kimball, Drew T. Lavoise

Mechanical Engineering

Following the development of Aircraft Collision Avoidance Technology (ACAT) by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a need arose to transition the life-saving technology to aid the general aviation community. Considering the realistic cost of implementation, it was decided that the technology should be adapted to function on any smartphone, using that device as an end-to-end solution to sense, process, and alert the pilot to imminent threats. In September of 2012, the SAS (Sense and Survive) Senior Project Team at California Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo was assigned the task of using smartphone technology to accurately sense …

Communication Artifacts And Interaction Evaluation For Requirements Engineering, Miloslava Plachkinova

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This paper aims to answer an important question regarding the development of new information systems (IS): "What is the predominant factor for the selection of communication artifacts for requirements engineering (RE)?". Many researchers have focused on the RE and communication as separate disciplines, but little or no research addressed the RE communication issues. These problems are important because they often lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the gathered requirements. We develop expectations about the RE communication process based on prior literature from both disciplines and we test them through several case studies. Our methodology consists of analysis of six case …

Energy-Neutral Scheduling And Forwarding In Environmentally-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks, Alvin Cerdena Valera, Weng Seng Soh, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In environmentally-powered wireless sensor networks (EPWSNs), low latency wakeup scheduling and packet forwarding is challenging due to dynamic duty cycling, posing time-varying sleep latencies and necessitating the use of dynamic wakeup schedules. We show that the variance of the intervals between receiving wakeup slots affects the expected sleep latency: when the variance of the intervals is low (high), the expected latency is low (high). We therefore propose a novel scheduling scheme that uses the bit-reversal permutation sequence (BRPS) – a finite integer sequence that positions receiving wakeup slots as evenly as possible to reduce the expected sleep latency. At the …

Arraytrack: A Fine-Grained Indoor Location System, Jie Xiong, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With myriad augmented reality, social networking, and retail shopping applications all on the horizon for the mobile handheld, a fast and accurate location technology will become key to a rich user experience. When roaming outdoors, users can usually count on a clear GPS signal for accurate location, but indoors, GPS often fades, and so up until recently, mobiles have had to rely mainly on rather coarse-grained signal strength readings. What has changed this status quo is the recent trend of dramatically increasing numbers of antennas at the indoor access point, mainly to bolster capacity and coverage with multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) …

Predicting Sql Injection And Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities Through Mining Input Sanitization Patterns, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

ContextSQL injection (SQLI) and cross site scripting (XSS) are the two most common and serious web application vulnerabilities for the past decade. To mitigate these two security threats, many vulnerability detection approaches based on static and dynamic taint analysis techniques have been proposed. Alternatively, there are also vulnerability prediction approaches based on machine learning techniques, which showed that static code attributes such as code complexity measures are cheap and useful predictors. However, current prediction approaches target general vulnerabilities. And most of these approaches locate vulnerable code only at software component or file levels. Some approaches also involve process attributes that …

Senior Project Report - Doctest, Stephen Weessies

Computer Engineering

DocTest is a program that, simply put, allows a programmer or user to document STANAG 4586 (a standard for unmanned aerial vehicle interoperability) messages and test the vehicle system at Lockheed Martin [5]. The program is extensible to allow for further development aiding our software team to do what they do best and not get bogged down in tedious but necessary documentation. DocTest is also used to aid in testing, keeping track of the issues and bugs found and creating a document that captures each issue so an issue is not missed or forgotten. This program was made for use …

Special Issue On Medical Simulation, Michel Audette, Hanif M. Ladak

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

We would like to welcome you to this Special Issue on Medical Simulation, the first of its kind not only for SIMULATION: Transactions of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International, but for any technical journal. Our respective backgrounds are an indication of the technical and clinical breadth of medical simulation, as we approach the subject as primarily medical image analysis and biomechanics experts respectively, each with a variety of clinical interests spanning virtual reality (VR)–based neuro-, orthopedic and ear-nose-and-throat surgery. Moreover, we believe that the breadth of the papers that comprise this issue reflects an even broader perspective. After …

