Software Engineering Commons^™

Hardware/Software Interface Assurance With Conformance Checking, Li Lei

Dissertations and Theses

Hardware/Software (HW/SW) interfaces are pervasive in modern computer systems. Most of HW/SW interfaces are implemented by devices and their device drivers. Unfortunately, HW/SW interfaces are unreliable and insecure due to their intrinsic complexity and error-prone nature. Moreover, assuring HW/SW interface reliability and security is challenging. First, at the post-silicon validation stage, HW/SW integration validation is largely an ad-hoc and time-consuming process. Second, at the system deployment stage, transient hardware failures and malicious attacks make HW/SW interfaces vulnerable even after intensive testing and validation. In this dissertation, we present a comprehensive solution for HW/SW interface assurance over the system life cycle. …

Simple Macro: Addon For World Of Warcraft, Yemane Gebreyesus

Computer Engineering

This senior project was started to try and solve a problem within World of Warcraft. That particular problem is the underdeveloped default macro interface, which Simple Macro aims to remedy by creating a more user-friendly interface that is accessible by a wider audience. It employs a click through method of accessing and editing data to reduce the amount of typing necessary. The addon also has a feature to specifically help players that want to change a target in certain groups of macros all at once. The project was developed in both Lua and XML.

Resound.Fm, Matthew Bleifer

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to create a social platform for people to share and discover the music they love. Current music streaming technologies lack an effective tool for helping users find new music. The personal element of music that used to exist in the days that people gathered around record players or shared mixtapes has been lost online and Resound.fm seeks to bring it back. Resound.fm is a Ruby on Rails web application, which uses some of the latest web technologies and design patterns to create a powerful new music discovery experience online. The project was completed …

'Fo Fighter: 2d Real-Time Game, Cary Dobeck

Computer Engineering

‘FO Fighter is a 2D real-time game for Android and iOS mobile devices. The game utilizes the motion sensors and touch screens built within these devices to give the player a great amount of control over their character’s position and firing direction. This control allows for a reactive environment set in outer space, where gravity is determined by the device’s orientation, while the player must dodge, fight and destroy multiple enemy fighters on each planet in the solar system. ‘FO Fighter has been tested throughout its development cycle on numerous devices on both the Android and iOS platforms, with testers …

Geospatial Data Modeling To Support Energy Pipeline Integrity Management, Austin Wylie

Master's Theses

Several hundred thousand miles of energy pipelines span the whole of North America -- responsible for carrying the natural gas and liquid petroleum that power the continent's homes and economies. These pipelines, so crucial to everyday goings-on, are closely monitored by various operating companies to ensure they perform safely and smoothly.

Happenings like earthquakes, erosion, and extreme weather, however -- and human factors like vehicle traffic and construction -- all pose threats to pipeline integrity. As such, there is a tremendous need to measure and indicate useful, actionable data for each region of interest, and operators often use computer-based decision …

Drill Design Suite, Neil Nordhof

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Drill Design Suite is a lightweight tool for creating drill for marching band programs.

California State University San Bernardino Win Gps, Francisco A. Ron

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The objective of this masters project is to develop a working application for Android devices. This is an application intended to be used by CSUSB. It has its own database, which has information about most of the facilities on campus. There are many GPS applications on the market, however I chose to design and implement WiN GPS, short for Walking GPS, because it will allow the possibility of a personalized GPS for the school and for users should they choose to use it.

In order to develop Win GPS it was necessary to research the available tools and to become …

Adaptive Resource Provisioning Mechanism In Vees For Improving Performance Of Hla-Based Simulations, Zengxiang Li, Wentong Cai, Stephen John Turner, Xiaorong Li, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Parallel and distributed simulations (or High-Level Architecture (HLA)-based simulations) employing optimistic synchronization allow federates to advance simulation time freely at the risk of overoptimistic executions and execution rollbacks. As a result, the simulation performance may degrade significantly due to the simulation workload imbalance among federates. In this article, we investigate the execution of parallel and distributed simulations on Cloud and data centers with Virtual Execution Environments (VEEs). In order to speed up simulation execution, an Adaptive Resource Provisioning Mechanism in Virtual Execution Environments (ArmVee) is proposed. It is composed of a performance monitor and a resource manager. The former measures …

