Software Engineering Commons^™

Effective Communication Of Software Development Knowledge Through Community Portals, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge management plays an important role in many software organizations. Knowledge can be captured and distributed using a variety of media, including traditional help files and manuals, videos, technical articles, wikis, and blogs. In recent years, web-based community portals have emerged as an important mechanism for combining various communication channels. However, there is little advice on how they can be effectively deployed in a software project.In this paper, we present a first study of a community portal used by a closed source software project. Using grounded theory, we develop a model that characterizes documentation artifacts along several dimensions, such as …

Structural Complexity And Programmer Team Strategy: An Experimental Test, Narayan Ramasubbu, Chris F. Kemerer, Jeff Min Teck Hong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study develops and empirically tests the idea that the impact of structural complexity on perfective maintenance of object-oriented software is significantly determined by the team strategy of programmers (independent or collaborative). We analyzed two key dimensions of software structure, coupling and cohesion, with respect to the maintenance effort and the perceived ease-of-maintenance by pairs of programmers. Hypotheses based on the distributed cognition and task interdependence theoretical frameworks were tested using data collected from a controlled lab experiment employing professional programmers. The results show a significant interaction effect between coupling, cohesion, and programmer team strategy on both maintenance effort and …

Icodes: A Load-Planning System That Demonstrates The Value Of Ontologies In The Realm Of Logistical Command And Control (C2), Kym J. Pohl, Peter Morosoff

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, And Intuition, Jens Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

In recognizing the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation as the principal drivers of economic growth, this paper focuses on the human attributes that govern the behavior of the entrepreneur and the societal perceptions that influence the human environment in which the entrepreneur operates. Foremost among these human attributes is the experience-based nature of the human cognitive system that prepares us well for dealing with events that are closely related to our past experience, but forces us to learn by failure as we apply past methods to new situations. In particular, the paper discusses the difficulties that the human dependence on …

Semantic Transformation Of Search Requests For Improving The Results Of Web Search, Vladimir A. Fomichov, Anton V. Kirillov

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The paper describes a new method of constructing semantic expansions of search requests for improving the results of Web search. This method is based on the theory of K-representations -a new theory of designing semantic-syntactic analyzers of natural language texts with the broad use of formal means for representing input, intermediary, and output data. The current version of the theory is set forth in a monograph published by Springer in 2010. The stated approach is implemented with the help of the Web programming language Java: an experimental search system AOS (Aspect Oriented Search) has been developed.

Technology Assessment: Applied Infocyber Scenarios, John F. Halldane

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

CADRC and KML present an urgent need for analyzing the enormous volume of digital data in people centered applications. Adaptive knowledge-based collaborative agents were suggested. Amatrix for collaborative control, monitoring and management was outlined (Halldane Aug 2006) based on inline and crossline management principles. This introduced channels describing the technology and context, nodes of common parameters or attributes to link with other channels through secure analytical gates, then parallel tracks of meaningful criteria from performance, specifications, monitoring, to priorities. This is now applied in analytical scenarios to compare channels and tracks for assessing technology against meaningful infocyber tracks (Figure 1). …

An Intelligent Supply Chain Planning And Execution Environment, Jens Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Logistic planning and execution processes in a supply-chain are subject to a high level of complexity because of the number of parties and issues involved, the number of relationships that exist among them, and the dynamic nature of the execution environment. The large volume of data flowing through a sizable computer-based logistic planning and execution management environment that is based on rote data-processing principles tends to overwhelm the human users. As a result many opportunities for improving the efficiency of supply-chain processes and thereby reducing costs are overlooked by the human users, who are forced into a reactive mode. Similar …

An Agent Facilitated Design Conversation System For Facilitating The Designer In Creative Thinking In Architectural Design, Geeta Arjun, Jim Plume

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The paper discusses a current research that investigates if a computer aided conversation system can be created to support the human thought process in the early stages of architectural design. It argues that design conversations are an essential premise for designing, especially at the early stages, when the designer has to brainstorm ideas to generate creative conceptual solution-conjectures. The paper also argues that design knowledge is mainly dependent on a designer’s experiences. But experiential knowledge, stored in the long term memory is difficult to recall. Based on these arguments, an agent-based knowledge system, Design Thinker, is designed to allow for …

Preconference Proceedings Of The Focus Symposium On Intelligent Information Management Systems, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

No abstract provided.

Collaborative Learning In Software Development Teams, Matthew Hale, Rose Gamble, Kimberly Wilson, Anupama Narayan

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Recently Web 2.0 has emerged as a framework to study collaborative learning. Assessing learning in team projects is one mechanism used to improve teaching methodologies and tool support. Web 2.0 technologies enable automated assessment capabilities, leading to both rapid and incremental feedback. Such feedback can catch problems in time for pedagogic adjustment, to better guide students toward reaching learning objectives. Our courseware, SEREBRO, couples a social, tagging enabled, idea network with a range of modular toolkits, such as wikis, feeds and project management tools into a Web 2.0 environment for collaborating teams. In this paper, we first refine a set …

Defending Against Cross Site Scripting Attacks, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Researchers have proposed multiple solutions to cross-site scripting, but vulnerabilities continue to exist in many Web applications due to developers' lack of understanding of the problem and their unfamiliarity with current defenses' strengths and limitations.

