Software Engineering Commons^™

Hippi Care Hospital: Towards Proactive Business Processes In Emergency Room Services, Kar Way Tan, Venky Shankaraman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It was 2.35 am on a Saturday morning. Wiki Lim, process specialist from the Process Innovation Centre (PIC) of Hippi Care Hospital (HCH), desperately doodling on her notepad for ideas to improve service delivery at HCH’s Emergency Department (ED). HCH has committed to the public that its ED would meet the service quality criterion of serving 90% of A3 and A4 patients, non-emergency patients with moderate to mild symptoms, within 90 minutes of their arrival at the ED. The ED was not able to meet this performance goal and Dr. Edward Kim, the head of the ED at HCH, had …

We Can Hear You With Wifi!, Guanhua Wang, Yongpan Zou, Zimu Zhou, Kaishun Wu, Lionel M. Ni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent literature advances Wi-Fi signals to “see” people’s motions and locations. This paper asks the following question: Can Wi-Fi “hear” our talks? We present WiHear, which enables Wi-Fi signals to “hear” our talks without deploying any devices. To achieve this, WiHear needs to detect and analyze fine-grained radio reflections from mouth movements. WiHear solves this micro-movement detection problem by introducing Mouth Motion Profile that leverages partial multipath effects and wavelet packet transformation. Since Wi-Fi signals do not require line-of-sight, WiHear can “hear” people talks within the radio range. Further, WiHear can simultaneously “hear” multiple people’s talks leveraging MIMO technology. We …

A Catalog Of While Loop Specification Patterns, Aditi Barua, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

This document provides a catalog of while loop patterns along with their skeletal specifications. The specifications are written in a functional form known as intended functions. The catalog can be used to derive specifications of while loops by first matching the loops to the cataloged patterns and then instantiating the skeletal specifications of the matched patterns. Once their specifications are formulated and written, the correctness of while loops can be proved rigorously or formally using the functional program verification technique in which a program is viewed as a mathematical function from one program state to another.

Personality Profiles Of Software Engineers And Their Software Quality Preferences, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Zaka Ul-Mustafa

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Studies related to human aspects in software engineering (SE) have been performed from different perspectives. These perspectives include the study of human factors in different phases of software life cycle, effect of team performance in software development, how can a personality trait suit a particular task, and about some other miscellaneous issues. This research work aims to establish personality profiles of Pakistani software engineers using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) instrument. In this survey, we have collected personality profiles of 110 software engineers. Moreover, their preferences of software quality attributes have also been collected. Analysis of the study shows that …

Active Code Search: Incorporating User Feedback To Improve Code Search Relevance, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code search techniques return relevant code fragments given a user query. They typically work in a passive mode: given a user query, a static list of code fragments sorted by the relevance scores decided by a code search technique is returned to the user. A user will go through the sorted list of returned code fragments from top to bottom. As the user checks each code fragment one by one, he or she will naturally form an opinion about the true relevance of the code fragment. In an active model, those opinions will be taken as feedbacks to the search …

Crossnavi: Enabling Real-Time Crossroad Navigation For The Blind With Commodity Phones, Longfei Shangguan, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Xiaolong Zheng, Chenshu Wu, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Crossroad is among the most dangerous parts outside for the visually impaired people. Numerous studies have exploited navigating systems for the visually impaired community, providing services ranging from block detection, route planning to realtime localization. However, none of them have addressed the safety issue in crossroad and integrated three key factors necessary for a practical crossroad navigation system: detecting the crossroad, locating zebra patterns, and guiding the user within zebra crossing when passing the road. Our CrossNavi application responds to these needs, providing an integrated crossroad navigation service that incorporates all the essential functionalities mentioned above. The overall service is …

Towards Rigorously Faking Bidirectional Model Transformations, Christopher M. Poskitt, Mike Dodds, Richard F. Paige, Arend Rensink

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bidirectional model transformations (bx) are mechanisms for automatically restoring consistency between multiple concurrently modified models. They are, however, challenging to implement; many model transformation languages not supporting them at all. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatically obtaining the consistency guarantees of bx without the complexities of a bx language. First, we show how to "fake" true bidirectionality using pairs of unidirectional transformations and inter-model consistency constraints in Epsilon. Then, we propose to automatically verify that these transformations are consistency preserving – thus indistinguishable from true bx – by defining translations to graph rewrite rules and nested conditions, …

