Software Engineering Commons^™

Tasknav: Task-Based Navigation Of Software Documentation, Christoph Treude, Mathieu Sicard, Marc Klocke, Martin P. Robillard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To help developers navigate documentation, we introduce Task Nav, a tool that automatically discovers and indexes task descriptions in software documentation. With Task Nav, we conceptualize tasks as specific programming actions that have been described in the documentation. Task Nav presents these extracted task descriptions along with concepts, code elements, and section headers in an auto-complete search interface. Our preliminary evaluation indicates that search results identified through extracted task descriptions are more helpful to developers than those found through other means, and that they help bridge the gap between documentation structure and the information needs of software developers. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opnGYmMGnqY.

Multi-Agent Task Assignment For Mobile Crowdsourcing Under Trajectory Uncertainties, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we investigate the problem of mobile crowdsourcing, where workers are financially motivated to perform location-based tasks physically. Unlike current industry practice that relies on workers to manually browse and filter tasks to perform, we intend to automatically make task recommendations based on workers' historical trajectories and desired time budgets. However, predicting workers' trajectories is inevitably faced with uncertainties, as no one will take exactly the same route every day; yet such uncertainties are oftentimes abstracted away in the known literature. In this work, we depart from the deterministic modeling and study the stochastic task recommendation problem where …

Flutcha: Using Fluency To Distinguish Humans From Computers, Kotaro Hara, Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi, Benjamin B. Benderson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Improvements in image understanding technologies aremaking it possible for computers to pass traditionalCAPTCHA tests with high probability. This suggests theneed for new kinds of tasks that are easy to accomplishfor humans but remain difficult for computers. In thispaper, we introduce Fluency CAPTCHA (FluTCHA), anovel method to distinguish humans from computersusing the fact that humans are better than machines atimproving the fluency of sentences. We propose a wayto let users work on FluTCHA tests and simultaneouslycomplete useful linguistic tasks. Evaluation studiesdemonstrate the feasibility of using FluTCHA todistinguish humans from computers.

Rclinker: Automated Linking Of Issue Reports And Commits Leveraging Rich Contextual Information, Tien-Duy B. Le, Mario Linares Vasquez, David Lo, Denys Poshyvanyk

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Links between issue reports and their corresponding commits in version control systems are often missing. However, these links are important for measuring the quality of a software system, predicting defects, and many other tasks. Several approaches have been designed to solve this problem by automatically linking bug reports to source code commits via comparison of textual information in commit messages and bug reports. Yet, the effectiveness of these techniques is oftentimes suboptimal when commit messages are empty or contain minimum information; this particular problem makes the process of recovering traceability links between commits and bug reports particularly challenging. In this …

Matchmaking Game Players On Public Transport, Nairan Zhang, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper extends our recent work, called GameOn, which presented a system for allowing public transport commuters to engage in multiplayer games with fellow commuters traveling on the same bus or train. An important challenge for GameOn is to group players with reliable connections into the same game. In this case, the meaning of reliability has two dimensions. First, the network connectivity (TCP, UDP etc.) should be robust. Second, the players should be collocated with each other for a sufficiently long duration so that a game session will not be terminated by players leaving the public transport modality such as …

Formal Specification And Refinement Of The Navigation Tasks Of Autonomous Robots, Eman Rabiah

Theses

Autonomous robots are hybrid systems whose role in our daily life is becoming increasingly critical. They are tasked with various activities requiring reliability, safety, and correctness of their software-controlled behavior. Formal methods have been proved effective in addressing development issues associated with these software qualities. However, even though autonomous robot navigation is a primordial function, there is no research dealing with enhancing reliability of the navigation algorithms. Thus, our focus is to investigate this type of algorithms, and specifically path planning, a fundamental and critical functionality supporting autonomy. We formally address the issue of enhancing reliability of the widely-used A* …

Uav-Cloud: A Platform For Uav Resources And Services On The Cloud, Sara Yousif Mohamed Mahmoud

