Software Engineering Commons^™

Incentive Mechanism Design For Crowdsourcing: An All-Pay Auction Approach, Tie Luo, Sajal K. Das, Hwee-Pink Tan, Lirong Xia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Crowdsourcing can be modeled as a principal-agent problem in which the principal (crowdsourcer) desires to solicit maximal contribution from a group of agents (participants) while agents are only motivated to act to their own respective advantages. To reconcile this tension, we propose an all-pay auction approach to incentivize agents to act in the principal's interst, i.e., maximizing profit, while allowing agents to reap strictly positive utility. Our rationale for advocating all-pay auctions is based on two merits that we identify, namely all-pay auctions (i) compress the common, two-stage "bid-contribute" crowdsourcing process into a single "bid-cum-contribute" stage, and (ii) eliminate the …

Analysis Of Software Design Patterns In Human Cognitive Performance Experiments, Alexander C. Roosma

Theses and Dissertations

As Air Force operations continue to move toward the use of more autonomous systems and more human-machine teaming in general, there is a corresponding need to swiftly evaluate systems with these capabilities. We support this development through software design improvements of the execution of human cognitive performance experiments. This thesis sought to answer the following two research questions addressing the core functionality that these experiments rely on for execution and analysis: 1) What data infrastructure software requirements are necessary to execute the experimental design of human cognitive performance experiments? 2) How effectively does a central data mediator design pattern meet …

Using A Dynamic Domain-Specific Modeling Language For The Model-Driven Development Of Cross-Platform Mobile Applications, Christopher A. Jones

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

There has been a gradual but steady convergence of dynamic programming languages with modeling languages. One area that can benefit from this convergence is modeldriven development (MDD) especially in the domain of mobile application development. By using a dynamic language to construct a domain-specific modeling language (DSML), it is possible to create models that are executable, exhibit flexible type checking, and provide a smaller cognitive gap between business users, modelers and developers than more traditional model-driven approaches.

Dynamic languages have found strong adoption by practitioners of Agile development processes. These processes often rely on developers to rapidly produce working code …

Sefo: A Package For Generating Probabilistic Forecasts From Nmme Predictive Ensembles, Nir Krakauer

Publications and Research

Long-range weather forecasts based on output from ensembles of computer simulations are attracting increasing interest. A variety of methods have been proposed to convert the ensemble outputs to calibrated probabilistic forecasts. The package presented here (SeFo, for Seasonal Forecasting) implements a number of methods for producing forecasts of monthly surface air temperature anomalies up to 9 months in advance using output from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME). The package contains modules for downloading and reading past observations and ensemble output; producing forecast probability distributions; and verifying and calibrating a user-determined subset of methods using arbitrary past periods. By changing …

A Reflection On Types, Simon. Peyton Jones, Stephanie Weirich, Richard A. Eisenberg, Dimitrios Vytiniotis

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

The ability to perform type tests at runtime blurs the line between statically-typed and dynamically-checked languages. Recent developments in Haskell’s type system allow even programs that use reflection to themselves be statically typed, using a type-indexed runtime representation of types called \𝗍𝖾𝗑𝗍𝗂𝗍{𝖳𝗒𝗉𝖾𝖱𝖾𝗉}\textit{TypeRep}. As a result we can build dynamic types as an ordinary, statically-typed library, on top of \𝗍𝖾𝗑𝗍𝗂𝗍{𝖳𝗒𝗉𝖾𝖱𝖾𝗉}\textit{TypeRep} in an open-world context.