Event Analytics, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Yuan-Fang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The process analysis toolkit (PAT) integrates the expressiveness of state, event, time, and probability-based languages with the power of model checking. PAT is a self-contained reasoning system for system specification, simulation, and verification. PAT currently supports a wide range of 12 different expressive modeling languages with many application domains and has attracted thousands of registered users from hundreds of organizations. In this invited talk, we will present the PAT system and its vision on “Event Analytics” (EA) which is beyond “Data Analytics”. The EA research is based on applying model checking to event planning, scheduling, prediction, strategy analysis and decision …

Uncovering Embarrassing Moments In In-Situ Exposure Of Incoming Mobile Messages, Chulhong Min, Saumay Pushp, Seungchul Lee, Inseok Hwang, Youngki Lee, Seungwoo Kang, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile instant messengers serve as major interaction media for everyday chats. Contrary to the belief that a message is seen only by a designated receiver, it can be accidentally exposed to someone nearby and could result in embarrassing moments, for example, when the receiver is viewing pictures together with his friend upon the message arrival. To understand the significance of the problem and core factors that cause such embarrassments, we collected 961 in-situ responses from 14 participants upon the actual message arrival and analyzed them from the perspective of the receiver's situation. The results showed that 29% of message arrivals …

Phaser: Enabling Phased Array Signal Processing On Commodity Wifi Access Points, Jon Gjengset, Jie Xiong, Graeme Mcphilips, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Signal processing on antenna arrays has received much recent attention in the mobile and wireless networking research communities, with array signal processing approaches addressing the problems of human movement detection, indoor mobile device localization, and wireless network security. However, there are two important challenges inherent in the design of these systems that must be overcome if they are to be of practical use on commodity hardware. First, phase differences between the radio oscillators behind each antenna can make readings unusable, and so must be corrected in order for most techniques to yield high-fidelity results. Second, while the number of antennas …

Potential Biases In Bug Localization: Do They Matter?, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Yuan Tian, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Issue tracking systems are valuable resources during software maintenance activities and contain information about the issues faced during the development of a project as well as after its release. Many projects receive many reports of bugs and it is challenging for developers to manually debug and fix them. To mitigate this problem, past studies have proposed information retrieval (IR)-based bug localization techniques, which takes as input a textual description of a bug stored in an issue tracking system, and returns a list of potentially buggy source code files. These studies often evaluate their effectiveness on issue reports marked as bugs …

Dupfinder: Integrated Tool Support For Duplicate Bug Report Detection, Ferdian Thung, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To track bugs that appear in a software, developers often make use of a bug tracking system. Users can report bugs that they encounter in such a system. Bug reporting is inherently an uncoordinated distributed process though and thus when a user submits a new bug report, there might be cases when another bug report describing exactly the same problem is already present in the system. Such bug reports are duplicate of each other and these duplicate bug reports need to be identified. A number of past studies have proposed a number of automated approaches to detect duplicate bug reports. …

To What Extent Could We Detect Field Defects? An Extended Empirical Study Of False Negatives In Static Bug Finding Tools, Ferdian Thung, Lucia Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Foyzur Rahman, Premkumar Devanbu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software defects can cause much loss. Static bug-finding tools are designed to detect and remove software defects and believed to be effective. However, do such tools in fact help prevent actual defects that occur in the field and reported by users? If these tools had been used, would they have detected these field defects, and generated warnings that would direct programmers to fix them? To answer these questions, we perform an empirical study that investigates the effectiveness of five state-of-the-art static bug-finding tools (FindBugs, JLint, PMD, CheckStyle, and JCSC) on hundreds of reported and fixed defects extracted from three open …

High5: Promoting Interpersonal Hand-To-Hand Touch For Vibrant Workplace With Electrodermal Sensor Watches, Yuhwan Kim, Seungchul Lee, Inseok Hwang, Hyunho Ro, Youngki Lee, Miri Moon, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Interpersonal touch is our most primitive social language strongly governing our emotional well-being. Despite the positive implications of touch in many facets of our daily social interactions, we find wide-spread caution and taboo limiting touch-based interactions in workplace relationships that constitute a significant part of our daily social life. In this paper, we explore new opportunities for ubicomp technology to promote a new meme of casual and cheerful interpersonal touch such as high-fives towards facilitating vibrant workplace culture. Specifically, we propose High5, a mobile service with a smartwatch-style system to promote high-fives in everyday workplace interactions. We first present initial …

Automatic Early Defects Detection In Use Case Documents, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Yue Zhang, Bimlesh Wadhwa, Jin Song Dong, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Use cases, as the primary techniques in the user requirement analysis, have been widely adopted in the requirement engineering practice. As developed early, use cases also serve as the basis for function requirement development, system design and testing. Errors in the use cases could potentially lead to problems in the system design or implementation. It is thus highly desirable to detect errors in use cases. Automatically analyzing use case documents is challenging primarily because they are written in natural languages. In this work, we aim to achieve automatic defect detection in use case documents by leveraging on advanced parsing techniques. …