Theses

UAVs - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – have gained significant attention recently, due to the increasingly growing range of applications. However, developing collaborative UAV applications using traditional technologies in a tightly coupled design requires a great deal of development effort, time, and budget especially for heterogeneous UAVs. Moreover, monitoring and accessing UAV resources using traditional communication media suffer from several restrictions and limitations. This research aims to simplify the efforts, reduce the time, and lower the costs of developing collaborative applications for distributed heterogeneous UAVs. In addition, the research aims to provide ubiquitous UAV resources access. A platform is proposed for …

Towards Practical Graph-Based Verification For An Object-Oriented Concurrency Model, Alexander Heußner, Christopher M. Poskitt, Claudio Corrodi, Benjamin Morandi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To harness the power of multi-core and distributed platforms, and to make the development of concurrent software more accessible to software engineers, different object-oriented concurrency models such as SCOOP have been proposed. Despite the practical importance of analysing SCOOP programs, there are currently no general verification approaches that operate directly on program code without additional annotations. One reason for this is the multitude of partially conflicting semantic formalisations for SCOOP (either in theory or by-implementation). Here, we propose a simple graph transformation system (GTS) based run-time semantics for SCOOP that grasps the most common features of all known semantics of …

Tlv: Abstraction Through Testing, Learning, And Validation, Jun Sun, Hao Xiao, Yang Liu, Shang-Wei Lin, Shengchao Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A (Java) class provides a service to its clients (i.e., programs which use the class). The service must satisfy certain specifications. Different specifications might be expected at different levels of abstraction depending on the client's objective. In order to effectively contrast the class against its specifications, whether manually or automatically, one essential step is to automatically construct an abstraction of the given class at a proper level of abstraction. The abstraction should be correct (i.e., over-approximating) and accurate (i.e., with few spurious traces). We present an automatic approach, which combines testing, learning, and validation, to constructing an abstraction. Our approach …

Saberlytics Software Suite, Dylan Hallagan, Cody Thomas

Computer Science Undergraduate

No abstract provided.

Superhero Camp, Ben Fennell, Matthew Czajka

Computer Science Undergraduate

No abstract provided.

Network Inventory Application, Aaron M. Resch, Matthew Begley

Computer Science Undergraduate

No abstract provided.

Garbage Collector, Greg Lohrman, Alexis Zakala

Computer Science Undergraduate

No abstract provided.

Demand Bidding Program And Its Application In Hotel Energy Management, Manikanta Perumalla

All Capstone Projects

Demand bidding program (DBP) is recently adopted in practice by some energy operators. DBP is a risk-free demand response program targeting large energy consumers. In this paper, we consider DBP with the application in hotel energy management. For DBP, optimization problem is formulated with the objective of maximizing expected reward, which is received when the amount of energy saving satisfies the contract. For a general distribution of energy consumption, we give a general condition for the optimal bid and outline an algorithm to find the solution without numerical integration. Furthermore, for Gaussian distribution, we derive closed-form expressions of the optimal …

Instamapp, Andrew Dicosmo, Preethi Reddy, Venkat Nischey

All Capstone Projects

InstaMapp is a web application we started building in fall 2014. This application is intended for anyone who wants to locate a product from a department store. Anyone who would like to print or view a shopping list with aisle or department locations. Currently there isn’t a reliable application out that that exist in the technology space. InstaMapp currently integrates with Walmart’s API and supports a responsive design for mobile devices.

During fall 2014, we built a proof of concept on Microsoft Windows Azure websites integrating with Intel Mashery Services for the API. We used the following Languages: PHP, JQuery, …

Governance And Organizational Sponsorship As Success Factors In Free/Libre And Open Source Software Development: An Empirical Investigation Using Structural Equation Modeling, Aleksandr Blekh

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Recent advances in information technologies and subsequent explosive growth of computer software use in practically all aspects of everyday life provide tremendous opportunities and benefits for improving people's lives. However, significant proportion of software projects represents cancelled, abandoned or otherwise failed projects. This situation exists not only in commercial software products or government information systems, but also in an increasingly popular and important domain of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS).

