Software Engineering Commons^™

Pointcut Rejuvenation: Recovering Pointcut Expressions In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi Khatchadourian, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Harry Xu

Publications and Research

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming; changes to the base code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. In this paper, we present an automated approach that limits fragility problems by providing mechanical assistance in pointcut maintenance. The approach is based on harnessing arbitrarily deep structural commonalities between program elements corresponding to join points selected by a pointcut. The extracted patterns are then applied to later versions to offer suggestions of new join points that may require inclusion. To illustrate that the motivation behind our proposal is well founded, …

Vignette: Interactive Texture Design And Manipulation With Freeform Gestures For Pen-And-Ink Illustration, Rubaiat Habib Kazi, Takeo Igarashi, Shengdong Zhao, Richard C. Davis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vignette is an interactive system that facilitates texture creation in pen-and-ink illustrations. Unlike existing systems, Vignette preserves illustrators' workflow and style: users draw a fraction of a texture and use gestures to automatically fill regions with the texture. We currently support both 1D and 2D synthesis with stitching. Our system also has interactive refinement and editing capabilities to provide a higher level texture control, which helps artists achieve their desired vision. A user study with professional artists shows that Vignette makes the process of illustration more enjoyable and that first time users can create rich textures from scratch within minutes.

Empirical Studies On Collaboration In Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey, Jens Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaboration in software development is a complex is- sue that has been examined by various researchers over the last decade. This paper presents a systematic literature re- view of pertinent literature on empirical studies on collabo- rative software development. We found that a lot of progress has been achieved in the field of global or distributed de- velopment. While there are still many challenges, today's projects seem to have overcome at least some of those. Also, first steps have been made in understanding the collabora- tive aspects of requirements engineering and design. Re- search on tools for collaboration is advanced, …

Student Usage Patterns And Perceptions For Differentiated Lab Exercises In An Undergraduate Programming Course, Heng Ngee Mok

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Differentiated instruction in the form of tiered take-home lab exercises was implemented for students of an undergraduate-level programming course. This paper attempts to uncover the perceptions and usage patterns of students toward these new lab exercises using a comprehensive survey. Findings reveal that these tiered exercises are generally very well received and preferred over their traditional "one size fits all" counter-parts. Although the study does not show that tiered exercises have improved proÞciency or scores, it does seem to indicate higher student engagement and motivation levels. Based on the survey results, a list of recommendations is put forth for the …

Traffic Counter Mobile Application, Victor Molano

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

INTRODUCTION

Manual Counters:

•The vehicles counts and characteristics at signalized intersections and others transportation facilities are usually made using manual counters. These manual counters are mechanical or digital boards in which the user can record the different observations from the field. The use of these devices is usually required when more sophisticated methods are not available, when expensive equipment is not justified and for scholastic practices.

Real-Time Face Detection And Recognition, Parker Hill, Brendan Morris

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

The face has become a popular biometric for identification due to the wide range of features and difficulty in manipulation of the metric. In order to work towards a robust facial recognition system, this work contains a foundation for using the face as a recognition metric. First, faces are detected from still images using a Viola-Jones object detection algorithm. Then, Eigenfaces is applied to the detected faces. The system was tested on face databases as well as real-time feed from a web camera.

Adaptive Image Diffusion In Wavelet Domain, Kumar Mandava

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• Removing noise without sacrificing important structures
• Nonlinear strategies: Wavelet shrinkage and Nonlinear diffusion filtering based on features
• Clustering based wavelet diffusion

Comparative Study Of Various Data Collection Software Used For Seat-Belt Observation Surveys, Atul Sancheti, Puneet Lakhanpal, Sergio Contreras, Pushkin Kachroo, Masha Wilson

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

Every year, Click It or Ticket (CIOT) mobilization is held in U.S. which aims at increasing seat-belt usage awareness among the people. Data collection for assessing current seat-belt usage rates and campaign design for influencing mass audience are the two most important components of the mobilization. This paper presents a comparative study of various data collections software used for seat-belt observational surveys. The comparison is based on the speed and accuracy of the data collected from different software at the same locations and at the same time of the day.

