Software Engineering Commons^™

Machine Learning For Predictive Energy And Emissions Modeling Of Vehicles And Power Grids In The United States, S M Tanvir Faysal Alam Chowdhoury

Dissertations

The environmental benefits of electric vehicle (EV) adoption depend on more than replacing internal combustion engine vehicles with electric powertrains. EV adoption reshapes electricity demand, interacts with regional generation mixes, and influences travel behavior and congestion, creating a coupled transportation-energy system in which vehicle and power-plant emissions must be evaluated together. This dissertation develops machine-learning frameworks for predicting energy consumption and emissions from vehicles and power grids under rising EV adoption. The first component forecasts grid emissions from EV charging. Using simulation data from NREL's Cambium database, a Prophet-based time-series framework predicts carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane emission rates …

Enhancing Ad/Adrd Management Through Ihelpcare: A Compliant And Culturally Sensitive Ai-Driven Digital Healthcare Platform, Trisha Bhowmick

Master's Theses

The digital healthcare field is expanding fast, and now it requires platforms that use advanced technology and maintain robust data security and compliance practices. In the present paper, we present the main structure, key methods, and compliance strategies of the digital healthcare system iHelpCare, which, while fully meeting the HIPAA/GDPR requirements, provides health services more accessible, efficient, and inclusive. The proposed platform is powered by AI for personalized care solutions, with the main emphasis on preventive health management and providing tools for people with disabilities.

iHelpCare achieves real-time patient monitoring while securing medical data management and easy communication between patients, …

The Integration Of Agile Methodologies In Devops Practices Within The Information Technology Industry, Ashley Hourigan, Ridewaan Hanslo

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

The demand for rapid software delivery in the Information Technology (IT) industry has significantly intensified, emphasising the need for faster software products and service releases with enhanced features to meet customer expectations. Agile methodologies are replacing traditional approaches such as Waterfall, where flexibility, iterative development and adaptation to change are favoured over rigid planning and execution. DevOps, a subsequent evolution from Agile, emphasises collaborative efforts in development and operations teams, focusing on continuous integration and deployment to deliver resilient and high-quality software products and services. This study aims to critically assess both Agile and DevOps practices in the IT industry …

Reverse Engineering Of Binary Programs Using Graph Attention Networks, Sai Nikhila Kanigiri

Master's Theses

Understanding the functionality and behavior of binary code is essential for many software engineering tasks, including malware analysis, vulnerability detection, and program optimization. However, automating this process is challenging due to the complexity of machine code and the significant manual effort required from experienced software engineers. In this paper, we present BinGAT (Reverse Engineering of Binary Programs using Graph Attention Networks), a method for classifying binary programs into algorithmic categories using Graph Attention Neural Networks (GNNs) based on their Control-Flow Graphs (CFGs). Given a binary program, BinGAT extracts its CFG through static analysis and transforms the assembly instructions within each …

Semantic Segmentation Of Point Cloud Sequences Using Point Transformer V3, Marion Sisk

Master's Theses

Semantic segmentation of point clouds is a basic step for many autonomous systems including automobiles. In autonomous driving systems, LiDAR sensors are frequently used to produce point cloud sequences that allow the system to perceive the environment and navigate safely. Modern machine learning techniques for segmentation have predominately focused on single-scan segmentation, however sequence segmentation has often proven to perform better on common segmentation metrics. Using the popular Semantic KITTI dataset, we show that by providing point cloud sequences to a segmentation pipeline based on Point Transformer v3, we increase the segmentation performance between seven and fifteen percent when compared …

Cm-Ii Meditation As An Intervention To Reduce Stress And Improve Attention: A Study Of Ml Detection, Spectral Analysis, And Hrv Metrics, Sreekanth Gopi

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

Students frequently face heightened stress due to academic and social pressures, particularly in de- manding fields like computer science and engineering. These challenges are often associated with serious mental health issues, including ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), depression, and an increased risk of suicide. The average student attention span has notably decreased from 21⁄2 minutes to just 47 seconds, and now it typically takes about 25 minutes to switch attention to a new task (Mark, 2023). Research findings suggest that over 95% of individuals who die by suicide have been diagnosed with depression (Shahtahmasebi, 2013), and almost 20% of students …

Service-Oriented Framework For Developing Interoperable E-Health Systems In A Low-Income Country, Bonface Abima, Agnes Nakakawa, Geoffrey Mayoka Kituyi

The African Journal of Information Systems

e-Health solutions in low-income countries are fragmented, address institution-specific needs, and do little to address the strategic need for inter-institutional exchange of health data. Although various e-health interoperability frameworks exist, contextual factors often hinder their effective adoption in low-income countries. This underlines the need to investigate such factors and to use findings to adapt existing e-health interoperability models. Following a design science approach, this research involved conducting an exploratory survey among 90 medical and Information Technology personnel from 67 health facilities in Uganda. Findings were used to derive requirements for e-health interoperability, and to orchestrate elements of a service oriented …