The problem of failures in software development projects requires identification and understanding of the factors of success and their interrelationships. Practice and previous research suggest that governance of software …

Effect Of Machine Translation In Interlingual Conversation: Lessons From A Formative Study, Kotaro Hara, Shamsi T. Iqbal

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Language barrier is the primary challenge for effectivecross-lingual conversations. Spoken language translation(SLT) is perceived as a cost-effective alternative to lessaffordable human interpreters, but little research has beendone on how people interact with such technology. Using aprototype translator application, we performed a formativeevaluation to elicit how people interact with the technologyand adapt their conversation style. We conducted two setsof studies with a total of 23 pairs (46 participants).Participants worked on storytelling tasks to simulate naturalconversations with 3 different interface settings. Ourfindings show that collocutors naturally adapt their style ofspeech production and comprehension to compensate forinadequacies in SLT. We conclude the paper …

Maximizing Lifetime In Clustered Wsns With Energy Harvesting Relay: Profiling And Modeling, Pengfei Zhang, Hwee-Pink Tan, Gaoxi Xiao, Yi Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inspired by clustering and energy harvesting techniques, we study multiple-cluster wireless sensor networks with energy harvesting (EH) sensors serving as relay for cluster heads. In this paper, we derive the model for realistic energy harvesting rate. Then we propose distributed matching algorithm for EHs to serve as relay for CHs. The proposed algorithm could find optimal/near-optimal CH-EH matching in short time and still achieve good performance. We evaluate the performance of our method through theoretical analysis as well as simulation.

Markov Decision Processes With Applications In Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey, Abu Mohammad Alsheikh, Dinh Thai Hoang, Dusit Niyato, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are used to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process …

Evaluating Defect Prediction Using A Massive Set Of Metrics, Xiao Xuan, David Lo, Xin Xia, Yuan Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To evaluate the performance of a within-project defect prediction approach, people normally use precision, recall, and F-measure scores. However, in machine learning literature, there are a large number of evaluation metrics to evaluate the performance of an algorithm, (e.g., Matthews Correlation Coefficient, G-means, etc.), and these metrics evaluate an approach from different aspects. In this paper, we investigate the performance of within-project defect prediction approaches on a large number of evaluation metrics. We choose 6 state-of-the-art approaches including naive Bayes, decision tree, logistic regression, kNN, random forest and Bayesian network which are widely used in defect prediction literature. And we …

An Empirical Assessment Of Bellon's Clone Benchmark, Alan Charpentier, Jean-Rémy Falleri, David Lo, Laurent Reveillere

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Clone benchmarks are essential to the assessment and improvement of clone detection tools and algorithms. Among existing benchmarks, Bellon's benchmark is widely used by the research community. However, a serious threat to the validity of this benchmark is that reference clones it contains have been manually validated by Bellon alone. Other persons may disagree with Bellon's judgment. Objective: In this paper, we perform an empirical assessment of Bellon's benchmark. Method: We seek the opinion of eighteen participants on a subset of Bellon's benchmark to determine if researchers should trust the reference clones it contains. Results: Our experiment shows that …

High-Throughput Reliable Multicast In Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks, Xin Zhao, Jun Guo, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Sanjay K. Jha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a cross-layer approach for enabling high-throughput reliable multicast in multi-hop wireless mesh networks. The building block of our approach is a multicast routing metric, called the expected multicast transmission count (EMTX). EMTX is designed to capture the combined effects of MAC-layer retransmission-based reliability, wireless broadcast advantage, and link quality awareness. The EMTX of single-hop transmission of a multicast packet from a sender is the expected number of multicast transmissions (including retransmissions) required for its next-hop recipients to receive the packet successfully. We formulate the EMTX-based multicast problem with the objective of minimizing the sum of EMTX over …

Sensorem – An Efficient Mobile Platform For Wireless Sensor Network Visualization, Jin Ming Koh, Marcus Sak, Hwee Xian Tan, Huiguang Liang, Fachmin Folianto, Tony Quek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Queuevadis: Queuing Analytics Using Smartphones, Tadashi Okoshii, Lu Yu, Chetna Vig, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present QueueVadis, a system that addresses the problem of estimating, in real-time, the properties of queues at commonplace urban locations, such as coffee shops, taxi stands and movie theaters. Abjuring the use of any queuing-specific infrastructure sensors, QueueVadis uses participatory mobile sensing to detect both (i) the individual-level queuing episodes for any arbitrarily-shaped queue (by a characteristic locomotive signature of short bursts of "shuffling forward" between periods of "standing") and (ii) the aggregate-level queue properties (such as expected wait or service times) via appropriate statistical aggregation of multi-person data. Moreover, for venues where multiple queues are too close …