Generating Minimal Pair-Wise Covering Test Suites, Luis C. Gutierrez ^, Martine Ceberio *

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Spring 2012

Software is ubiquitous and needs to be reliable. Software testing therefore plays an important role in software development. Proper testing a software system informs about its quality and reliability so as to prevent unexpected behavior during system execution. One of the methods to prevent failures consists in testing a system under different input values, but when all possible input values are tested, an impractical number of test cases might result. In software testing, pair-wise testing is a combinatorial technique which uses combination of pair input values to generate test cases. Using pair-wise testing dramatically reduces the number of test cases, …

Extending Java For Android Programming, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Android is one of the most popular platforms for developing mobile applications. However, its framework relies on programming conventions and styles to implement framework-specific concepts like activities and intents, causing problems such as reliability, readability, understandability, and maintainability. We propose to extend Java to support Android framework concepts explicitly as built-in language features. Our extension called Android Java will allow Android programmers to express these concepts in a more reliable, natural, and succinct way.

An Open Source Usability Maturity Model (Os-Umm), Luiz Fernando Capretz, Arif Raza, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

User satisfaction has always been a major factor in the success of software, regardless of whether it is closed proprietary or open source software (OSS). In open source projects, usability aspects cannot be improved unless there are ways to test and measure them. Hence, the increasing popularity of open source projects among novice and non-technical users necessitates a usability evaluation methodology. Consequently, this paper presents a usability maturity model specifically aimed at usability-related issues for open source projects. In particular, the model examines the degree of coordination between open source projects and their usability aspects. The measuring instrument of the …

Software Engineering For The Mobile Application Market, Jacob Schwartz

Honors Theses and Capstones

One of the goals of the current United States government is to lower healthcare costs. One of the solutions is to alter the behavior of the population to be more physically active and to eat healthier. This project will focus on the latter solution by writing applications for the Android and iOS mobile platforms that will allow a user to monitor their dietary intake to see and correct patterns in their eating behavior.

Adaptive Radial Basis Function Neural Networks-Based Real Time Harmonics Estimation And Pwm Control For Active Power Filters, Eyad Kh Almaita

Dissertations

With the proliferation of nonlinear loads in the power system, harmonic pollution becomes a serious problem that affects the power quality in both transmission and distribution systems. Active power filters (APF) have been proven to be one of the most successful methods for mitigating harmonics problems. So far, different techniques have been used in harmonics extraction and control of APF to satisfy the fast response and the accuracy required by the APF. Neural networks techniques have been used successfully in different real-time and complex situations. This dissertation demonstrates four main tasks; (i) a novel adaptive radial basis function neural networks …

Setting Up A Low-Cost Lab Management System For A Multi-Purpose Computing Laboratory Using Virtualisation Technology, Heng Ngee Mok, Wee Kiat Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes how a generic computer laboratory equipped with 52 workstations is set up for teaching IT-related courses and other general purpose usage. The authors have successfully constructed a lab management system based on decentralised, client-side software virtualisation technology using Linux and free software tools from VMware that fulfils the requirements of fast "switch over" time between consecutive lab sessions, the ability to support a wide range of IT courses and usage scenarios, low cost, easy maintenance, and a sandboxed environment for potentially disruptive IT security lab exercises. Sufficient implementation details are provided so that readers can build a …

Scalable Activity-Travel Pattern Monitoring Framework For Large-Scale City Environment, Youngki Lee, Sangjeong Lee, Byoungjip Kim, Jungwoo Kim, Yunseok Rhee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we introduce Activity Travel Pattern (ATP) monitoring in a large-scale city environment. ATP represents where city residents and vehicles stay and how they travel around in a complex megacity. Monitoring ATP will incubate new types of value-added services such as predictive mobile advertisement, demand forecasting for urban stores, and adaptive transportation scheduling. To enable ATP monitoring, we develop ActraMon, a high-performance ATP monitoring framework. As a first step, ActraMon provides a simple but effective computational model of ATP and a declarative query language facilitating effective specification of various ATP monitoring queries. More important, ActraMon employs the shared …

Understanding How Reverse Engineers Make Sense Of Programs From Assembly Language Representations, Adam R. Bryant