Exploring Variety Seeking Behavior In Mobile Users, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Robert J. Kauffman, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding the personality traits and current attitudes of individual consumers is crucial for retailers and mobile advertisers. In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon of “variety seeking tendencies" in mobile users in their (1) online (represented by their App usage behavior), and (2) physical (represented by their location visits) worlds. We show that different categories of users exhibit different levels of variety. Further, by analyzing at various time scales, we show that there exists correlation between when a person is likely to visit new places in the real world and when he/she is likely to explore new Apps in the …

Developing Microsoft Word 2007 Add-On Applications, Peter L. Sonnek

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

In 2007, Microsoft released a new version of MS Office that changed the file platform to a universal data format called Extensible Markup Language or XML. XML is meant to be simple, meaningful, and understood by all computer programs. Since Microsoft has moved its file format to XML, tremendous extendibility can be built by software professionals to link MS Office 2007 documents to data not held within the saved documents. This project tested the levels of interactive data between MS Word 2007 and several other XML data sources.

An Overview Of The Current State Of The Test-First Vs. Test-Last Debate, Christopher M. Thomas

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

When it comes to software development, perhaps one of the most important and time consuming processes is that of software testing. In fact, early studies on software testing estimated that it could consume fifty percent or more of development costs for a product. Because of this, the ability to optimize testing to reduce testing costs can be very valuable. In this paper we compare two popular methods, test-last testing, often used in waterfall software development processes, and test-first testing, often used in Agile test driven software development methods, by reviewing recent studies on the subject. In this review we discuss …

Improved Microrobotic Control Through Image Processing And Automated Hardware Interfacing, Archit R. Aggarwal, Wuming Jing, David J. Cappelleri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Untethered submilliliter-sized robots (microrobots) are showing potential use in different industrial, manufacturing and medical applications. A particular type of these microrobots, magnetic robots, have shown improved performance in power and control capabilities compared to the other thermal and electrostatic based robots. However, the magnetic robot designs have not been assessed in a robust manner to understand the degree of control in different environments and their application feasibility. This research project seeks to develop a custom control software interface to provide a holistic tool for researchers to evaluate the microrobotic performance through advance control features. The software deliverable involved two main …

Earth History Visualization System, Xinjie Lei, James G. Ogg

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Time Scale Creator (TSCreator), a geological chart generator, displays any portion of Earth history including chemo- magneto-, and other aspects. TSCreator is used by many universities, petroleum companies, and international geological surveys. In order to improve the quality of Time Scale Creator, tools were developed to provide users with more friendly graphical user interfaces (GUIs), accurate scaling of specific isotope, internationalization of data input and output, and smart depth scaling in wells to age conversion. To implement such tools, research for algorithm and common methods was basically done by searching articles online and reading posts on forums for Java developers. …

Is There Progress Toward Sustainability?: Despite The Inherent Human Resistance To Change., Jens Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The theme of this paper is to briefly survey the status of current efforts to maintain our natural environment and then discuss prospects for achieving future sustainability. The author finds that while there has been general recognition of the need for environmental sensitivity and conservation of natural resources, progress toward achieving sustainability goals has been slow. A principal reason for this lack of action is found in the reactive nature of the human species. Situated by biological design in our environment we typically respond to environmental changes only after they have occurred. Accordingly, while a number of revolutionary proposals have …

Using Remote Sensing Data To Predict The Spread Of Mosquito Borne Disease, Mary Ellen O'Donnell, Erika Podest

STAR Program Research Presentations

There is interest in how environmental variables derived from satellite data such as temperature, vegetation cover, and precipitation correlate to vector borne disease occurrence such as malaria and dengue fever. This study will be carried out using a decision tree based open source software called Random Forests to find correlations between the remote sensing variables and mosquito abundance. Software will be written in C# to take large amounts of data from the NASA satellite database and automatically format it for the Random Forest Software input. Correlations found, using Random Forests, between disease incidence and the variables can be used as …

Multisensory Emotion Recognition With Speech And Facial Expression, Jacob P. Roeland

Honors Theses

Computers through both desktop and mobile devices are only becoming more important in our lives leading us to have more involved and longer interactions with them. Because of this our brains actually classify our involvement with them in a manner similar to our interactions with our fellow humans. This can lead to frustration and anxiety when our computers interrupt our work or pleasure with contextually inappropriate messages, much the same way it would if a friend or co-worker was pushy or rude. A way to solve this issue is to give our machines emotional intelligence, or the ability to recognize …