Semantic Memory Modeling And Memory Interaction In Learning Agents, Wenwen Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Loo-Nin Teow

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Semantic memory plays a critical role in reasoning and decision making. It enables an agent to abstract useful knowledge learned from its past experience. Based on an extension of fusion adaptive resonance theory network, this paper presents a novel self-organizing memory model to represent and learn various types of semantic knowledge in a unified manner. The proposed model, called fusion adaptive resonance theory for multimemory learning, incorporates a set of neural processes, through which it may transfer knowledge and cooperate with other long-term memory systems, including episodic memory and procedural memory. Specifically, we present a generic learning process, under which …

Venncafe, Daniel Johnson, Christopher Clark, Jonathan Amireh

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Our senior project involved creating a simple dating application and service. From other dating applications, we observed that the logistics of scheduling a first date are a tedious way to start a conversation with someone you've never met. The main concept of our application was that it would use user schedule availability and their favorite cafes to automatically plan optimal dates.

We started the project with the intent of...

• Working through the entire development cycle of a large project as a team

• Devising techniques for determining overlapping preferences, especially when handling large amounts of location and time data

• Exploring different …

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History Driven Program Repair, Xuan-Bach D. Le, David Lo, Claire Le Goues

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effective automated program repair techniques have great potential to reduce the costs of debugging and maintenance. Previously proposed automated program repair (APR) techniques often follow a generate-and-validate and test- case-driven procedure: They first randomly generate a large pool of fix candidates and then exhaustively validate the quality of the candidates by testing them against existing or provided test suites. Unfortunately, many real-world bugs cannot be repaired by existing techniques even after more than 12 hours of computation in a multi-core cloud environment. More work is needed to advance the capabilities of modern APR techniques. We propose a new technique that …

Value-Inspired Service Design In Elderly Home-Monitoring Systems, Na Liu, Sandeep Purao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The provision of elderly home-monitoring systems to enhance aging-in-place requires the service to meet the needs of both the elderly and their caregivers. The design of such IT services requires interdisciplinary efforts to look beyond the technical requirements. Taking a value-inspired design perspective, the study argues that service design for promoting aging-in-place needs to reconcile the values of both the elderly and caregivers. Drawn from the framework of basic human values and the unique experience of the SHINESeniors project, the study extracts the core values for elderly and caregivers using a multi-method case analysis. We suggest that both system and …

Rack: Automatic Api Recommendation Using Crowdsourced Knowledge, Mohammad M. Rahman, Chanchal K. Roy, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional code search engines often do not perform well with natural language queries since they mostly apply keyword matching. These engines thus need carefully designed queries containing information about programming APIs for code search. Unfortunately, existing studies suggest that preparing an effective code search query is both challenging and time consuming for the developers. In this paper, we propose a novel API recommendation technique -- RACK that recommends a list of relevant APIs for a natural language query for code search by exploiting keyword-API associations from the crowdsourced knowledge of Stack Overflow. We first motivate our technique using an exploratory …

Iris: Tapping Wearable Sensing To Capture In-Store Retail Insights On Shoppers, Meera Radhakrishnan, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Deepthi Chander, Koustuv Dasgupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate the possibility of using a combination of a smartphone and a smartwatch, carried by a shopper, to get insights into the shopper’s behavior inside a retail store. The proposed IRIS framework uses standard locomotive and gestural micro-activities as building blocks to define novel composite features that help classify different facets of a shopper’s interaction/experience with individual items, as well as attributes of the overall shopping episode or the store. Besides defining such novel features, IRIS builds a novel segmentation algorithm, which partitions the duration of an entire shopping episode into atomic item-level interactions, by using a combination of …

Sinabro: A Smartphone-Integrated Opportunistic Electrocardiogram Monitoring System, Sungjun Kwon, Dongseok Lee, Jeehoon Kim, Youngki Lee, Seungwoo Kang, Sangwon Seo, Kwangsuk Park

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In our preliminary study, we proposed a smartphone-integrated, unobtrusive electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system, Sinabro, which monitors a user's ECG opportunistically during daily smartphone use without explicit user intervention. The proposed system also monitors ECG-derived features, such as heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV), to support the pervasive healthcare apps for smartphones based on the user's high-level contexts, such as stress and affective state levels. In this study, we have extended the Sinabro system by: (1) upgrading the sensor device; (2) improving the feature extraction process; and (3) evaluating extensions of the system. We evaluated these extensions with a …