Online Assistance, Imran Khan

All Capstone Projects

From the introduction: "This project entitled Online Assistance is efficient and designed to do only one thing, facilitate communications between help desk staff and end users. The overriding design goal is to be as simple and frictionless for both users and help desk staff as is possible. It can leverage SQL server for membership and role based security or integrate with windows authentication and Active Directory groups.

Software Engineering occurs as a consequence of a process called “System Engineering”. Instead of concentrate solely on software, system-engineering focuses on a variety of elements like Analyzing, Designing and organizing these elements into …

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. …

Automated Detection Of Likely Design Flaws In Layered Architectures, Aditya Budi, - Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Shaowei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Layered architecture prescribes a good principle for separating concerns to make systems more maintainable. One example of such layered architectures is the separation of classes into three groups: Boundary, Control, and Entity, which are referred to as the three analysis class stereotypes in UML. Classes of different stereotypes are interacting with one another, when properly designed, the overall interaction would be maintainable, flexible, and robust. On the other hand, poor design would result in less maintainable system that is prone to errors. In many software projects, the stereotypes of classes are often missing, thus detection of design flaws becomes non-trivial. …

Formalizing Reusable Aspect-Oriented Concurrency Control, Neelam Soundarajan, Derek Bronish, Raffi Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Java and its library provide powerful concurrency control mechanisms. However, their use can lead to similar synchronization code scattered across multiple classes, synchronization and functional code being tangled together, and similar code being duplicated in many applications. Aspect-oriented (AO) programming makes it possible to address these problems. However, the specific behavior of systems built using AO techniques can be challenging to comprehend. We propose a specification approach to precisely express such systems' critical concurrency and synchronization properties. We illustrate the method with a simple example.

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 …

Combinational Circuit Obfuscation Through Power Signature Manipulation, Hyunchul Ko

Theses and Dissertations

Today's military systems are composed of hardware and software systems, many of which are critical technologies, and must be protected to ensure our adversaries cannot gain any information from a various analysis attacks. Side Channel Analysis (SCA) attacks allow an attacker to gain the significant information from the measured signatures leaked by side-channels such as power consumption, and electro-magnetic emission. In this research the focus on detecting, characterizing, and manipulating the power signature by designing a power signature estimation and manipulation method. This research has determined that the proposed method capable of characterizing and altering the type of power signature …

Resizable, Scalable, Concurrent Hash Tables Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett, Paul E. Mckenney, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Presentation focusing on software synchronization, thread locking, transactional memory, and relativistic programming. Hash table algorithms are presented with examples of relativistic list insertion and removal, and related data structures. Existing approaches are compared to new methodologies and future work with relativistic data structures.

Coffee_Shop: Investigations Into Modern Word Processors., Nathaniel Welch

Computer Science and Software Engineering

My senior project was spent building a desktop application similar to WriteRoom and OmmWriter. These two applications are both word processors for the Macintosh OS X operating system. Both of these applications are designed to be a reset on word processing software, bringing their interfaces back to the days of Microsoft Word 3.0 and Word Perfect. They do this by spending more time on focusing on the design of the software interface, and focusing on keeping it minimalistic, instead of filling the product with new obscure features, which is a common complaint against the current iterations of Microsoft Word.

The …

Android Application Controlled Surge Protector, Lok An

Electrical Engineering

A significant amount of consumer electronics cannot be switched off completely without being unplugged. Standby power, also known as phantom power, refers to the electric power consumed by electronic appliances when they are switched off. There are some devices that need constant power; items like alarm clocks and security systems need constant power to function correctly. Some devices, such as video game consoles and televisions, consume power without offering any features. Electricity lost from standby power has been increasing with the amount of consumer electronics increasing in households.

This project’s goal is to create a low power remote that can …

Optimizing Sensor Data Acquisition For Energy-Efficient Smartphone-Based Continuous Event Processing, Archan Misra, Lipyeow Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many pervasive applications, such as activity recognition or remote wellness monitoring, utilize a personal mobile device (aka smartphone) to perform continuous processing of data streams acquired from locally-connected, wearable, sensors. To ensure the continuous operation of such applications on a battery-limited mobile device, it is essential to dramatically reduce the energy overhead associated with the process of sensor data acquisition and processing. To achieve this goal, this paper introduces a technique of "acquisition-cost" aware continuous query processing, as part of the Acquisition Cost-Aware Query Adaptation (ACQUA) framework. ACQUA replaces the current paradigm, where the data is typically streamed (pushed) from …