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation develops a theory of the conceptual and procedural aspects involved with how reverse engineers make sense of executable programs. Software reverse engineering is a complex set of tasks which require a person to understand the structure and functionality of a program from its assembly language representation, typically without having access to the program's source code. This dissertation describes the reverse engineering process as a type of sensemaking, in which a person combines reasoning and information foraging behaviors to develop a mental model of the program. The structure of knowledge elements used in making sense of executable programs are …

Losing The Lake: Development And Deployment Of An Educational Game, Joseph M. Vesco, Katie Gilgen, Anne Paine, Marissa Owens, Michael Nussbaum, Gale M. Sinatra, Sajjad Ahmad, Kent J. Crippen, Sergiu Dascalu, Frederick C. Harris

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Faculty Research

When asked what the top three issues of the Las Vegas region were, the reply was “water, water, water!" This was the result of a survey done a few years ago of Las Vegas Valley TV anchors. The reason for this response is that sustainability of the urban environments requires sufficient water resources as does population growth. With the advent of global climate change, this resource is in danger. Water flow and mountainous ice packs are impacted by this change in climate there by impacting the amount of water the the region. This is compounded over time as the population …

3-D Scene Reconstruction From Aerial Imagery, Jared M. Ekholm

Theses and Dissertations

3-D scene reconstructions derived from Structure from Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) techniques were analyzed to determine the optimal reconnaissance flight characteristics suitable for target reconstruction. In support of this goal, a preliminary study of a simple 3-D geometric object facilitated the analysis of convergence angles and number of camera frames within a controlled environment. Reconstruction accuracy measurements revealed at least 3 camera frames and a 6 convergence angle were required to achieve results reminiscent of the original structure. The central investigative effort sought the applicability of certain airborne reconnaissance flight profiles to reconstructing ground targets. The data sets …

Hoare-Style Verification Of Graph Programs, Christopher M. Poskitt, Detlef Plump

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

GP (for Graph Programs) is an experimental nondeterministic programming language for solving problems on graphs and graph-like structures. The language is based on graph transformation rules, allowing visual programming at a high level of abstraction. In particular, GP frees programmers from dealing with low-level data structures. In this paper, we present a Hoare-style proof system for verifying the partial correctness of (a subset of) graph programs. The pre- and postconditions of the calculus are nested graph conditions with expressions, a formalism for specifying both structural graph properties and properties of labels. We show that our proof system is sound with …

Utility-Based Bandwidth Adaptation In Mission-Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Flavio Bergamaschi, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper develops a utility-based optimization framework for resource sharing by multiple competing missions in a mission-oriented wireless sensor network (WSN) environment. Prior work on network utility maximization (NUM) based optimization has focused on unicast flows with sender-based utilities in either wireline or wireless networks. In this work, we develop a generalized NUM model to consider three key new features observed in mission-centric WSN environments: i) the definition of the utility of an individual mission (receiver) as a joint function of data from multiple sensor sources ii) the consumption of each senders (sensor) data by multiple missions and iii) the …

Dynamic Lookahead Mechanism For Conserving Power In Multi-Player Mobile Games, Karthik Thirugnanam, Bhojan Anand, Jeena Sebastian, Pravein Kannan, Akhihebbal L. Ananda, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Mun Choon Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the current generation of mobile smartphones become more powerful, they are being used to perform more resource intensive tasks making battery lifetime a major bottleneck. In this paper, we present a technique called dynamic AoV lookahead for reducing wireless interface power consumption up to 50% while playing a popular, yet resource intensive, mobile multiplayer games.

Human: Creating Memorable Fingerprints Of Mobile Users, Gupta Payas, Kiat Wee Tan, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, David Lo, Debin Gao, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present a new way of generating behavioral (not biometric) fingerprints from the cellphone usage data. In particular, we explore if the generated behavioral fingerprints are memorable enough to be remembered by end users. We built a system, called HuMan, that generates fingerprints from cellphone data. To test HuMan, we conducted an extensive user study that involved collecting about one month of continuous usage data (including calls, SMSes, application usage patterns etc.) from 44 Symbian and Android smartphone users. We evaluated the memorable fingerprints generated from this rich multi-context data by asking each user to answer various …