A Large Scale Study Of Multiple Programming Languages And Code Quality, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Withthige Dinusha Ruchira Wijedasa, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, most software use multiple programming languages to implement certain functionalities based on the strengths and weaknesses of different languages. Researchers in the past have studied the impact of independent programming languages on software quality, however, there has been little or no research on the impact of multiple languages on the quality of software. Does the use of multiple languages cause more bugs? Are certain languages when used with other languages make software more bug prone? What are the relationships between multi-language usage and various bug categories? In this study, we perform a large scale empirical investigation to shed light …

An Adaptive Wireless Passive Human Detection Via Fine-Grained Physical Layer Information, Liangyi Gong, Wu Yang, Zimu Zhou, Dapeng Man, Haibin Cai, Xiancun Zhou, Zheng Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless device-free passive human detection is a key enabler for a range of indoor location-based services such as asset security, emergency responses, privacy-preserving children and elderly monitoring, etc. Since the feature of received signal varies with different multipath propagation conditions, an labor-intensive on-site calibration procedure is almost indispensable to decide the optimal scenario-specific threshold for human detection. Such overhead, however, impedes readily and fast deployment of wireless device-free human detection systems in practical indoor environments. In this work, we explore PHY layer multipath profiling information to extract a novel quantitative metric Ks as an indicator for link sensitivity, and further …

Towards Improving Interface Modularity In Legacy Java Software Through Automated Refactoring, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Olivia Moore, Hidehiko Masuhara

Publications and Research

The skeletal implementation pattern is a software design pattern consisting of defining an abstract class that provides a partial interface implementation. However, since Java allows only single class inheritance, if implementers decide to extend a skeletal implementation, they will not be allowed to extend any other class. Also, discovering the skeletal implementation may require a global analysis. Java 8 enhanced interfaces alleviate these problems by allowing interfaces to contain (default) method implementations, which implementers inherit. Java classes are then free to extend a different class, and a separate abstract class is no longer needed; developers considering implementing an interface need …

Requirements Quick Notes, William L. Honig, Shingo Takada

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A short introduction to requirements and their role in system development. Includes industry definition of requirements, overview of basic requirements process including numbering of requirements, ties to testing, and traceability. An introduction to requirements quality attributes (correct, unambiguous, etc.) Includes references to requirements process, numbering, and quality papers.

Requirements Metrics - Definitions Of A Working List Of Possible Metrics For Requirements Quality, William L. Honig

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A work in progress to define a metrics set for requirements. Metrics are defined that apply to either the entire requirements set (requirements document as a whole) or individual atomic (or singular, individual) requirements statements. Requirements are identified with standard names and a identification scheme and include both subjective and objective measures.

An example metric for the full set of requirements: Rd2 - Requirements Consistency, Is the set of atomic requirements internally consistent, with no contradictions, no duplication between individual requirements? An example of a metric for a single requirement: Ra4 - Requirement Verifiability, How adequately can this requirement be …

Towards Improving Interface Modularity In Legacy Java Software Through Automated Refactoring, Raffi Khatchadourian, Olivia Moore, Hidehiko Masuhara

Publications and Research

The skeletal implementation pattern is a software design pattern that defines an abstract class that provides a partial interface implementation. However, since Java allows only single class inheritance, if implementers decide to extend a skeletal implementation, they will not be allowed to extend any other class. Also, discovering the skeletal implementation may require a global analysis. Java 8 enhanced interfaces alleviate these problems by enabling interfaces to contain (default) method implementations, which implementers inherit. Java classes are then free to extend a different class, and a separate abstract class is no longer needed; developers considering implementing an interface need only …

