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Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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Full-Text Articles in Software Engineering

A Formal Model Of Semantic Web Service Ontology (Wsmo) Execution, Hai H. Wang, Nick Gibbins, Terry R. Payne, Ahmed Saleh, Jun Sun Apr 2008

A Formal Model Of Semantic Web Service Ontology (Wsmo) Execution, Hai H. Wang, Nick Gibbins, Terry R. Payne, Ahmed Saleh, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Semantic Web services have been one of the most significant research areas within the semantic Web vision, and have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential. Current semantic Web service research focuses on defining models and languages for the semantic markup of all relevant aspects of services, which are accessible through a Web service interface. The Web service modelling ontology (WSMO) is one of the most significant semantic Web service framework proposed to date. To support the standardization and tool support of WSMO, a formal semantics of the language is highly desirable. As there are a …


Measurement And Estimation Of Network Qos Among Peer Xbox 360 Game Players, Youngki Lee, Sharad Agarwal, Chris Butcher, Jitu Padhye Apr 2008

Measurement And Estimation Of Network Qos Among Peer Xbox 360 Game Players, Youngki Lee, Sharad Agarwal, Chris Butcher, Jitu Padhye

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The research community has proposed several techniques for estimating the quality of network paths in terms of delay and capacity. However, few techniques have been studied in the context of large deployed applications. Network gaming is an application that is extremely sensitive to network path quality [1,2,3]. Yet, the quality of network paths among players of large, wide-area games and techniques for estimating it have not received much attention from the research community.


Rate-Diversity And Resource-Aware Broadcast And Multicast In Multi-Rate Wireless Mesh Networks, Bao Hua Liu, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Sanjay Jha Apr 2008

Rate-Diversity And Resource-Aware Broadcast And Multicast In Multi-Rate Wireless Mesh Networks, Bao Hua Liu, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Sanjay Jha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on the problem of increasing the traffic capacity (volume of admissible traffic) of broadcast and multicast flows in a wireless mesh network (WMN). We study and suggest routing strategies where the process of constructing the forwarding tree considers three distinct features: (a) the ability of individual mesh nodes to perform link-layer broadcasts at multiple rates, (b) the wireless broadcast advantage, whereby a single broadcast transmission covers multiple neighboring receivers and (c) the residual transmission capacity at a WMN node, subject to intereference-based constraints from existing traffic flows in its neighborhood. Our metric of interest is the total …


K-Sketch: A 'Kinetic' Sketch Pad For Novice Animators, Richard C. Davis, Brien Colwell, James A. Landay Apr 2008

K-Sketch: A 'Kinetic' Sketch Pad For Novice Animators, Richard C. Davis, Brien Colwell, James A. Landay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Because most animation tools are complex and timeconsuming to learn and use, most animations today are created by experts. To help novices create a wide range of animations quickly, we have developed a general-purpos informal, 2D animation sketching system called K-Sketch. Field studies investigating the needs of animatorsnd would-be animators helped us collect a library of usage scenarios for our tool. A novel optimization technique enabled us to design an interface that is simultaneously fast, simple, and powerful. The result is a pen-based system that relies on users’ intuitive sense of space and time while still supporting a wide range …


Comp-Ref: A Technique To Guide The Delegation Of Responsibilities To Components In Software Systems, Subhajit Datta, Robert Van Engelen Apr 2008

Comp-Ref: A Technique To Guide The Delegation Of Responsibilities To Components In Software Systems, Subhajit Datta, Robert Van Engelen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In software systems, components collaborate to collectively fulfill requirements. A key concern of software design is the delegation of responsibilities to components such that user needs are most expediently met. This paper presents the COMP-REF technique based on a set of metrics and Linear Programming (LP) to guide the allocation of responsibilities of a system’s components. We define the metrics Aptitude Index, Requirement Set, and Concordance Index to extract some design characteristics and use these metrics in an optimization algorithm. Results from experimental validation of the COMP-REF technique across a range of software systems are reported. We also …


Harmoni: Context-Aware Filtering Of Sensor Data For Continuous Remote Health Monitoring, Iqbal Mohomed, Archan Misra, Maria Ebling, William Jerome Mar 2008

Harmoni: Context-Aware Filtering Of Sensor Data For Continuous Remote Health Monitoring, Iqbal Mohomed, Archan Misra, Maria Ebling, William Jerome