Improved Duplicate Bug Report Identification, Yuan Tian, Chengnian Sun, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bugs are prevalent in software systems. To improve the reliability of software systems, developers often allow end users to provide feedback on bugs that they encounter. Users could perform this by sending a bug report in a bug report management system like Bugzilla. This process however is uncoordinated and distributed, which means that many users could submit bug reports reporting the same problem. These are referred to as duplicate bug reports. The existence of many duplicate bug reports may cause much unnecessary manual efforts as often a triager would need to manually tag bug reports as being duplicates. Recently, there …

Scenario-Based And Value-Based Specification Mining: Better Together, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification mining takes execution traces as input and extracts likely program invariants, which can be used for comprehension, verification, and evolution related tasks. In this work we integrate scenario-based specification mining, which uses a data-mining algorithm to suggest ordering constraints in the form of live sequence charts, an inter-object, visual, modal, scenario-based specification language, with mining of value-based invariants, which detects likely invariants holding at specific program points. The key to the integration is a technique we call scenario-based slicing, running on top of the mining algorithms to distinguish the scenario-specific invariants from the general ones. The resulting suggested specifications …

Mobicon: A Mobile Context-Monitoring Platform, Youngki Lee, S. S. Iyengar, Chulhong Min, Younghyun Ju, Taiwoo Park, Jinwon Lee, Yunseok Rhee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User context is defined by data generated through everyday physical activity in sensor-rich, resource-limited mobile environments.

Users’ Perception Of Open Source Usability: An Empirical Study, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The number of open source software (OSS) users has increased in recent years. No longer are they limited to technically adept software developers. Many believe that the OSS market share could increase tremendously provided OSS had systems that were easier to use. Although examples of good usable open source software exist, it is agreed that OSS can be made more usable. This study presents an empirical investigation to study the impact of some key factors on OSS usability from the end users’ point of view. The research model studies and establishes the relationship between the key usability factors from the …

The Social Network Of Software Engineering Research, Subhajit Datta, Nishant Kumar, Santonu Sarkar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The social network perspective has served as a useful framework for studying scientific research collaboration in different disciplines. Although collaboration in computer science research has received some attention, software engineering research collaboration has remained unexplored to a large extent. In this paper, we examine the collaboration networks based on co-authorship information of papers from ten software engineering publication venues over the 1976-2010 time period. We compare time variations of certain parameters of these networks with corresponding parameters of collaboration networks from other disciplines. We also explore whether software engineering collaboration networks manifest symptoms of the small-world phenomenon, conform to the …

Arivu: Making Networked Mobile Games Green: A Scalable Power-Aware Middleware, Anand Bhojan, Ananda L. Akhihebbal L., Mun Choon Chan, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the improved processing power, graphic quality and high-speed wireless connection in recent generations of mobile phones, it looks more attractive than ever to introduce networked games on these devices. However, these games consume higher levels of energy. While device features and application resource requirements are rapidly growing, the battery technologies are not growing at the same pace. Therefore, the main concern is the limitation of the battery power of such portable devices to support potentially long-hour of game play. In this paper we present ARIVU, a scalable power aware middleware that dynamically controls the energy consumption of wireless interface …

Programming In A Socially Networked World: The Evolution Of The Social Programmer, Christoph Treude, Fernando Figueira Filho, Brendan Cleary, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media has changed how software developers collaborate, how they coordinate their work, and where they find information. Social media sites, such as the Question and Answer (Q&A) portal Stack Overflow, fill archives with millions of entries that contribute to what we know about software development, covering a wide range of topics. For today’s software developers, reusable code snippets, introductory usage examples, and pertinent libraries are often just a web search away. In this position paper, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for software developers that rely on web content curated by the crowd, and we envision the future of …

Towards Fine-Grained Radio-Based Indoor Location, Jie Xiong, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Location systems are key to a rich experience for mobile users. When they roam outdoors, mobiles can usually count on a clear GPS signal for an accurate location, but indoors, GPS usually fades, and so up until recently, mobiles have had to rely mainly on rather coarse-grained signal strength readings for location. What has changed this status quo is the recent trend of dramatically increasing numbers of antennas at the indoor AP, mainly to bolster capacity and coverage with multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) techniques. In the near future, the number of antennas at the access point will increase several-fold, to meet …