Aarpa: Combining Mobile And Power-Line Sensing For Fine-Grained Appliance Usage And Energy Monitoring, Nirmalya Roy, Nilavra Pathak, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To promote energy-efficient operations in residential and office buildings, non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) techniques have been proposed to infer the fine-grained power consumption and usage patterns of appliances from power-line measurement data. Fine-grained monitoring of everyday appliances (such as toasters and coffee makers) can not only promote energy-efficient building operations, but also provide unique insights into the context and activities of individuals. Current building-level NILM techniques are unable to identify the consumption characteristics of relatively low-load appliances, whereas smart-plug based solutions incur significant deployment and maintenance costs. In this paper, we investigate an intermediate architecture, where smart circuit breakers provide …

Wifi-Based Indoor Line-Of-Sight Identification, Zimu Zhou, Zheng Yang, Chenshu Wu, Longfei Shangguan, Haibin Cai, Yunhao Liu, Lionel M. Ni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless LANs, particularly WiFi, have been pervasively deployed and have fostered myriad wireless communication services and ubiquitous computing applications. A primary concern in designing these applications is to combat harsh indoor propagation environments, particularly Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) propagation. The ability to identify the existence of the Line-Of-Sight (LOS) path acts as a key enabler for adaptive communication, cognitive radios, and robust localization. Enabling such capability on commodity WiFi infrastructure, however, is prohibitive due to the coarse multipath resolution with MAC-layer received signal strength. In this paper, we propose two PHY-layer channel-statistics-based features from both the time and frequency domains. To further …

Extracting Development Tasks To Navigate Software Documentation, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard, Barthélémy Dagenais

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge management plays a central role in many software development organizations. While much of the important technical knowledge can be captured in documentation, there often exists a gap between the information needs of software developers and the documentation structure. To help developers navigate documentation, we developed a technique for automatically extracting tasks from software documentation by conceptualizing tasks as specific programming actions that have been described in the documentation. More than 70 percent of the tasks we extracted from the documentation of two projects were judged meaningful by at least one of two developers. We present TaskNavigator, a user interface …

Wifi-Based Indoor Line-Of-Sight Identification, Zimu Zhou, Zheng Yang, Chenshu Wu, Longfei Shangguan, Haibin Cai, Yunhao Liu, Lionel M. Ni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless LANs, particularly WiFi, have been pervasively deployed and have fostered myriad wireless communication services and ubiquitous computing applications. A primary concern in designing these applications is to combat harsh indoor propagation environments, particularly Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) propagation. The ability to identify the existence of the Line-Of-Sight (LOS) path acts as a key enabler for adaptive communication, cognitive radios, and robust localization. Enabling such capability on commodity WiFi infrastructure, however, is prohibitive due to the coarse multipath resolution with MAC-layer received signal strength. In this paper, we propose two PHY-layer channel-statistics-based features from both the time and frequency domains. To further …

Verifying Parameterized Timed Security Protocols, Li Li, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Quantitative timing is often explicitly used in systems for better security, e.g., the credentials for automatic website logon often has limited lifetime. Verifying timing relevant security protocols in these systems is very challenging as timing adds another dimension of complexity compared with the untimed protocol verification. In our previous work, we proposed an approach to check the correctness of the timed authentication in security protocols with fixed timing constraints. However, a more difficult question persists, i.e., given a particular protocol design, whether the protocol has security flaws in its design or it can be configured secure with proper parameter values? …

Software Application And Mobile Optimization, Timothy Yu

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

Most software applications have yet to be optimized for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Such is the case with Gallaudet University’s enterprise information systems, Bison, the university’s administration system, including all records except for finances and Blackboard, the university’s learning management system. A two-part project addressed this lack of mobile optimization with Bison. The first part was the Residence Life Sticker Project intended to familiarize the developer with Gallaudet’s internal IT systems. It involved developing a web form for the Office of Residence Life to record receipt of ID card stickers, handbooks, and release room consent information. The …

Non-Orientable Objects As Gaming Surfaces, Haley P. Bourke, Paul Latiolais

Student Research Symposium

Developed in Python, Klein Space Fighter is an interactive learning tool and mathematically themed arcade game that allows the player to combat on different mathematical surfaces including a 2D Klein bottle. The app is available for Android and desktop devices, and will be made available for iOS in the future.