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A promising architecture for remote healthcare monitoring involves the use of a pervasive device (such as a cellular phone), which aggregates data from multiple body-worn medical sensors and transmits the data to the backend. Unfortunately, the volume of data generated by increasingly sophisticated continuouslyactive sensors can overwhelm the resources on the mobile device. We propose imbuing the mobile device with the intelligence to perform context-aware filtering of sensor data streams in order to reduce transmissions in cases where the observed data corresponds to the norm expected by the system in a given context. To investigate the efficacy of this technique, …


Location Update Versus Paging Trade-Off In Cellular Networks: An Approach Based On Vector Quantization, Abhishek Roy, Archan Misra, Sajal K. Das Dec 2007

Location Update Versus Paging Trade-Off In Cellular Networks: An Approach Based On Vector Quantization, Abhishek Roy, Archan Misra, Sajal K. Das

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we propose two information-theoretic techniques for efficiently trading off the location update and paging costs associated with mobility management in wireless cellular networks. Previous approaches attempt to always accurately convey a mobile's movement sequence and hence, cannot reduce the signaling cost below the entropy bound. Our proposed techniques, however, exploit rate-distortion theory to arbitrarily reduce the update cost, at the expense of an increase in the corresponding paging overhead. To this end, we describe two location tracking algorithms, based on spatial quantization and temporal quantization, which first quantize the movement sequence into a smaller set of codewords, …


Machine-Assisted Proof Support For Validation Beyond Simulink, Chunqing Chen, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun Nov 2007

Machine-Assisted Proof Support For Validation Beyond Simulink, Chunqing Chen, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Simulink is popular in industry for modeling and simulating embedded systems. It is deficient to handle requirements of high-level assurance and timing analysis. Previously, we showed the idea of applying Timed Interval Calculus (TIC) to complement Simulink. In this paper, we develop machine-assisted proof support for Simulink models represented in TIC. The work is based on a generic theorem prover, Prototype Verification System (PVS). The TIC specifications of both Simulink models and requirements are transformed to PVS specifications automatically. Verification can be carried out at interval level with a high level of automation. Analysis of continuous and discrete behaviors is …


Important Characteristics Of Software Development Team Members: An Empirical Investigation Using Repertory Grid, Keng Siau, Xin Tan, Hong Sheng Nov 2007

Important Characteristics Of Software Development Team Members: An Empirical Investigation Using Repertory Grid, Keng Siau, Xin Tan, Hong Sheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An information system is typically developed by a team of information systems (IS) professionals. Research shows that teams staffed with the right people are more likely to be effective and efficient. There is a paucity of study that examines the important traits of IS professionals in team contexts. The objective of this research is to identify and understand the important characteristics of good team members in software development projects. We applied an established psychological technique (Repertory Grid) to guide our interviews with 21 experienced IS professionals, who have had extensive experience in software development teams. The comprehensive list of important …


Important Characteristics Of Software Development Team Members: An Empirical Investigation Using Repertory Grid, Keng Siau, Xin Tan, Hong Sheng Nov 2007

Important Characteristics Of Software Development Team Members: An Empirical Investigation Using Repertory Grid, Keng Siau, Xin Tan, Hong Sheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An information system is typically developed by a team of information systems (IS) professionals. Research shows that teams staffed with the right people are more likely to be effective and efficient. There is a paucity of study that examines the important traits of IS professionals in team contexts. The objective of this research is to identify and understand the important characteristics of good team members in software development projects. We applied an established psychological technique (Repertory Grid) to guide our interviews with 21 experienced IS professionals, who have had extensive experience in software development teams. The comprehensive list of important …


Advances And Challenges With Data Broadcasting In Wireless Mesh Networks, Chun Tung Chou, Junaid Qadir, Joo Ghee Lim, Archan Misra Nov 2007

Advances And Challenges With Data Broadcasting In Wireless Mesh Networks, Chun Tung Chou, Junaid Qadir, Joo Ghee Lim, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless mesh networks have become a promising means to provide low-cost broadband access. Many WMN applications require broadcasting data (IPTV etc.) over the WMN. This article studies how efficient data broadcast, measured in terms of broadcast latency, can be realized by exploiting two features of WMNs: the use of multiple transmission rates at the link layer and the use of multiple radio interfaces on each node. We demonstrate that by exploiting these features, broadcast latency can be reduced severalfold compared to the current default practice in wireless LANs of using the lowest transmission rate for broadcast traffic. We also discuss …


Context-Aware Statistical Debugging: From Bug Predictors To Faulty Control Flow Paths, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su Nov 2007

