Software Engineering Commons^™

Gpu Accelerated On-The-Fly Reachability Checking, Zhimin Wu, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jianqi Shi, Shengchao Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking suffers from the infamous state space explosion problem. In this paper, we propose an approach, named GPURC, to utilize the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to speed up the reachability verification. The key idea is to achieve a dynamic load balancing so that the many cores in GPUs are fully utilized during the state space exploration.To this end, we firstly construct a compact data encoding of the input transition systems to reduce the memory cost and fit the calculation in GPUs. To support a large number of concurrent components, we propose a multi-integer encoding with conflict-release accessing approach. We …

All Your Sessions Are Belong To Us: Investigating Authenticator Leakage Through Backup Channels On Android, Guangdong Bai, Jun Sun, Jianliang Wu, Quanqi Ye, Li Li, Jin Song Dong, Shanqing Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Security of authentication protocols heavily relies on the confidentiality of credentials (or authenticators) like passwords and session IDs. However, unlike browser-based web applications for which highly evolved browsers manage the authenticators, Android apps have to construct their own management. We find that most apps simply locate their authenticators into the persistent storage and entrust underlying Android OS for mediation. Consequently, these authenticators can be leaked through compromised backup channels. In this work, we conduct the first systematic investigation on this previously overlooked attack vector. We find that nearly all backup apps on Google Play inadvertently expose backup data to any …

Predicting Energy Demand Peak Using M5 Model Trees, Sara S. Abdelkader, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Predicting energy demand peak is a key factor for reducing energy demand and electricity bills for commercial customers. Features influencing energy demand are many and complex, such as occupant behaviours and temperature. Feature selection can decrease prediction model complexity without sacrificing performance. In this paper, features were selected based on their multiple linear regression correlation coefficients. This paper discusses the capabilities of M5 model trees in energy demand prediction for commercial buildings. M5 model trees are similar to regression trees; however they are more suitable for continuous prediction problems. The M5 model tree prediction was developed based on a selected …

Battle Bot Ai – Patriot Bot, James Johnston

Computer Engineering

An entry in the the 'Battle Block AI' competition hosted by 'The AI Games'.

Energy Forecasting For Event Venues: Big Data And Prediction Accuracy, Katarina Grolinger, Alexandra L'Heureux, Miriam Am Capretz, Luke Seewald

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Advances in sensor technologies and the proliferation of smart meters have resulted in an explosion of energy-related data sets. These Big Data have created opportunities for development of new energy services and a promise of better energy management and conservation. Sensor-based energy forecasting has been researched in the context of office buildings, schools, and residential buildings. This paper investigates sensor-based forecasting in the context of event-organizing venues, which present an especially difficult scenario due to large variations in consumption caused by the hosted events. Moreover, the significance of the data set size, specifically the impact of temporal granularity, on energy …

Students' Perspectives Of Mobile Learning Platforms: An Empirical Study, Muasaad Alrasheedi, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Arif Raza

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Educational institutions are becoming involved in adopting technological innovations like th e mobile learning (m-Learning) platform for education. Mobile technologies are the next frontier as infrast ructure for m-Learning because they can provide high-quality learning capab ilities to satisfy the rising student demand for mobility and flexibility due to the ubiquitous nature of mobile tec hnology (smartphones) and the va st opportunities it offers, there ar e indications that smartphones could lead the next generation for learning platforms. Researchers have examin ed the idea from several angles and produced a copious amount of literature devoted to explaining the interrelationships of …

Management's Perspective On Critical Success Factors Affecting Mobile Learning In Higher Education Institutions - An Empirical Study, Muasaad Alrasheedi, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Arif Raza

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Mobile learning (m-Learning) is considered to be one of the fastest growing learning platforms. The immense interest in m-Learning is attributed to the incredible rate of growth of mobile technology and its proliferation into every aspect of modern life. Despite this, m-Learning has not experienced a similar adoption rate in the education sector, chiefly higher education. Researchers have attempted to explain this anomaly by conducting several studies in the area. However, mostly the research in m-Learning is examined from the perspective of the students and educators. In this research, it is contended that there is a third important stakeholder group …