Gta-M: Greedy Trajectory-Aware (M Copies) Routing For Airborne Networks, Xiaoping Ma, Hwee Xian Tan, Alvin C. Valera

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Airborne networks have potential applications in both civilian and military domains - such as passenger in-flight Internet connectivity, air traffic control and in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) activities. However, airborne networks suffer from frequent disruptions due to high node mobility, ad hoc connectivity and line-of-sight blockages. These challenges can be alleviated through the use of disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) techniques. In this paper, we propose GTA-m, a multi-copy greedy trajectory-aware routing protocol for airborne networks. GTA-m employs DTN capabilities and exploits the use of flight information to forwarded bundles greedily to intended destination(s). To alleviate the local minima issues that …

Evaluation Of String Constraint Solvers Using Dynamic Symbolic Execution, Scott Kausler

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Symbolic execution is a path sensitive program analysis technique used for error detection and test case generation. Symbolic execution tools rely on constraint solvers to determine the feasibility of program paths and generate concrete inputs for feasible paths. Therefore, the effectiveness of such tools depends on their constraint solvers.

Most modern constraint solvers for primitive data types, such as integers, are both efficient and accurate. However, the research on constraint solvers for complex data types, such as strings, is ongoing and less converged. For example, there are several types of string constraint solvers provided by researchers. However, a potential user …

Automatic Fine-Grained Issue Report Reclassification, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Issue tracking systems are valuable resources during software maintenance activities. These systems contain different categories of issue reports such as bug, request for improvement (RFE), documentation, refactoring, task etc. While logging issue reports into a tracking system, reporters can indicate the category of the reports. Herzig et al. Recently reported that more than 40% of issue reports are given wrong categories in issue tracking systems. Among issue reports that are marked as bugs, more than 30% of them are not bug reports. The misclassification of issue reports can adversely affects developers as they then need to manually identify the categories …

A Palm Vein Identification System Based On Gabor Wavelet Features, Ran Wang, Guoyou Wang, Zhong Chen, Zhigang Zeng, Yong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a new and promising biometric feature, thermal palm vein pattern has drawn lots of attention in research and application areas. Many algorithms have been proposed for authentication since palm vein has special characteristics, such as liveness detection and hard to forgery. However, the detection accuracy of palm vein quite depends on the preprocessing and feature representation, which is supposed to be translation and rotation invariant to some extent. In this paper, we proposed an effective method for palm vein identification based on Gabor wavelet features which contains five steps: image acquisition, ROI detection, image preprocessing, features extraction, and matching. …

The Learning Curves In Open-Source Software (Oss) Development Network, Youngsoo Kim, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We examine the learning curves of individual software developers in Open-Source Software (OSS) Development. We collected the dataset of multi-year code change histories from the repositories for five open source software projects involving more than 100 developers. We build and estimate regression models to assess individual developers' learning progress (in reducing the likelihood they may make a bug). Our estimation results show that developer's coding experience does not decrease bug ratios while cumulative bug-fixing experience leads to learning progress. The results may have implications and provoke future research on project management about allocating resources on tasks that add new code …

Symbolic Analysis Of An Electric Vehicle Charging Protocol, Li Li, Jun Pang, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we describe our analysis of a recently proposed electric vehicle charing protocol. The protocol builds on complex cryptographic primitives such as commitment, zeroknowledge proofs, BBS+ signature and etc. Moreover, interesting properties such as secrecy, authentication, anonymity, and location privacy are claimed on this protocol. It thus presents a challenge for formal verification, as no single existing tool for security protocol analysis support for all the required features. In our analysis, we employ and combine the strength of two stateof-the-art symbolic verifiers, Tamarin and ProVerif, to check all important properties of the protocol.

Detecting Differences Across Multiple Instances Of Code Clones, Yun Lin, Zhenchang Xing, Yinxing Xue, Yang Liu, Xin Peng, Jun Sun, Wenyun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Clone detectors find similar code fragments (i.e., instances of code clones) and report large numbers of them for industrial systems. To maintain or manage code clones, developers often have to investigate differences of multiple cloned code fragments. However,existing program differencing techniques compare only two code fragments at a time. Developers then have to manually combine several pairwise differencing results. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically detecting differences across multiple clone instances. We have implemented our approach as an Eclipse plugin and evaluated its accuracy with three Java software systems. Our evaluation shows that our algorithm has precision …