Software Engineering Commons^™

Cace: Exploiting Behavioral Interactions For Improved Activity Recognition In Multi-Inhabitant Smart Homes, Mohammad Arif Ul Alam, Nirmalya Roy, Archan Misra, Joseph Taylor

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose CACE (Constraints And Correlations mining Engine) which investigates the challenges of improving the recognition of complex daily activities in multi-inhabitant smart homes, by better exploiting the spatiotemporal relationships across the activities of different individuals. We first propose and develop a loosely-coupled Hierarchical Dynamic Bayesian Network (HDBN), which both (a) captures the hierarchical inference of complex (macro-activity) contexts from lower-layer microactivity context (postural and improved oral gestural context), and (b) embeds the various types of behavioral correlations and constraints (at both micro-and macro-activity contexts) across the individuals. While this model is rich in terms of accuracy, it is computationally …

Demo: Smartwatch Based Shopping Gesture Recognition, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan, Sharanya Eswaran, Sougata Sen, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the current retail segment, the retail store owners are keen to understand the browsing behavior and purchase pattern of the shoppers inside the physical stores. Profiling the behavior of the shopper is key to success for any marketing strategies that can optimize or personalize shopping-related services in real-time. We envision that exploiting the knowledge of real-time behavior of shopper’s in-store activities enables novel applications such as: (a) targeted advertising or recommendations: based on longer term shopper profiles, (b) proactive retail help to assist the shoppers who are confused in choosing between two items, (c) smart reminders that can remind …

Value-Inspired Elderly Care Service Design For Aging-In-Place, Na Liu, Sandeep Purao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most current projects aimed at in-home monitoring for the elderly appear to focus on demonstrating technical feasibility and ensuring safety. In doing so, they often overlook the complexity of the interactions between the elderly and the caregivers. This study explores this complexity by adopting a value-inspired design perspective. Following an action design method, we describe the (re)design of the system and service protocol for an elderly-home monitoring effort. The work requires that we leverage the capabilities (of the technological infrastructure system as well as the service providers) to reconcile the values held by the participants (the elderly and their caregivers). …

Indoor Location Error-Detection Via Crowdsourced Multi-Dimensional Mobile Data, Savina Singla, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore the use of multi-dimensional mobile sensing data as a means of identifying errors in one or more of those data streams. More specifically, we look at the possibility of identifying indoor locations with likely incorrect/stale Wi-Fi fingerprints, by using concurrent readings from Wi-Fi and barometer sensors from a collection of mobile devices. Our key contribution is a novel two-step process: (i) using longitudinal, crowd-sourced readings of (possibly incorrect) Wi-Fi location estimates to statistically estimate the barometer calibration offset of individual mobile devices, and (ii) then, using such offset-corrected barometer readings from devices (that are supposedly collocated) to identify …

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Stamina Combat Overhaul, Richard Rattner

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

No abstract provided.

Poster: Sonicnect: Accurate Hands-Free Gesture Input System With Smart Acoustic Sensing, Maotian Chang, Ping Li, Panlong Yang, Jie Xiong, Chang Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This work presents Sonicnect, an acoustic sensing system with smartphone that enables accurate hands-free gesture input. Sonicnect leverages the embedded microphone in the smartphone to capture the subtle audio signals generated with fingers touching on the table. It supports 9 commonly used gestures (click, flip, scroll and zoom, etc) with above 92% recognition accuracy, and the minimum gesture movement could be 2cm. Distinguishable features are then extracted by exploiting spatio-temporal and frequency properties of the subtle audio signals. We conduct extensive real environment experiments to evaluate its performance. The results validate the effectiveness and robustness of Sonicnect.

Seeking Independent Management Of Problem Behavior: A Proof-Of-Concept Study With Children And Their Teachers, Camellia Zakaria, Richard C. Davis, Zachary Walker

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Problem behaviors are particularly common in children with neurodevelopmental disorders like Autism and Down syndrome. These behaviors sometimes discourage social inclusion, inhibit learning development, and cause severe injuries, but caregivers are often unable to attend to their children immediately when the behaviors occur. Recent research shows that problem behavior can be automatically detected with wearable devices, but it is still not clear how to reduce caregivers' burdens and facilitate academic, social, and functional development of children with problem behaviors. We conducted a field study at a school with 21 children who exhibit problem behaviors and found that they needed frequent …