Mobility Increases Localizability: A Survey On Wireless Indoor Localization Using Inertial Sensors, Zheng Yang, Chenshu Wu, Zimu Zhou, Xinglin Zhang, Xu Wang, Yunhao Liy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless indoor positioning has been extensively studied for the past two decades and continuously attracted growing research efforts in mobile computing context. As the integration of multiple inertial sensors (e.g., accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer) to nowadays smartphones in recent years, human-centric mobility sensing is emerging and coming into vogue. Mobility information, as a new dimension in addition to wireless signals, can benefit localization in a number of ways, since location and mobility are by nature related in physical world. In this article, we survey this new trend of mobility enhancing smartphone-based indoor localization. Specifically, we first study how to measure …

Exploring Discriminative Features For Anomaly Detection In Public Spaces, Shriguru Nayak, Archan Misra, Kasthuri Jeyarajah, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context data, collected either from mobile devices or from user-generated social media content, can help identify abnormal behavioural patterns in public spaces (e.g., shopping malls, college campuses or downtown city areas). Spatiotemporal analysis of such data streams provides a compelling new approach towards automatically creating real-time urban situational awareness, especially about events that are unanticipated or that evolve very rapidly. In this work, we use real-life datasets collected via SMU's LiveLabs testbed or via SMU's Palanteer software, to explore various discriminative features (both spatial and temporal - e.g., occupancy volumes, rate of change in topic{specific tweets or probabilistic distribution of …

Interpreting Multitouch Gestures, Michael Schuweiler

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

Interpreting multitouch interactions can be as simple as understanding code that handles these multitouches and this code's associated actions. As more touch events are added to an input, inputs become more complex. There are multiple approaches to interpreting these inputs between users and touchscreens. Researchers in this field find answers to common problems and provide developers with tools that make interactions with multitouch devices easier to describe and incorporate into their systems. These tools are then used to create gestures through different approaches, specifically through demonstration and by declaration. In this paper, these researchers' tools are described and compared.

How To Speed Up Software Migration And Modernization: Successful Strategies Developed By Precisiating Expert Knowledge, Francisco Zapata, Octavio Lerma, Leobardo Valera, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Computers are getting faster and faster; the operating systems are getting more sophisticated. Often, these improvements necessitate that we migrate the existing software to the new platform. In the ideal world, the migrated software should run perfectly well on a new platform; however, in reality, when we try that, thousands of errors appear, errors that need correcting. As a result, software migration is usually a very time-consuming process. A natural way to speed up this process is to take into account that errors naturally fall into different categories, and often, a common correction can be applied to all error from …

Leading Undergraduate Students To Big Data Generation, Jianjun Yang, Ju Shen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

People are facing a flood of data today. Data are being collected at unprecedented scale in many areas, such as networking, image processing, virtualization, scientific computation, and algorithms. The huge data nowadays are called Big Data. Big data is an all encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process them using traditional data processing applications. In this article, the authors present a unique way which uses network simulator and tools of image processing to train students abilities to learn, analyze, manipulate, and apply Big Data. Thus they develop students hands-on …

Code Coverage And Test Suite Effectiveness: Empirical Study With Real Bugs In Large Systems, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During software maintenance, testing is a crucial activity to ensure the quality of program code as it evolves over time. With the increasing size and complexity of software, adequate software testing has become increasingly important. Code coverage is often used as a yardstick to gauge the comprehensiveness of test cases and the adequacy of testing. A test suite quality is often measured by the number of bugs it can find (aka. kill). Previous studies have analysed the quality of a test suite by its ability to kill mutants, i.e., artificially seeded faults. However, mutants do not necessarily represent real bugs. …