Context-Aware Statistical Debugging: From Bug Predictors To Faulty Control Flow Paths, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effective bug localization is important for realizing automated debugging. One attractive approach is to apply statistical techniques on a collection of evaluation profiles of program properties to help localize bugs. Previous research has proposed various specialized techniques to isolate certain program predicates as bug predictors. However, because many bugs may not be directly associated with these predicates, these techniques are often ineffective in localizing bugs. Relevant control flow paths that may contain bug locations are more informative than stand-alone predicates for discovering and understanding bugs. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically generate such faulty control flow paths …


Mining Modal Scenarios-Based Specifications From Execution Trace Of Reactive Systems, David Lo, Shahar Maoz, Siau-Cheng Khoo Nov 2007

Mining Modal Scenarios-Based Specifications From Execution Trace Of Reactive Systems, David Lo, Shahar Maoz, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification mining is a dynamic analysis process aimed at automatically inferring suggested specifications of a program from its execution traces. We describe a novel method, framework, and tool, for mining inter-object scenario-based specifications in the form of a UML2-compliant variant of Damm and Harels Live Sequence Charts (LSC). LSC extends the classical partial order semantics of sequence diagrams with temporal liveness and symbolic class level lifelines, in order to generate compact and expressive specifications. The output of our algorithm is a sound and complete set of statistically significant LSCs (i.e., satisfying given thresholds of support and confidence), mined from an …


Model Checking In The Absence Of Code, Model And Properties, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo Nov 2007

Model Checking In The Absence Of Code, Model And Properties, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking is a major approach in ensuring software correctness. It verifies a model converted from code against some formal properties. However, difficulties and programmers ’ reluctance to formalize formal properties have been some hurdles to its widespread industrial adoption. Also, with the advent of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components provided by third party vendors, model checking is further challenged as often only a binary version of the code is provided by vendors. Interestingly, latest instrumentation tools like PIN and Valgrind have enable execution traces to be collected dynamically from a running program. In this preliminary study, we investigate what can …


A Two-Phase Approach To Interactivity Enhancement For Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Suiping Zhou Oct 2007

A Two-Phase Approach To Interactivity Enhancement For Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Suiping Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed virtual environments (DVEs) are distributed systems that allow multiple geographically distributed clients (users) to interact simultaneously in a computer-generated, shared virtual world. Applications of DVEs can be seen in many areas nowadays, such as online games, military simulations, collaborative designs, etc. To support large-scale DVEs with real-time interactions among thousands or even more distributed clients, a geographically distributed server architecture (GDSA) is generally needed, and the virtual world can be partitioned into many distinct zones to distribute the load among the servers. Due to the geographic distributions of clients and servers in such architectures, it is essential to efficiently …


Sketchwizard: Wizard Of Oz Prototyping Of Pen-Based User Interfaces, Richard C. Davis, T. Scott Saponas, Michael Shilman, James A. Landay Oct 2007

Sketchwizard: Wizard Of Oz Prototyping Of Pen-Based User Interfaces, Richard C. Davis, T. Scott Saponas, Michael Shilman, James A. Landay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

SketchWizard allows designers to create Wizard of Oz prototypes of pen-based user interfaces in the early stages of design. In the past, designers have been inhibited from participating in the design of pen-based interfaces because of the inadequacy of paper prototypes and the difficulty of developing functional prototypes. In SketchWizard, designers and end users share a drawing canvas between two computers, allowing the designer to simulate the behavior of recognition or other technologies. Special editing features are provided to help designers respond quickly to end-user input. This paper describes the SketchWizard system and presents two evaluations of our approach. The …


Mining Modal Scenarios From Execution Traces, David Lo, Shahar Maoz, Siau-Cheng Khoo Oct 2007

Mining Modal Scenarios From Execution Traces, David Lo, Shahar Maoz, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification mining is a dynamic analysis process aimed at automatically inferring suggested specifications of a program from its execution traces. We describe a method, a framework, and a tool, for mining inter-object scenario-based specifications in the form of a UML2-compliant variant of Damm and Harel's Live Sequence Charts (LSC), which extends the classical partial order semantics of sequence diagrams with temporal liveness and symbolic class level lifelines, in order to generate compact and expressive specifications. Moreover, we use previous research work and tools developed for LSC to visualize, analyze, manipulate, test, and thus evaluate the scenario-based specifications we mine. Our …


Performance Of Network-Coding In Multi-Rate Wireless Environments For Multicast Applications, Luiz F. M. Viera, Archan Misra, Mario Gerla Oct 2007

Performance Of Network-Coding In Multi-Rate Wireless Environments For Multicast Applications, Luiz F. M. Viera, Archan Misra, Mario Gerla