To receive an invitation to download the app through Google Play, contact me at [email protected]

Homesafe: A Mobile Application Utilizing Encryption And Access Control, Kenneth Trumpoldt

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Our society is becoming more virtual and mobile everyday. The purpose of this application is to transform a physical card system into a virtual card system that meets the demands of a technologically-oriented society. Parents will be able to create their own child identification cards more quickly and cost efficiently. Cards can be easily edited instead of having to order an updated replacement. Immediate and frequent alteration of cards allows for information to be more accurate. Cards can be shared globally and instantly via the Internet or shared connections such as Bluetooth. The fast access to and virtual duplication of …

Heuristic Collective Learning For Efficient And Robust Emergence Of Social Norms, Jianye Hao, Jun Sun, Dongping Huang, Yi Cai, Chao Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In multiagent systems, social norms is a useful technique in regulating agents’ behaviors to achieve coordination or cooperation among agents. One important research question is to investigate how a desirable social norm can be evolved in a bottom-up manner through local interactions. In this paper, we propose two novel learning strategies under the collective learning framework: collective learning EV-l and collective learning EV-g, to efficiently facilitate the emergence of social norms. Experimental results show that both learning strategies can support the emergence of desirable social norms more efficiently in a much broader range of multiagent interaction scenarios than previous work, …

Non-Invasive Detection Of Moving And Stationary Human With Wifi, Chenshu Wu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Xuefeng Liu, Yunhao Liu, Jiannong Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Non-invasive human sensing based on radio signals has attracted a great deal of research interest and fostered a broad range of innovative applications of localization, gesture recognition, smart health-care, etc., for which a primary primitive is to detect human presence. Previous works have studied the detection of moving humans via signal variations caused by human movements. For stationary people, however, existing approaches often employ a prerequisite scenario-tailored calibration of channel profile in human-free environments. Based on in-depth understanding of human motion induced signal attenuation reflected by PHY layer channel state information (CSI), we propose DeMan, a unified scheme for non-invasive …

Relative Localization Of Rfid Tags Using Spatial-Temporal Phase Profiling, Longfei Shangguan, Zheng Yang, Alex X. Liu, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many object localization applications need the relative locations of a set of objects as oppose to their absolute locations. Although many schemes for object localization using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags have been proposed, they mostly focus on absolute object localization and are not suitable for relative object localization because of large error margins and the special hardware that they require. In this paper, we propose an approach called Spatial-Temporal Phase Profiling (STPP) to RFID based relative object localization. The basic idea of STPP is that by moving a reader over a set of tags during which the reader continuously …

Moneyware: Simulating Software Portfolio Quality Management, Robert David Beverly

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In this research we introduce MoneyWare, a simulator designed to explore and ultimately to provide guidance on simulating software portfolio quality management. The name “MoneyWare” is inspired by the movie Moneyball. It chronicled a baseball team which used more descriptive statistics to achieve a higher quality ball club with limited resources. MoneyWare is inspired by the observation that the problem of software development is somewhat analogous. Management is faced with an incoming stream of tasks for development. The tasks vary in terms of size, priority, risk, and date needed. But, in any case, the demands come to more than the …

Developing A Bilingual, Computer-Tailored, Hpv Vaccination Promotion Intervention Targeting Latino Parents, Angela Chia-Chen Chen, Ashish Amresh

Publications

In this paper we present an innovative, computer-tailored application aimed at increasing Latino parents' intention to vaccinate their adolescent children against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). HPV infection is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States. Latinas have the highest age-adjusted incidence rate for HPV-associated cervical cancer compared with their counterparts in other racial/ethnic groups. HPV vaccines offer hope against HPV-associated diseases. Because parental consent is required for children under age 18 to receive t h e HPV vaccination in most U. S. states, parents' attitudes and intention to have their children vaccinated are keys for promoting HPV …

Compression Of Video Tracking And Bandwidth Balancing Routing In Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks, Yin Wang, Jianjun Yang, Ju Shen, Bryson Payne, Juan Guo, Kun Hua

Computer Science Faculty Publications

There has been a tremendous growth in multimedia applications over wireless networks. Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks(WMSNs) have become the premier choice in many research communities and industry. Many state-of-art applications, such as surveillance, traffic monitoring, and remote heath care are essentially video tracking and transmission in WMSNs. The transmission speed is constrained by the big file size of video data and fixed bandwidth allocation in constant routing paths. In this paper, we present a CamShift based algorithm to compress the tracking of videos. Then we propose a bandwidth balancing strategy in which each sensor node is able to dynamically select …

Locating Potential Aspect Interference Using Clustering Analysis, Brian Todd Bennett