A Social Profile-Based E-Learning Model, Xola Ntlangula

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

Many High Education Institutions (HEIs) have migrated to blended or complete online learning to cater for less interruption with learning. As such, there is a growing demand for personalized e-learning to accommodate the diversity of students' needs. Personalization can be achieved using recommendation systems powered by artificial intelligence. Although using student data to personalize learning is not a new concept, collecting and identifying appropriate data is necessary to determine the best recommendations for students. By reviewing the existing data collection capabilities of the e-learning platforms deployed by public universities in South Africa, we were able to establish the readiness of …

Factors Influencing The Retention Of Millennial Software Developers In South African Companies, Kim Fouche, Maureen Tanner

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

South Africa has an Information Technology skills shortage leading to high turnover of Information Technology professionals. Not only do companies face significant costs in replacing software developers, but high mobility also affects staff morale. Millennials are known to be more loyal to their own needs and do not tend to stay at companies for long, increasing the complexities of retention. This study explores the factors that influence the retention of millennial software developers in South African companies. The qualitative study was carried out using online semi-structured interviews. The study found that work environment, lifestyle, and management style, play a key …

Software Supply Chain Security Attacks And Analysis Of Defense, Juanjose Rodriguez-Cardenas, Jobair Hossain Faruk, Masura Tansim, Asia Shavers, Corey Brookins, Shamar Lake, Ava Norouzi, Marie Nassif, Kenneth Burke, Miranda Dominguez

Symposium of Student Scholars

The Software Supply chain or SSC is the backbone of the logistics industry and is crucial to a business's success and operation. The surge of attacks and risks for the SSC has grown in coming years with each attack's impact becoming more significant. These attacks have led to the leaking of both client and company sensitive information, corruption of the data, and having it subject to malware and ransomware installation, despite new practices implemented and investments into SSC security and its branches that have not stopped attackers from developing new vulnerabilities and exploits. In our research, we have investigated Software …

The Stakeholder-Profile Framework For Tacit Knowledge Acquisition In Requirements Elicitation Interviews, Rasha Eltigani

Master of Science in Software Engineering Theses

The stakeholder’s tacit knowledge is a key crown jewel of requirements elicitation, and in turn software development at large. This critical element holds significant leverage in determining the outcome and the quality of the requirements, and therefore the development endeavor holistically. Due to its very nature of being tacit, it is innately covert and deeply hidden within the stakeholders’ minds, so it is extremely difficult to articulate and relay, as well as even harder to elicit and utilize. Additionally, the literature reports that there is a scarcity of available theorizations and solutions for addressing this challenge, posing a key and …

Machine Learning-Oriented Predictive Maintenance (Pdm) Framework For Autonomous Vehicles (Avs): Adopting Blockchain For Pdm Solution, Md Jobair Hossain Faruk, Hossain Shahriar, Maria Valero

Symposium of Student Scholars

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) refers to smart, connected and multimedia cars with technological megatrends of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) and have gained huge strive in today's world. AVs adopt automated driving systems (ADS) technique that permits the vehicle to manage and control driving points without human drivers by utilizing advanced equipment including a combination of sensors, controllers, onboard computers, actuators, algorithms, and advanced software embedded in the different parts of the vehicle. These advanced sensors provide unique inputs to the ADS to generate a path from point A to point B. Ensuring the safety of sensors by limiting maintenance …

Students Certification Management (Scm): Hyperledger Fabric-Based Digital Repository, Md Jobair Hossain Faruk, Hossain Shahriar, Maria Valero

Symposium of Student Scholars

The higher education sector has been heavily impacted financially by the economic downturn caused by the pandemic that has resulted a decline in student enrollments. Finding cost-effective novel technology for storing and sharing student's credentials among academic institutions and potential employers is a demand. Within the current conventional approach, ensuring authentication of a candidate’s credentials is costly and time-consuming which gives burdens to thousands of prospective students and potential employees. As a result, candidates fail to secure opportunities for either delay or non-submission of credentials all over the world. Blockchain technology has the potential for students' control over their credentials; …

A Review Of Dark Web: Crawling And Discovery Of Information, Timothy Williams, Edwin Matthew, Juanjose Rodriguez-Cardenas, Jack Wright, Hossain Shahriar

Symposium of Student Scholars

The dark web is often discussed in taboo by many who are unfamiliar with the subject. However, this essay takes a dive into the skeleton of what constructs the dark web by compiling the research of published essays. TOR and other discussed browsers are specialized web browsers that provide anonymity by going through multiple servers and encrypted networks between the host and client, hiding the IP address of both ends. This provides difficulty in terms of controlling or monitoring the dark web, leading to its popularity in criminal underworlds.