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates the interaction between net-work coding and link-layer transmission rate diversity in multi-hop wireless networks. By appropriately mixing data packets at intermediate nodes, network coding allows a single multicast flow to achieve higher throughput to a set of receivers. Broadcast applications can also exploit link-layer rate diversity, whereby individual nodes can transmit at faster rates at the expense of corresponding smaller coverage area. We first demonstrate how combining rate-diversity with network coding can provide a larger capacity for data dissemination of a single multicast flow, and how consideration of rate diversity is critical for maximizing system throughput. We …


Context-Based Detection Of Clone-Related Bugs, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su, Edwin Chiu Sep 2007

Context-Based Detection Of Clone-Related Bugs, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su, Edwin Chiu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Studies show that programs contain much similar code, commonly known as clones. One of the main reasons for introducing clones is programmers' tendency to copy and paste code to quickly duplicate functionality. We commonly believe that clones can make programs difficult to maintain and introduce subtle bugs. Although much research has proposed techniques for detecting and removing clones to improve software maintainability, little has considered how to detect latent bugs introduced by clones. In this paper, we introduce a general notion of context-based inconsistencies among clones and develop an efficient algorithm to detect such inconsistencies for locating bugs. We have …


Difference Computation Of Large Models, Christoph Treude, Stefan Berlik, Sven Wenzel, Udo Kelter Sep 2007

Difference Computation Of Large Models, Christoph Treude, Stefan Berlik, Sven Wenzel, Udo Kelter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern software engineering practices lead to large models which exist in many versions. Version management systems should offer a service to compare, and possibly merge, these models. The computation of a difference between large models is a big challenge; current algorithms are too inefficient here. We present a new technique for computing differences between models. In practical tests, this technique has been an order of magnitude faster than currently known algorithms. The main idea is to use a high-dimensional search tree for efficiently finding similar model elements. Individual elements are mapped onto a vector of numerical values using a collection …


Globally Distributed Software Development Project Performance: An Empirical Analysis, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan Sep 2007

Globally Distributed Software Development Project Performance: An Empirical Analysis, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software firms are increasingly distributing their software development effort across multiple locations. In this paper we present the results of a two year field study that investigated the effects of dispersion on the productivity and quality of distributed software development. We first develop a model of distributed software development. We then use the model, along with our empirically observed data, to understand the consequences of dispersion on software project performance. Our analysis reveals that, even in high process maturity environments, a) dispersion significantly reduces development productivity and has effects on conformance quality, and b) these negative effects of dispersion can …


The Future Of Information Systems Engineering, Keng Siau Sep 2007

The Future Of Information Systems Engineering, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.


Realizing Live Sequence Charts In System Verilog, Hai H. Wang, Shengchao Qin, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong Aug 2007

Realizing Live Sequence Charts In System Verilog, Hai H. Wang, Shengchao Qin, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The design of an embedded control system starts with an investigation of properties and behaviors of the process evolving within its environment, and an analysis of the requirement for its safety performance. In early stages, system requirements are often specied as scenarios of behavior using sequence charts for different use cases. This specication must be precise, intuitive and expressive enough to capture different aspects of embedded control systems. As a rather rich and useful extension to the classical message sequence charts, Live Sequence Charts (LSC), which provide a rich collection of constructs for specifying both possible and mandatory behaviors, are …


Century: Automated Aspects Of Patient Care, Marion Blount, John Davis, Maria Ebling, Ji Hyun Kim, Kyun Hyun Kim, Kang Yoon Lee, Archan Misra, Se Hun Park, Daby Sow, Young Ju Tak, Min Wang, Karen Witting Aug 2007

Century: Automated Aspects Of Patient Care, Marion Blount, John Davis, Maria Ebling, Ji Hyun Kim, Kyun Hyun Kim, Kang Yoon Lee, Archan Misra, Se Hun Park, Daby Sow, Young Ju Tak, Min Wang, Karen Witting

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Remote health monitoring affords the possibility of improving the quality of health care by enabling relatively inexpensive out-patient care. However, remote health monitoring raises new a problem: the potential for data explosion in health care systems. To address this problem, the remote health monitoring systems must be integrated with analysis tools that provide automated trend analysis and event detection in real time. In this paper, we propose an overview of Century, an extensible framework for analysis of large numbers of remote sensor-based medical data streams.