Toward Unification Of Explicit And Implicit Invocation-Style Programming, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Subprograms like procedures and methods can be invoked explicitly or implicitly; in implicit invocation, an event implicitly causes the invocation of subprograms that are registered an interest in the event. Mixing these two styles is common in programming and often unavoidable in developing such software as GUI applications and event-based control systems. However, it isn't also uncommon for the mixed use to complicate programming logic and thus produce unclean code, code that is hard to read and understand. We show, through a small but realistic example, that the problem is not much on mixing two different styles itself but more …

A Systematic Derivation Of Loop Specifications Using Patterns, Aditi Barua, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Any non-trivial program contains loop control structures such as while, for and do statements. A formal correctness proof of code containing loop control structures is typically performed using an induction-based technique, and oftentimes the most challenging step of an inductive proof is formulating a correct induction hypothesis. An incorrectly-formulated induction hypothesis will surely lead to a failure of the proof. In this paper we propose a systematic approach for formulating and driving specifications of loop control structures for formal analysis and verification of programs. We explain our approach using while loops and a functional program verification technique in which a …

Real Time Analytics On Digital Distraction, Kristian Welch

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Hypothesis: empirically measuring the users productivity has the potential to significantly increase their productivity. This paper is the documentation of the process of building software capable of verifying this hypothesis. Starting with the research which gives enough evidence to warrant the hypothesis, also included is commentary on the prototyping, design decisions, and iteration based on user feedback of the software.

An Immersive Telepresence System Using Rgb-D Sensors And Head-Mounted Display, Xinzhong Lu, Ju Shen, Saverio Perugini, Jianjun Yang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to effectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The …

Mobilerp, Anthony Fata

Computer Engineering

MobilERP is a system that increases traceability of parts in a manufacturing process in a simple paperless way. The system contains three components, a desktop application, a mobile app, and a database. The mobile application allows employees to scan (using a bar code scanner) parts that they are working/finishing on during the manufacturing process. As the part goes down the assembly line, individuals will barcode scan using the app to track the progress. These changes would get updated to the database, where then the designated person can track the progress of the part as well as any problems or concerns …

Pthreads Profiler, Ryan Van Quinlan

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to design and implement a program which would allow users to profile programs that utilize the Pthreads library. This profiler allows users to measure load balance and lock contention between threads as well as discover deadlocks. These tools can be essential to developers of multi-threaded applications, which are notoriously difficult to debug. Additionally, this tool can help find vital performance benefits by providing relative execution measurements. The profiler is written in C++ and utilizes the standard template library as well as glibc extensions.

Mopeye: Monitoring Per-App Network Performance With Zero Measurement Traffic, Daoyuan Wu, Weichao Li, Rocky K. C. Chang, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile network performance measurement is important for understanding mobile user experience, problem diagnosis, and service comparison. A number of crowdsourcing measurement apps (e.g., MobiPerf and Netalyzr) have been embarked for the last few years. Unlike existing apps that use active measurement methods, we employ a novel passive-active approach to continuously monitor per-app network performance on unrooted smartphones without injecting additional network traffic. By leveraging the VpnService API on Android, MopEye, our measurement app, intercepts all network traffic and then relays them to their destinations using socket APIs. Therefore, not only MopEye can measure the round-trip time accurately, it can do …

Progressive Sequence Matching For Adl Plan Recommendation, Shan Gao, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) are indicatives of a person’s lifestyle. In particular, daily ADL routines closely relate to a person’s well-being. With the objective of promoting active lifestyles, this paper presents an agent system that provides recommendations of suitable ADL plans (i.e., selected ADL sequences) to individual users based on the more active lifestyles of the others. Specifically, we develop a set of quantitative measures, named wellness scores, spanning the evaluation across the physical, cognitive, emotion, and social aspects based on his or her ADL routines. Then we propose an ADL sequence learning model, named Recommendation ADL ART, or …

On The Unreliability Of Bug Severity Data, Yuan Tian, Nasir Ali, David Lo, Ahmed E. Hassan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Severity levels, e.g., critical and minor, of bugs are often used to prioritize development efforts. Prior research efforts have proposed approaches to automatically assign the severity label to a bug report. All prior efforts verify the accuracy of their approaches using human-assigned bug reports data that is stored in software repositories. However, all prior efforts assume that such human-assigned data is reliable. Hence a perfect automated approach should be able to assign the same severity label as in the repository – achieving a 100% accuracy. Looking at duplicate bug reports (i.e., reports referring to the same problem) from three open-source …

The Mathematics And Applications Behind Image Warping And Morphing, Tanvir Prince, Maria Malik, Ildefonso Salva, Ariel Mazor, Sakhr Aldaylam

Publications and Research

This research is conducted in the summer of 2015 and is possible by the support of various agency, in particular, by the grant of Prof. Angulo Nieves and the New York City Research Initiative.