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Software design continues to evolve from the structured programming paradigm of the 1970s and 1980s and the object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm of the 1980s and 1990s. The functional decomposition design methodology used in these paradigms reduced the prominence of non-functional requirements, which resulted in scattered and tangled code to address non-functional elements. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) allowed the removal of crosscutting concerns scattered throughout class code into single modules known as aspects. Aspectization resulted in increased modularity in class code, but introduced new types of problems that did not exist in OOP. One such problem was aspect interference, in which aspects …

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Development Of A Tridimensional Measuring Application For Ipads, Michael Casebolt, Nicolas Kouatli, Jack Mullen

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In today’s fast-paced distribution centers workers and management alike are constantly searching for the quickest and most efficient way to package items for distribution. Even with the advancement of app-oriented solutions to a variety of problems across many industries there is a distinct unmet need in distribution environments for an application capable of increasing the efficiency and accuracy of packaging items. This senior project focused on the development and testing of an application utilizing the Structure Three Dimensional Sensor and a 4th generation iPad to scan an object or group of objects to be packaged and determine the overall dimensions …

Gameon: P2p Gaming On Public Transport, Nairan Zhang, Youngki Lee, Meera Radhakrishnan, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile games, and especially multiplayer games are a very popular daily distraction for many users. We hypothesise that commuters travelling on public buses or trains would enjoy being able to play multiplayer games with their fellow commuters to alleviate the commute burden and boredom. We present quantitative data to show that the typical one-way commute time is fairly long (at least 25 minutes on average) as well as survey results indicating that commuters are willing to play multiplayer games with other random commuters. In this paper, we present GameOn, a system that allows commuters to participate in multiplayer games with …

Discovering The Rise And Fall Of Software Engineering Ideas From Scholarly Publication Data, Subhajit Datta, Santonu Sarkar, Sajeev A. S. M., Nishant Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

For researchers and practitioners of a relatively young discipline like software engineering, an enduring concern is to identify the acorns that will grow into oaks -- ideas remaining most current in the long run. Additionally, it is interesting to know how the ideas have risen in importance, and fallen, perhaps to rise again. We analyzed a corpus of 19,000+ papers written by 21,000+ authors across 16 software engineering publication venues from 1975 to 2010, to empirically determine the half-life of software engineering research topics. We adapted existing measures of half-life as well as defined a specific measure based on publication …

Ambient Rendezvous: Energy Efficient Neighbor Discovery Via Acoustic Sensing, Keyu Wang, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu, Lionel M. Ni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The continual proliferation of mobile devices has stimulated the development of opportunistic encounter-based networking and has spurred a myriad of proximity-based mobile applications. A primary cornerstone of such applications is to discover neighboring devices effectively and efficiently. Despite extensive protocol optimization, current neighbor discovery modalities mainly rely on radio interfaces, whose energy and wake up delay required to initiate, configure and operate these protocols hamper practical applicability. Unlike conventional schemes that actively emit radio tones, we exploit ubiquitous audio events to discover neighbors passively. The rationale is that spatially adjacent neighbors tend to share similar ambient acoustic environments. We propose …

Active Semi-Supervised Defect Categorization, Ferdian Thung, Xuan-Bach D. Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Defects are inseparable part of software development and evolution. To better comprehend problems affecting a software system, developers often store historical defects and these defects can be categorized into families. IBM proposes Orthogonal Defect Categorization (ODC) which include various classifications of defects based on a number of orthogonal dimensions (e.g., symptoms and semantics of defects, root causes of defects, etc.). To help developers categorize defects, several approaches that employ machine learning have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, these approaches often require developers to manually label a large number of defect examples. In practice, manually labelling a large number of …

Elblocker: Predicting Blocking Bugs With Ensemble Imbalance Learning, Xin Xia, David Lo, Emad Shihab, Xinyu Wang, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Blocking bugs are bugs that prevent other bugs from being fixed. Previous studies show that blocking bugs take approximately two to three times longer to be fixed compared to non-blocking bugs. Objective: Thus, automatically predicting blocking bugs early on so that developers are aware of them, can help reduce the impact of or avoid blocking bugs. However, a major challenge when predicting blocking bugs is that only a small proportion of bugs are blocking bugs, i.e., there is an unequal distribution between blocking and non-blocking bugs. For example, in Eclipse and OpenOffice, only 2.8% and 3.0% bugs are blocking …