Poster: Android Whole-System Control Flow Analysis For Accurate Application Behavior Modeling, Huu Hoang Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android, the modern operating system for smartphones, together with its millions of apps, has become an important part of human life. There are many challenges to analyzing them. It is important to model the mobile systems in order to analyze the behaviors of apps accurately. These apps are built on top of interactions with Android systems. We aim to automatically build abstract models of the mobile systems and thus automate the analysis of mobile applications and detect potential issues (e.g., leaking private data, causing unexpected crashes, etc.). The expected results will be the accuracy models of actual various versions of …

Condensing Class Diagrams With Minimal Manual Labeling Cost, Xinli Yang, David Lo, Xin Xia, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditionally, to better understand the design of a project, developers can reconstruct a class diagram from source code using a reverse engineering technique. However, the raw diagram is often perplexing because there are too many classes in it. Condensing the reverse engineered class diagram into a compact class diagram which contains only the important classes would enhance the understandability of the corresponding project. A number of recent works have proposed several supervised machine learning solutions that can be used for condensing reverse engineered class diagrams given a set of classes that are manually labeled as important or not. However, a …

Automated Identification Of High Impact Bug Reports Leveraging Imbalanced Learning Strategies, Xinli Yang, David Lo, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In practice, some bugs have more impact than others and thus deserve more immediate attention. Due to tight schedule and limited human resource, developers may not have enough time to inspect all bugs. Thus, they often concentrate on bugs that are highly impactful. In the literature, high impact bugs are used to refer to the bugs which appear in unexpected time or locations and bring more unexpected effects, or break pre-existing functionalities and destroy the user experience. Unfortunately, identifying high impact bugs from the thousands of bug reports in a bug tracking system is not an easy feat. Thus, an …

Poster: Air Quality Friendly Route Recommendation System, Savina Singla, Divya Bansal, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To model the overall personal inhalation of hazardous gases through the air (both indoor and outdoor) by an individual, provide air quality friendly route recommendations, thus raising the overall quality of urban movement and living healthy life.

Cdrep: Automatic Repair Of Cryptographic-Misuses In Android Applications, Siqi Ma, David Lo, Teng Li, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cryptography is increasingly being used in mobile applications to provide various security services; from user authentication, data privacy, to secure communications. However, there are plenty of mistakes that developers could accidentally make when using cryptography in their mobile apps and such mistakes can lead to a false sense of security. Recent research efforts indeed show that a significant portion of mobile apps in both Android and iOS platforms misused cryptographic APIs. In this paper, we present CDRep, a tool for automatically repairing cryptographic misuse defects in Android apps. We classify such defects into seven types and manually assemble the corresponding …

Interactive Computer Science Exercises In Edx, Hong Le

Master's Projects

This project focuses on improving online learning courses for Computer Science. My approach is to create a platform in which interactive exercises can be implemented for students to work on. Methodology includes creating plugins for interactive exercises using XBlock, a component architecture for building independent online courses on edX. The exercises are based on existing exercises like CodeCheck and Wiley’s InterActivities Exercise System. In order to integrate these exercises, I implemented CodeCheck XBlock and Interactive XBlock. These Xblocks allow students to work on interactive exercises on edX, and instructors to view and download students’ submissions.

Sign & Share: Full-Stack International Video Sharing Website, Shuxu Tian

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

Inspired by VL2 bilingual story apps that focus on American Sign Language and English, this project provides a new application for sharing multi-lingual signed and written stories to a worldwide audience. VL2 story apps include only ASL and English, and are for purchase; VL2 also sells the code to develop stories in other languages, but the code requires technical expertise to use. My new app uses a special set of tools to allow sharing stories in any signed language and written forms of spoken languages without cost and without the need for technical expertise. Known as Sign and Share, this …

Collecting Image Cropping Dataset: A Hybrid System Of Machine And Human Intelligence, Uyen T. Mai, Feng Liu

Student Research Symposium

Image cropping is a common tool that exists in almost any image editor, yet automatic cropping is still a difficult problem in Computer Vision. Since images nowadays can be easily collected through the web, machine learning is a promising approach to solve this problem. However, an image cropping dataset is not yet available and gathering such a large-scale dataset is a non-trivial task. Although a crowdsourcing website such as Mechanical Turk seems to be a solution to this task, image cropping is a sophisticated task that is vulnerable to unreliable annotation; furthermore, collecting a large-scale high-quality dataset through crowdsourcing is …