The purpose of this research is to reveal the mathematics and applications of the computer animation techniques of warping and morphing. A warp is a twist or distortion in the form of an object in an image while a morph is the smooth and gradual transformation of an object in one image into the object in another image. Linear algebra makes these computer animation techniques possible; …

Mlaas: Machine Learning As A Service, Mauro Ribeiro, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The demand for knowledge extraction has been increasing. With the growing amount of data being generated by global data sources (e.g., social media and mobile apps) and the popularization of context-specific data (e.g., the Internet of Things), companies and researchers need to connect all these data and extract valuable information. Machine learning has been gaining much attention in data mining, leveraging the birth of new solutions. This paper proposes an architecture to create a flexible and scalable machine learning as a service. An open source solution was implemented and presented. As a case study, a forecast of electricity demand was …

An Adaptive Markov Strategy For Effective Network Intrusion Detection, Jianye Hao, Yinxing Xue, Mahinthan Chandramohan, Yang Liu, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Network monitoring is an important way to ensure the security of hosts from being attacked by malicious attackers. One challenging problem for network operators is how to distribute the limited monitoring resources (e.g., intrusion detectors) among the network to detect attacks effectively, especially when the attacking strategies can be changing dynamically and unpredictable. To this end, we adopt Markov game to model the interactions between the network operator and the attacker and propose an adaptive Markov strategy (AMS) to determine how the detectors should be placed on the network against possible attacks to minimize the network’s accumulated cost over time. …

Challenges In Analyzing Software Documentation In Portuguese, Christoph Treude, Carlos A. Prolo, Fernando Figueira Filho

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many tools that automatically analyze, summarize, or transform software artifacts rely on natural language processing tooling for the interpretation of natural language text produced by software developers, such as documentation, code comments, commit messages, or bug reports. Processing natural language text produced by software developers is challenging because of unique characteristics not found in other texts, such as the presence of code terms and the systematic use of incomplete sentences. In addition, texts produced by Portuguese-speaking developers mix languages since many keywords and programming concepts are referred to by their English name. In this paper, we provide empirical insights into …

Detecting Broken Pointcuts Using Structural Commonality And Degree Of Interest, Raffi Khatchadourian, Awais Rashd, Hidehiko Masuhara, Takuya Watanabe

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. Deciding which pointcuts have broken due to base-code changes is daunting, especially in large and complex systems. We present an automated approach that recommends pointcuts that are likely to require modification due to a certain base-code change and ones that do not. Our hypothesis is that join points selected by a pointcut exhibit common structural characteristics. Patterns describing such commonalities recommend pointcuts that have potentially broken to the developer. The approach …

Interpolation Guided Compositional Verification, Shang-Wei Lin, Jun Sun, Truong Khanh Nguyen, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking suffers from the state space explosion problem. Compositional verification techniques such as assume-guarantee reasoning (AGR) have been proposed to alleviate the problem. However, there are at least three challenges in applying AGR. Firstly, given a system M1 M2, how do we automatically construct and refine (in the presence of spurious counterexamples) an assumption A2, which must be an abstraction of M2? Previous approaches suggest to incrementally learn and modify the assumption through multiple invocations of a model checker, which could be often time consuming. Secondly, how do we keep the state space small when checking M1 A2 |= …

A Passive Testing Approach For Protocols In Wireless Sensor Networks, Xiaoping Che, Stephane Maag, Hwee Xian Tan, Hwee-Pink Tan, Zhangbing Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart systems are today increasingly developed with the number of wireless sensor devices drastically increasing. They are implemented within several contexts throughout our environment. Thus, sensed data transported in ubiquitous systems are important, and the way to carry them must be efficient and reliable. For that purpose, several routing protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, one stage that is often neglected before their deployment is the conformance testing process, a cruicial and challenging step. Compared to active testing techniques commonly used in wired networks, passive approaches are more suitable to the WSN environment. While some works …