Design And Practical Application Of An Innovative, Pneumatically Latched Valve, Cheng Y. Lin, Jennifer G. Michaeli, Nathan J. Luetke

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

This article explains the design and fabrication of an innovative five-port, two-position (5/2), pneumatically latched valve. The initial application to repeatedly and automatically lift a mechanical cover or gate was presented as part of an undergraduate student project in the Mechanical Engineering Technology Program's Automation and Controls course in the Department of Engineering Technology at Old Dominion University. Valve operation, including self-latching, utilizes mechanical means only. The valve does not require any electrical power, electronic sensors, or controller, which makes it an energy-saving device. For light-duty operation, a bellows foot-air pump is used for air supply. A single activation of …

Performance Evaluation And Comparison Of Distributed Messaging Using Message Oriented Middleware, Naveen Mupparaju

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) is an enabling technology for modern event- driven applications that are typically based on publish/subscribe communication [Eugster03]. Enterprises typically contain hundreds of applications operating in environments with diverse databases and operating systems. Integration of these applications is required to coordinate the business process. Unfortunately, this is no easy task. Enterprise Integration, according to Brosey et al. (2001), "aims to connect and combines people, processes, systems, and technologies to ensure that the right people and the right processes have the right information and the right resources at the right time"[Brosey01]. Communication between different applications can be achieved …

Orientation Invariant Ecg-Based Stethoscope Tracking For Heart Auscultation Training On Augmented Standardized Patients, Nahom Kidane, Salim Chemlal, Jiang Li, Frederic D. Mckenzie, Tom Hubbard

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Auscultation, the act of listening to the heart and lung sounds, can reveal substantial information about patients’ health and other cardiac-related problems; therefore, competent training can be a key for accurate and reliable diagnosis. Standardized patients (SPs), who are healthy individuals trained to portray real patients, have been extensively used for such training and other medical teaching techniques; however, the range of symptoms and conditions they can simulate remains limited since they are only patient actors. In this work, we describe a novel tracking method for placing virtual symptoms in correct auscultation areas based on recorded ECG signals with various …

Hardware-Software Co-Design, Acceleration And Prototyping Of Control Algorithms On Reconfigurable Platforms, Desta Kumsa Edosa

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Differential equations play a significant role in many disciplines of science and engineering. Solving and implementing Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and partial Differential Equations (PDEs) effectively are very essential as most complex dynamic systems are modeled based on these equations. High Performance Computing (HPC) methodologies are required to compute and implement complex and data intensive applications modeled by differential equations at higher speed. There are, however, some challenges and limitations in implementing dynamic system, modeled by non-linear ordinary differential equations, on digital hardware. Modeling an integrator involves data approximation which results in accuracy error if data values are not considered …

Action Disambiguation Analysis Using Normalized Google-Like Distance Correlogram, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Classifying realistic human actions in video remains challenging for existing intro-variability and inter-ambiguity in action classes. Recently, Spatial-Temporal Interest Point (STIP) based local features have shown great promise in complex action analysis. However, these methods have the limitation that they typically focus on Bag-of-Words (BoW) algorithm, which can hardly discriminate actions’ ambiguity due to ignoring of spatial-temporal occurrence relations of visual words. In this paper, we propose a new model to capture this contextual relationship in terms of pairwise features’ co-occurrence. Normalized Google-Like Distance (NGLD) is proposed to numerically measuring this co-occurrence, due to its effectiveness in semantic correlation analysis. …

Sensor Openflow: Enabling Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks, Tie Luo, Hwee-Pink Tan, Tony Q. S. Quek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While it has been a belief for over a decade that wireless sensor networks (WSN) are application-specific, we argue that it can lead to resource underutilization and counter-productivity. We also identify two other main problems with WSN: rigidity to policy changes and difficulty to manage. In this paper, we take a radical, yet backward and peer compatible, approach to tackle these problems inherent to WSN. We propose a Software-Defined WSN architecture and address key technical challenges for its core component, Sensor OpenFlow. This work represents the first effort that synergizes software-defined networking and WSN.