Why Do Record/Replay Tests Of Web Applications Break?, Mouna Hammoudi

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software engineers often use record/replay tools to enable the automated testing of web applications. Tests created in this manner can then be used to regression test new versions of the web applications as they evolve. Web application tests recorded by record/replay tools, however, can be quite brittle; they can easily break as applications change. For this reason, researchers have begun to seek approaches for automatically repairing record/replay tests. To date, however, there have been no comprehensive attempts to characterize the causes of breakages in record/replay tests for web applications. In this work, we present a taxonomy classifying the ways in …

Ant Colony Optimization For Continuous Spaces, Rachel Findley

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is an optimization algorithm designed to find semi-optimal solutions to Combinatorial Optimization Problems. The challenge of modifying this algorithm to effectively optimize over a continuous domain is one that has been tackled by several researchers. In this paper, ACO has been modified to use several variations of the algorithm for continuous spaces. An aspect of ACO which is crucial to its success when optimizing over a continuous space is choosing the appropriate object (solution component) out of an infinite set to add to the ant's path. This step is highly important in shaping good solutions. Important …

Environmental Factors Influencing Individual Decision-Making Behavior In Software Project: A Systematic Literature Review, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Jingdong Jia

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

As one of the crucial human aspects, individual decision-making behavior that may affect the quality of a software project is adaptive to the environment in which the individual is. However, no comprehensive reference framework of the environmental factors influencing individual decision-making behavior in software projects is presently available. This paper undertakes a systematic literature review (SLR) to gain insight into existing studies on this topic. After a careful SLR process, 40 studies were targeted to solve this question. Based on these extracted studies, we first provided a taxonomy of environmental factors comprising eight categories. Then a total of 237 factors …

The Social Side Of Software Platform Ecosystems, Cleidson R. B. Da Souza, Fernando Figueira Filho, Müller Miranda, Renato Pina Ferreira, Christoph Treude, Leif Singer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software ecosystems as a paradigm for large-scale software development encompass a complex mix of technical, business, and social aspects. While significant research has been conducted to understand both the technical and business aspects, the social aspects of software ecosystems are less well understood. To close this gap, this paper presents the results of an empirical study aimed at understanding the influence of social aspects on developers’ participation in software ecosystems. We conducted 25 interviews with mobile software developers and an online survey with 83 respondents from the mobile software development community. Our results point out a complex social system based …

Enabling Runtime Profiling To Hide And Exploit Heterogeneity Within Chip Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Systems (Chmps), Eugene Cartwright

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The heterogeneity of multiprocessor systems on chip (MPSoC) has presented unique opportunities for furthering today’s diverse application needs. FPGA-based MPSoCs have the potential of bridging the gap between generality and specialization but has traditionally been limited to device experts. The flexibility of these systems can enable computation without compromise but can only be realized if this flexibility extends throughout the software stack. At the top of this stack, there has been significant effort for leveraging the heterogeneity of the architecture. However, the betterment of these abstractions are limited to what the bottom of the stack exposes: the runtime system.

The …

Sonifying Git History, Kevin J. North

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Version control is a technique that software developers use in industry to manage their source code artifacts. One benefit of using version control is that it produces a history of every change made to a codebase, which developers frequently analyze in order to aid the software development process. However, version control history contains highly multidimensional and temporal data. State of the art techniques can show several of these dimensions, but they cannot show a large number of dimensions simultaneously without becoming difficult to understand. An alternative technique to understand temporal data with high dimensionality is sonification. Sonification maps information to …

Optimizing Selection Of Competing Services With Probabilistic Hierarchical Refinement, Tian Huat Tan, Manman Chen, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Étienne André, Yinxing Xue, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, many large enterprises (e.g., Netflix, Amazon) have decomposed their monolithic application into services, and composed them to fulfill their business functionalities. Many hosting services on the cloud, with different Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., availability, cost), can be used to host the services. This is an example of competing services. QoS is crucial for the satisfaction of users. It is important to choose a set of services that maximize the overall QoS, and satisfy all QoS requirements for the service composition. This problem, known as optimal service selection, is NPhard. Therefore, an effective method for reducing the search space …