In this work, we provide an overview of data mining and …

Challenges And Success Factors Of Scaled Agile Adoption – A South African Perspective, Lucas Khoza, Carl Marnewick

The African Journal of Information Systems

Agile methods and Agile scaling frameworks have become a solution for software-developing organizations striving to improve the success of software projects. Agile methods were developed for small projects, but due to their benefits, even large software-developing organizations have adopted them to scale their software projects. This quantitative study was undertaken to deepen the researchers’ understanding of the critical success factors and challenges of Scaled Agile from the South African perspective. A simple random sampling method was used. Data was collected with the use of an online structured questionnaire and the response rate was 70%. The results reveal that customer satisfaction …

Federated Learning For Secure Sensor Cloud, Viraaji Mothukuri

Master of Science in Software Engineering Theses

Intelligent sensing solutions bridge the gap between the physical world and the cyber world by digitizing the sensor data collected from sensor devices. Sensor cloud networks provide resources to physical and virtual sensing devices and enable uninterrupted intelligent solutions to end-users. Thanks to advancements in machine learning algorithms and big data, the automation of mundane tasks with artificial intelligence is becoming a more reliable smart option. However, existing approaches based on centralized Machine Learning (ML) on sensor cloud networks fail to ensure data privacy. Moreover, centralized ML works with the pre-requisite to have the entire training dataset from end-devices transferred …

A Preliminary Analysis Of How A Software Organization’S Maturity And Size Affect Its Intellectual Property Portfolio, Daniel Gifford

Master of Science in Software Engineering Theses

Intellectual property, commonly known as IP, is complex. The four main types of software IP, which is what this thesis will focus on, are patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and copyright. Patents, trade secrets, and copyrights were all studied by this thesis. Software IP is unique in that it can by copyrighted. Different IP owners, which can be businesses of different types, individuals, and universities, often have different strategies as to how to use their IP portfolio. This thesis studies differences in IP usage between these entities specifically in the field of software. Large and small software companies were analyzed specifically. …

On The Yellow Brick Road, A Path To Enterprise Architecture Maturity, Avsharn Bachoo

The African Journal of Information Systems

This study concentrated on the relationship between the Enterprise Architecture (EA) maturity of an organization and the business value associated with it in the South African financial services environment. It was developed within the critical realism philosophy, which states that mechanisms generate events by accentuating the underlying EA mechanisms that lead to business value, as well as provide insights into the opportunities and challenges organizations experienced as they progressed to higher levels of maturity. Constructed using the resource-based view of the firm as the underlying theoretical framework, this research examined EA as an intangible resource and maturity as a source …

Texture-Based Deep Neural Network For Histopathology Cancer Whole Slide Image (Wsi) Classification, Nelson Zange Tsaku

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

Automatic histopathological Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis for cancer classification has been highlighted along with the advancements in microscopic imaging techniques. However, manual examination and diagnosis with WSIs is time-consuming and tiresome. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have succeeded in histopathological image analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel cancer texture-based deep neural network (CAT-Net) that learns scalable texture features from histopathological WSIs. The innovation of CAT-Net is twofold: (1) capturing invariant spatial patterns by dilated convolutional layers and (2) Reducing model complexity while improving performance. Moreover, CAT-Net can provide discriminative texture patterns formed on cancerous regions of histopathological …

Implementation Of Secure Dnp3 Architecture Of Scada System For Smart Grids, Uday Bhaskar Boyanapalli

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

With the recent advances in the power grid system connecting to the internet, data sharing, and networking enables space for hackers to maliciously attack them based on their vulnerabilities. Vital stations in the smart grid are the generation, transmission, distribution, and customer substations are connected and controlled remotely by the network. Every substation is controlled by a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system which communicates on DNP3 protocol on Internet/IP which has many security vulnerabilities. This research will focus on Distributed Network Protocol (DNP3) communication which is used in the smart grid to communicate between the controller devices. We …

Cultivating Third Party Development In Platform-Centric Software Ecosystems: Extended Boundary Resources Model, Brown C. Msiska

The African Journal of Information Systems

Software ecosystems provide an effective way through which software solutions can be constructed by composing software components, typically applications, developed by internal and external developers on top of a software platform. Third party development increases the potential of a software ecosystem to effectively and quickly respond to context-specific software requirements. The boundary resources model gives a theoretical account for cultivation of third party development premised on the role of platform boundary resources such as application programming interfaces (API). However, from a longitudinal case study of the DHIS2 software ecosystem, this paper observes that no matter how good the boundary resources …

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 …

Ksugo, Chase Godwin

KSU Journey Honors College Capstones and Theses

KSUGo seeks to better enable students to interact with their community, maintain a level of safety on and off campus, improve their course management skills, and increase information propagation among students and campus officials. Currently, Kennesaw State does not have a dedicated general purpose native application on any mobile device platform for students, faculty, or staff to use for improving their everyday Kennesaw State experience. This project seeks to rectify that need by providing a native application with support for the Android platform.