Diversity Maximization Speedup For Localizing Faults In Single-Fault And Multi-Fault Programs, Xin Xia, Liang Gong, Tien-Duy B. Le, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Hongyu Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fault localization is useful for reducing debugging effort. Such techniques require test cases with oracles, which can determine whether a program behaves correctly for every test input. Although most fault localization techniques can localize faults relatively accurately even with a small number of test cases, choosing the right test cases and creating oracles for them are not easy. Test oracle creation is expensive because it can take much manual labeling effort (i.e., effort needed to decide whether the test cases pass or fail). Given a number of test cases to be executed, it is challenging to minimize the number of …

Did You Take A Break Today? Detecting Playing Foosball Using Your Smartwatch, Sougata Sen, Kiran K. Rachuri, Abhishek Mukherji, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prolonged working hours are a primary cause of stress, work related injuries (e.g, RSIs), and work-life imbalance in employees at a workplace. As reported by some studies, taking timely breaks from continuous work not only reduces stress and exhaustion but also improves productivity, employee bonding, and camaraderie. Our goal is to build a system that automatically detects breaks thereby assisting in maintaining healthy work-break balance. In this paper, we focus on detecting foosball breaks of employees at a workplace using a smartwatch. We selected foosball as it is one of the most commonly played games at many workplaces in the …

A More Accurate Model For Finding Tutorial Segments Explaining Apis, He Jiang, Jingxuan Zhang, Xiaochen Li, Zhilei Ren, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers prefer to utilize third-party libraries when they implement some functionalities and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are frequently used by them. Facing an unfamiliar API, developers tend to consult tutorials as learning resources. Unfortunately, the segments explaining a specific API scatter across tutorials. Hence, it remains a challenging issue to find the relevant segments. In this study, we propose a more accurate model to find the exact tutorial fragments explaining APIs. This new model consists of a text classifier with domain specific features. More specifically, we discover two important indicators to complement traditional text based features, namely co-occurrence APIs and …

Magi: Enabling Multi-Device Gestural Applications, Tran Huy Vu, Choo Tsu Wei, Kenny, Youngki Lee, Richard Christopher Davis, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe our vision of a multiple mobile or wearable device environment and share our initial exploration of our vision in multi-wrist gesture recognition. We explore how multi-device input and output might look, giving four scenarios of everyday multi-device use that show the technical challenges that need to be addressed. We describe our system which allows for recognition to be distributed between multiple devices, fusing recognition streams on a resource-rich device (e.g., mobile phone). An Interactor layer recognises common gestures from the fusion engine, and provides abstract input streams (e.g., scrolling and zooming) to user interface components called Midgets. These …

Improving The Sensitivity Of Unobtrusive Inactivity Detection In Sensor-Enabled Homes For The Elderly, Alvin C. Valera, Hwee-Pink Tan, Liming Bai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unobtrusive in-home monitoring systems are gaining acceptability and are being deployed to enable relatives and caregivers to remotely monitor and provide timely care to their elderly loved ones or senior clients, respectively, who are living independently. Such systems can provide information about nonmovement or inactivity of the elderly resident. As prolonged inactivity could mean potential danger, several algorithms have been proposed to automatically detect unusually long durations of inactivity. Such schemes, however, suffer from low sensitivity due to their high detection latency. In this paper, we propose Dwell Time-enhanced Dynamic Threshold (DTDT), a scheme for computing adaptive alert thresholds that …

Human Activity Prediction By Mapping Grouplets To Recurrent Self-Organizing Map, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu, Mengyuan Liu, Tianwei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human activity prediction is defined as inferring the high-level activity category with the observation of only a few action units. It is very meaningful for time-critical applications such as emergency surveillance. For efficient prediction, we represent the ongoing human activity by using body part movements and taking full advantage of inherent sequentiality, then find the best matching activity template by a proper aligning measurement.In streaming videos, dense spatio-temporal interest points (STIPs) are first extracted as low-level descriptors for their high detection efficiency. Then, sparse grouplets, i.e., clustered point groups, are located to represent body part movements, for which we propose …