Leveraging Automated Privacy Checking For Design Of Mobile Privacy Protection Mechanisms, Joseph Joo Keng Chan, Lingxiao Jiang, Kiat Wee Tan, Rajesh Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While mobile platforms rely on developers to follow good practices in privacy design, developers might not always adhere. In addition, it is often difficult for users to understand the privacy behaviour of their applications without some prolonged usage. To aid in these issues, we describe on-going research to improve privacy protection by utilizing techniques that mine privacy information from application binaries as a grey-box (Automated Privacy Checking). The outputs can then be utilized to improve the users' ability to exercise privacy-motivated discretion. We conducted a user study to observe the effects of presenting information on leak-causing triggers within applications in …

Learning To Rank For Bug Report Assignee Recommendation, Yuan Tian, Withthige Dinusha Ruchira Wijedasa, David Lo, Claire Le Goues

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Projects receive a large number of bug reports, and resolving these reports take considerable time and human resources. To aid developers in the resolution of bug reports, various automated techniques have been proposed to identify and recommend developers to address newly reported bugs. Two families of bug assignee recommendation techniques include those that recommend developers who have fixed similar bugs before (a.k.a. activity-based techniques) and those recommend suitable developers based on the location of the bug (a.k.a. location-based techniques). Previously, each of these techniques has been investigated separately. In this work, we propose a unified model that combines information from …

Deeper Look Into Bug Fixes: Patterns, Replacements, Deletions, And Additions, Mauricio Soto, Ferdian Thung, Chu-Pan Wong, Claire Le Goues, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many implementations of research techniques that automatically repair software bugs target programs written in C. Work that targets Java often begins from or compares to direct translations of such techniques to a Java context. However, Java and C are very different languages, and Java should be studied to inform the construction of repair approaches to target it. We conduct a large-scale study of bugfixing commits in Java projects, focusing on assumptions underlying common search-based repair approaches. We make observations that can be leveraged to guide high quality automatic software repair to target Java specifically, including common and uncommon statement modifications …

You Are Being Watched: Bystanders' Perspective On The Use Of Camera Devices In Public Spaces, Samarth Singhal, Carman Neustaedter, Thecla Schiphorst, Anthony Tang, Abhisekh Patra, Rui Pan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We are observing an increase in the use of smartphones and wearable devices in public places for streaming and recording video. Yet the use of cameras in these devices can infringe upon the privacy of the people in the surrounding environment by inadvertently capturing them. This paper presents findings from an in-situ exploratory study that investigates bystanders' reactions and feelings towards streaming and recording videos with smartphones and wearable glasses in public spaces. We use the interview results to guide an exploration of design directions for mobile video.

Augmenting Api Documentation With Insights From Stack Overflow, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developers need access to different kinds of information which is often dispersed among different documentation sources, such as API documentation or Stack Overflow. We present an approach to automatically augment API documentation with “insight sentences” from Stack Overflow— sentences that are related to a particular API type and that provide insight not contained in the API documentation of that type. Based on a development set of 1,574 sentences, we compare the performance of two state-of-the-art summarization techniques as well as a pattern-based approach for insight sentence extraction. We then present SISE, a novel machine learning based approach that uses …

An Example Of Atomic Requirements - Login Screen, William L. Honig

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A simple example of what an atomic or individual or singular requirement statement should be. Using the example of the familiar login screen, shows the evolution from a low quality initial attempt at requirements to a complete atomic requirement statement. Introduces the idea of a system glossary to support the atomic requirement.

Atomic Requirements Quick Notes, William L. Honig, Shingo Takada

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Working paper on atomic requirements for systems development and the importance of singular, cohesive, individual requirements statements. Covers possible definitions of atomic requirements, and their characteristics. Atomic requirements improve many parts of the development process from requirements to testing and contracting.

The Design Of Assistive Location-Based Technologies For People With Ambulatory Disabilities: A Formative Study, Kotaro Hara, Christine Chen, Jon E. Froehlich

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we investigate how people with mobility impairments assess and evaluate accessibility in the built environment and the role of current and emerging location-based technologies therein. We conducted a three-part formative study with 20 mobility impaired participants: a semi-structured interview (Part 1), a participatory design activity (Part 2), and a design probe activity (Part 3). Part 2 and 3 actively engaged our participants in exploring and designing the future of what we call assistive location-based technologies (ALTs) location-based technologies that specifically incorporate accessibility features to support navigating, searching, and exploring the physical world. Our Part 1 findings highlight …