Fit Buddy Prototype And Ksugo Mobile App, Albert Lim

KSU Journey Honors College Capstones and Theses

The purpose of my Honors Capstone project is to deliver a mobile app prototype that is focused on improving the student experience at Kennesaw State University (KSU), called Fit Buddy. There are three key concepts that will be covered in this Proof of Concept project: social networking, fitness, and IoT (Internet of Things) usages.

Additionally, the purpose of the CS Capstone project is to deliver a mobile app that is focused on improving the faculty, student, and guest experience at KSU, called KSUGo. The primary objective and purpose in creating this stems from KSU’s many resourceful outlets, which we seek …

Feasibility Of Using Virtual Reality In Requirements Elicitation Process, Aman Bhimani

Master of Science in Software Engineering Theses

Contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) technologies offer an increasing number of functionalities including head-mounted displays (HMD), haptic and sound feedback, as well as motion tracking. This gives us the opportunity to leverage the immersive power offered by these technologies in the context of requirements elicitation, especially to surface those requirements that cannot be expressed via traditional techniques such as interviews and focus groups. The goal of this thesis is to survey uses of VR in requirements engineering, and to describe a method of elicitation using VR as a tool.

To validate the methodology, a research plan is developed with a strong …

Code Metrics For Predicting Risk Levels Of Android Applications, Akond A. Rahman

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Android applications pose security and privacy risks for end-users. Early prediction of risk levels that are associated with Android applications can help Android developers is releasing less risky applications to end-users. Researchers have showed how code metrics can be used as early predictors of failure prone software components. Whether or not code metrics can be used to predict risk levels of Android applications requires systematic exploration. The goal of this paper is to aid Android application developers in assessing the risk associated with developed Android applications by identifying code metrics that can be used as predictors to predict two levels …

Formal Specification Driven Development, Titus Fofung

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

This paper researches a quantitative metric of investigating Formal Specification-Driven Development (FSDD). Formal specification is needed at the beginning of the development process to prevent ambiguity and to improve the quality through corrections of errors found in the late phases of a traditional design process, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The research is conducted with capstone students using both the FSDD and the SDLC (traditional) models and a quantitative analysis is presented to evaluate the internal quality of the software. The tool used to measure the internal quality is the .NET 2013 analysis tool. Formal Specification-Driven Development (FSDD) is a …

Tapjacking Threats And Mitigation Techniques For Android Applications, Vanessa Cooper

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

With the increased dependency on web applications through mobile devices, malicious attack techniques have now shifted from traditional web applications running on desktop or laptop (allowing mouse click- based interactions) to mobile applications running on mobile devices (allowing touch-based interactions). Clickjacking is a type of malicious attack originating in web applications, where victims are lured to click on seemingly benign objects in web pages. However, when clicked, unintended actions are performed without the user’s knowledge. In particular, it is shown that users are lured to touch an object of an application triggering unintended actions not actually intended by victims. This …

Deployment Evaluation Of Accounting Information Systems In Libyan Commercial Banks, Omar Sharkasi, Martin George Wynn

The African Journal of Information Systems

This article reports on the recent implementation and current deployment of accounting information systems in Libyan commercial banks. A case study approach is adopted that moves from an initial screening of the 14 main Libyan banks to a final in-depth study of just three banks. Business process modeling and systems profiling are used to assess the status of the banks in terms of systems use, process change and information systems strategy development. Libyan banks are well advanced in their installation of modern packaged software but could be used to greater effect to optimize business processes and improve efficiencies. Training and …

Technology Capacity Development Through Oss Implementation: The Case Of Public Higher Education Institutions In Ethiopia, Nigussie Tadesse Mengesha

The African Journal of Information Systems

The Open Source Software (OSS) literature gives little attention to the study and practice of domain specific end-user OSS implementation in general and in the public sector of developing countries (DCs) in particular. This paper, however, investigates the trajectories of two OSS-based information systems (IS) implementation projects in a developing country (DC) context with the aim to uncover the practice-based learning and resource sharing evident among locally situated and globally dispersed developers and users. The result of the interpretative case study research shows that the OSS philosophy and practice of software development, implementation and ownership, facilitates for the emergence of …