Campus-Scale Mobile Crowd-Tasking: Deployment & Behavioral Insights, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Shih-Fen Cheng, Nikita Jaiman, Randy Tandriansiyah, Cen Chen, Hoong Chuin Lau, Deepthi Chander, Koustuv Dasgupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile crowd-tasking markets are growing at an unprecedented rate with increasing number of smartphone users. Such platforms differ from their online counterparts in that they demand physical mobility and can benefit from smartphone processors and sensors for verification purposes. Despite the importance of such mobile crowd-tasking markets, little is known about the labor supply dynamics and mobility patterns of the users. In this paper we design, develop and experiment with a realworld mobile crowd-tasking platform, called TA$Ker. Our contributions are two-fold: (a) We develop TA$Ker, a system that allows us to empirically study the worker responses to push vs. pull …

Ambient And Smartphone Sensor Assisted Adl Recognition In Multi-Inhabitant Smart Environments, Nirmalya Roy, Archan Misra, Diane Cook

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Activity recognition in smart environments is an evolving research problem due to the advancement and proliferation of sensing, monitoring and actuation technologies to make it possible for large scale and real deployment. While activities in smart home are interleaved, complex and volatile; the number of inhabitants in the environment is also dynamic. A key challenge in designing robust smart home activity recognition approaches is to exploit the users’ spatiotemporal behavior and location, focus on the availability of multitude of devices capable of providing different dimensions of information and fulfill the underpinning needs for scaling the system beyond a single user …

Ibed: Combining Ibea And De For Optimal Feature Selection In Software Product Line Engineering, Yinxing Xue, Jinghui Zhong, Tian Huat Tan, Yang Liu, Wentong Cai, Manman Chen, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software configuration, which aims to customize the software for different users (e.g., Linux kernel configuration), is an important and complicated task. In software product line engineering (SPLE), feature oriented domain analysis is adopted and feature model is used to guide the configuration of new product variants. In SPLE, product configuration is an optimal feature selection problem, which needs to find a set of features that have no conflicts and meanwhile achieve multiple design objectives (e.g., minimizing cost and maximizing the number of features). In previous studies, several multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) were used for the optimal feature selection problem and …

Formalizing And Verifying Stochastic System Architectures Using Monterey Phoenix, Songzheng Song, Jiexin Zhang, Yang Liu, Mikhail Auguston, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong, Tieming Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The analysis of software architecture plays an important role in understanding the system structures and facilitate proper implementation of user requirements. Despite its importance in the software engineering practice, the lack of formal description and verification support in this domain hinders the development of quality architectural models. To tackle this problem, in this work, we develop an approach for modeling and verifying software architectures specified using Monterey Phoenix (MP) architecture description language. MP is capable of modeling system and environment behaviors based on event traces, as well as supporting different architecture composition operations and views. First, we formalize the syntax …

Improved Egt-Based Robustness Analysis Of Negotiation Strategies In Multiagent Systems Via Model Checking, Songzheng Song, Jianye Hao, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Ho-Fung Leung, Jie Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated negotiations play an important role in various domains modeled as multiagent systems, where agents represent human users and adopt different negotiation strategies. Generally, given a multiagent system, a negotiation strategy should be robust in the sense that most agents in the system have the incentive to choose it rather than other strategies. Empirical game-theoretic (EGT) analysis is a game-theoretic analysis approach to investigate the robustness of different strategies based on a set of empirical results. In this study, we propose that model-checking techniques can be adopted to improve EGT analysis for negotiation strategies. The dynamics of strategy profiles can …

Empirical Investigation Of Key Business Factors For Digital Game Performance, Saiqa Alemm, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces software engineering, business, management, and artistic disciplines. This research facilitates a better understanding of the business dimension of digital games. The main objective of this research is to investigate empirically the effect of business factors on the performance of digital games in the market and to answer the research questions asked in this study. Game development organizations are facing high pressure and competition in the digital game industry. Business has become a crucial dimension, especially for game development organizations. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of …