Experience Report: An Industrial Experience Report On Test Outsourcing Practices, Xin Xia, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Zhenchang Xing, Xinyu Wang, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, many companies contract their testing functionalities out to third-party IT outsourcing companies. This process referred to as test outsourcing is common in the industry, yet it is rarely studied in the research community. In this paper, to bridge the gap, we performed an empirical study on test outsourcing with 10 interviewees and 140 survey respondents. We investigated various research questions such as the types, the process, and the challenges of test outsourcing, and the differences between test outsourcing and in-house testing. We found customer satisfaction, tight project schedule, and domain unfamiliarity are the top-3 challenges faced by the testers. …

Should Fixing These Failures Be Delegated To Automated Program Repair?, Le Dinh Xuan Bach, Le Bui Tien Duy, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Program repair constitutes one of the major components of software maintenance that usually incurs a significant cost in software production. Automated program repair is supposed to help in reducing the software maintenance cost by automatically fixing software defects. Despite the recent advances in automated software repair, it is still very costly to wait for repair tools to produce valid repairs of defects. This paper addresses the following question: "Will an automated program repair technique find a repair for a defect within a reasonable time?". To answer this question, we build an oracle that can predict whether fixing a failure should …

Real-Time Detection Of Seat Occupancy And Hogging, Huy Hoang Nguyen, Nakul Gulati, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a cheap and effective solution to detect if specific seats at a shared public table are occupied -- either by humans or by objects (i.e., the seats are being "hogged"). The hogging of seats, in particular, is a big problem for our campus library and required a large amount of manpower to correct (to find and clear hogged seats). We propose using two different cheap sensors, a capacitance sensor and an infrared (IR) sensor, to solve this problem. In the rest of this paper, we show how using these sensors can accurately determine if a …

Powerforecaster: Predicting Smartphone Power Impact Of Continuous Sensing Applications At Pre-Installation Time, Chulhong Min, Youngki Lee, Chungkuk Yoo, Seungwoo Kang, Sangwon Choi, Pillsoon Park, Inseok Hwang, Younghyun Ju, Seungpyo Choi, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Today's smartphone application (hereinafter 'app') markets miss a key piece of information, power consumption of apps. This causes a severe problem for continuous sensing apps as they consume significant power without users' awareness. Users have no choice but to repeatedly install one app after another and experience their power use. To break such an exhaustive cycle, we propose PowerForecaster, a system that provides users with power use of sensing apps at pre-installation time. Such advanced power estimation is extremely challenging since the power cost of a sensing app largely varies with users' physical activities and phone use patterns. We observe …

Codehow: Effective Code Search Based On Api Understanding And Extended Boolean Model (E), Fei Lv, Jian-Guang Lou, Shaowei Wang, Dongmei Zhang, Jainjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the years of software development, a vast amount of source code has been accumulated. Many code search tools were proposed to help programmers reuse previously-written code by performing free-text queries over a large-scale codebase. Our experience shows that the accuracy of these code search tools are often unsatisfactory. One major reason is that existing tools lack of query understanding ability. In this paper, we propose CodeHow, a code search technique that can recognize potential APIs a user query refers to. Having understood the potentially relevant APIs, CodeHow expands the query with the APIs and performs code retrieval by applying …

Automating The Performance Deviation Analysis For Multiple System Releases: An Evolutionary Study, Felipe Pinto, Uirá Kulesza, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a scenario-based approach for the evaluation of the quality attribute of performance, measured in terms of execution time (response time). The approach is implemented by a framework that uses dynamic analysis and repository mining techniques to provide an automated way for revealing potential sources of performance degradation of scenarios between releases of a software system. The approach defines four phases: (i) preparation – choosing the scenarios and preparing the target releases; (ii) dynamic analysis – determining the performance of scenarios and methods by calculating their execution time; (iii) degradation analysis – processing and comparing the results of …

Using Gamification As A Collaboration Motivator For Software Development Teams: A Preliminary Framework, Flavio Steffens, Sabrina Marczak, Fernando Figueira Filho, Christoph Treude, Leif Singer, David Redmiles, Ban Al-Ani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gamification is the use of game elements in non-game context to engage and to motivate people to achieve goals. Its use is becoming very popular in software development organizations due to work being based upon human-centric and brain-intensive activity. This paper presents the topics of collaboration and gamification in the context of software engineering, and proposes a framework that identifies the most common collaboration issues that affect software development teams, and how to apply game elements to motivate a change on their behaviors.