Measuring Knowledge Sharing In Open Source Software Development Teams, Y. Long, Keng Siau, K. Howell Aug 2007

Measuring Knowledge Sharing In Open Source Software Development Teams, Y. Long, Keng Siau, K. Howell

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The study provides an approach to measure the extent of knowledge sharing in Open Source Software (OSS) development in terms of two aspects: the quality of knowledge sharing which is indicated by the helpfulness of the messages, and the quantity of knowledge sharing which is indicated by the volume of the messages. The study developed a computer-aided content analysis program to assess the helpfulness of the messages based on a set of keywords and the length of the messages. The approach was applied to measure the extent of knowledge sharing of 150 OSS projects. The results further confirmed that the …


A Time-And-Value Centric Provenance Model And Architecture For Medical Event Streams, Marion Bllount, John Davis, Archan Misra, Daby Sow, Min Wang Jun 2007

A Time-And-Value Centric Provenance Model And Architecture For Medical Event Streams, Marion Bllount, John Davis, Archan Misra, Daby Sow, Min Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Provenance becomes a critical requirement for healthcare IT infrastructures, especially when pervasive biomedical sensors act as a source of raw medical streams for large-scale, automated clinical decision support systems. Medical and legal requirements will make it obligatory for such systems to answer queries regarding the underlying data samples from which output alerts are derived, the IDs of the processing components used and the privileges of the individuals and software components accessing the medical data. Unfortunately, existing models of either annotation or process based provenance are designed for transaction-oriented systems and do not satisfy the unique requirements for systems processing high-volume, …


Maximizing Broadcast And Multicast Traffic Load Through Link-Rate Diversity In Wireless Mesh Networks, Chun Tung Chou, Bao Hua Liu, Archan Misra Jun 2007

Maximizing Broadcast And Multicast Traffic Load Through Link-Rate Diversity In Wireless Mesh Networks, Chun Tung Chou, Bao Hua Liu, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies some of the fundamental challenges and opportunities associated with the network-layer broadcast and multicast in a multihop multirate wireless mesh network (WMN). In particular, we focus on exploiting the ability of nodes to perform link-layer broadcasts at different rates (with correspondingly different coverage areas). We first show how, in the broadcast wireless medium, the available capacity at a mesh node for a multicast transmission is not just a function of the aggregate pre-existing traffic load of other interfering nodes, but intricately coupled to the actual (sender, receiver) set and the link-layer rate of each individual transmission. We …


Simplifying Cyber Foraging For Mobile Devices, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Darren Gergle, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, James Herbsleb Jun 2007

Simplifying Cyber Foraging For Mobile Devices, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Darren Gergle, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, James Herbsleb

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber foraging is the transient and opportunistic use of compute servers by mobile devices. The short market life of such devices makes rapid modification of applications for remote execution an important problem. We describe a solution that combines a "little language" for cyber foraging with an adaptive runtime system. We report results from a user study showing that even novice developers are able to successfully modify large, unfamiliar applications in just a few hours. We also show that the quality of novice-modified and expert-modified applications are comparable in most cases.


Cognitive Evaluation Of Information Modeling Methods, Keng Siau, Yuan Wang May 2007

Cognitive Evaluation Of Information Modeling Methods, Keng Siau, Yuan Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the field of information system engineering, information modeling method is a technique to capture user requirements and to understand system complexity. The importance of information modeling has been recognized by practitioners and researchers, but little has been explored to analyze the available information modeling methods or to evaluate them in terms of their strengths, weaknesses, and effectiveness. This research analyzes six information-modeling methods: use case diagram, rich picture diagram, entity-relationship diagram, Trochim’s concept mapping, repertory grid, and causal mapping. These information-modeling methods are analyzed from a cognitive perspective in order to better understand their nature, the assumptions, and the …


Deckard: Scalable And Accurate Tree-Based Detection Of Code Clones, Lingxiao Jiang, Ghassan Misherghi, Zhendong Su, Stephane Glondu May 2007

Deckard: Scalable And Accurate Tree-Based Detection Of Code Clones, Lingxiao Jiang, Ghassan Misherghi, Zhendong Su, Stephane Glondu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Detecting code clones has many software engineering applications. Existing approaches either do not scale to large code bases or are not robust against minor code modifications. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for identifying similar subtrees and apply it to tree representations of source code. Our algorithm is based on a novel characterization of subtrees with numerical vectors in the Euclidean Rn and an efficient algorithm to cluster these vectors w.r.t. the Euclidean distance metric. Subtrees with vectors in one cluster are considered similar. We have implemented our tree similarity algorithm as a clone detection tool called DECKARD …