A Study Of Semi-Automated Tracing, Jeffrey Holden

Master's Theses

Requirements tracing is crucial for software engineering practices including change analysis, regression testing, and reverse engineering. The requirements tracing process produces a requirements traceability matrix(TM) which links high- and low-level document elements. Manually generating a TM is laborious, time consuming, and error-prone. Due to these challenges TMs are often neglected. Automated information retrieval(IR) techniques are used with some efficiency. However, in mission- or safety-critical systems a human analyst is required to vet the candidate TM. This introduces semi-automated requirements tracing, where IR methods present a candidate TM and a human analyst validates it, producing a final TM. In semi-automated tracing …

Adaptive Display Power Management For Mobile Games, Bhojan Anand, Karthik Thirugnanam, Jeena Sebastian, Pravein G. Kannan, Akhihebbal L. Ananda, Mun Choon Chan, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we show how tone mapping techniques can be used to dynamically increase the image brightness, thus allowing the LCD backlight levels to be reduced. This saves significant power as the majority of the LCD’s display power is consumed by its backlight. The Gamma function (or equivalent) can be efficiently implemented in smartphones with minimal resource cost. We describe how we overcame the Gamma function’s non-linear nature by using adaptive thresholds to apply different Gamma values to images with differing brightness levels. These adaptive thresholds allow us to save significant amounts of power while preserving the image quality. …

Kb-Anonymity: A Model For Anonymized Behavior-Preserving Test And Debugging Data, Aditya Budi, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Lucia Lucia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is often very expensive and practically infeasible to generate test cases that can exercise all possible program states in a program. This is especially true for a medium or large industrial system. In practice, industrial clients of the system often have a set of input data collected either before the system is built or after the deployment of a previous version of the system. Such data are highly valuable as they represent the operations that matter in a client's daily business and may be used to extensively test the system. However, such data often carries sensitive information and cannot …

Real-Time Trip Information Service For A Large Taxi Fleet, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Nguyen Xuan Khoa, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we describe the design, analysis, implementation, and operational deployment of a real-time trip information system that provides passengers with the expected fare and trip duration of the taxi ride they are planning to take. This system was built in cooperation with a taxi operator that operates more than 15,000 taxis in Singapore. We first describe the overall system design and then explain the efficient algorithms used to achieve our predictions based on up to 21 months of historical data consisting of approximately 250 million paid taxi trips. We then describe various optimisations (involving region sizes, amount of …

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 …

Intelligent Systems Development In A Non Engineering Curriculum, Emily A. Brand, William L. Honig, Matthew Wojtowicz

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Much of computer system development today is programming in the large - systems of millions of lines of code distributed across servers and the web. At the same time, microcontrollers have also become pervasive in everyday products, economical to manufacture, and represent a different level of learning about system development. Real world systems at this level require integrated development of custom hardware and software.

How can academic institutions give students a view of this other extreme - programming on small microcontrollers with specialized hardware? Full scale system development including custom hardware and software is expensive, beyond the range of any …

High-Performance Composite Event Monitoring System Supporting Large Numbers Of Queries And Sources, Sangjeong Lee, Youngki Lee, Byoungjip Kim, K. Selcuk Candan, Yunseok Rhee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a novel data structure, called Event-centric Composable Queue (ECQ), a basic building block of a new scalable composite event monitoring (CEM) framework, SCEMon. In particular, we focus on the scalability issues when large numbers of CEM queries and event sources exist in upcoming CEM environments. To address these challenges effectively, we take an event-centric sharing approach rather than dealing with queries and sources separately. ECQ is a shared queue, which stores incoming event instances of a primitive event class. ECQs are designed to facilitate efficient shared evaluations of multiple queries over very large volumes of event streams …

On Combining State Space Reductions With Global Fairness Assumptions, Shao Jie Zhang, Jun Sun, Jun Pang, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking has established itself as an effective system analysis method, as it is capable of proving/dis-proving properties automatically. Its application to practical systems is however limited by state space explosion. Among effective state reduction techniques are symmetry reduction and partial order reduction. Global fairness often plays a vital role in designing self-stabilizing population protocols. It is known that combining fairness and symmetry reduction is nontrivial. In this work, we first show that global fairness, unlike weak/strong fairness, can be combined with symmetry reduction. We extend the PAT model checker with the technique and demonstrate its usability by verifying recently …

Animation And Visualization Of 3d Underwater Sensor Networks, Matthew T. Tran

Master's Theses

Simulation and visualization are critical for the development of new systems and protocols in the area of computer networking. As real-world field testing is expensive and time-consuming, simulations are often preferred as they can be performed repeatedly and inexpensively while still reflecting the outcome of field tests to an extent. Visualizations of the simulation and field test results often follow to provide researchers with a vivid animation of the events, allowing for a much more intuitive understanding of the system than tediously reading through trace files. While there are currently a multitude of simulators and animators for land-based networks, few …