Software Engineering Commons^™

Gone In 200 Milliseconds: The Challenge Of Blocking Malvertising, Catherine Dwyer, Ameet Kanguri

Student and Faculty Research Days

Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar global industry that lets advertisers serve ads to specific customers of interest as they browse the web. Using real time bidding (RTB), as web visitors land on a site, advertising networks are alerted of space available and whatever profile information can be gleaned about the visitor. Ad networks then auction this combination of space and profile through ad exchanges, and the winning bid's ad content is served to the web visitor. The entire process, from a visitor landing on a publisher's page to ads being auctioned, takes 200 milliseconds--the time needed to snap your …

Chillisource Game Engine Particle System Study, Angela Gross

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The majority of modern game engines utilize intricate objects called particle systems which are a collection of many particles that together represent an object without well-defined surfaces. This thesis discusses the results of studying and stressing particle systems within ChilliSource, an open-source game engine written in C++, with the goal of understanding a complex system and exploring possible optimizations that could be made to it. The studies performed were driven by metrics generated with custom profiling classes that kept track of things like the number of particles rendered, how long the engine spent rendering particles, or even how long a …

Capturing, Eliciting, And Prioritizing (Cep) Non-Functional Requirements Metadata During The Early Stages Of Agile Software Development, Richard Rabin Maiti

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Agile software engineering has been a popular methodology to develop software rapidly and efficiently. However, the Agile methodology often favors Functional Requirements (FRs) due to the nature of agile software development, and strongly neglects Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). Neglecting NFRs has negative impacts on software products that have resulted in poor quality and higher cost to fix problems in later stages of software development.

This research developed the CEP “Capture Elicit Prioritize” methodology to effectively gather NFRs metadata from software requirement artifacts such as documents and images. Artifact included the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) artifact which gathered metadata from images. The …

Automatically Defined Templates For Improved Prediction Of Non-Stationary, Nonlinear Time Series In Genetic Programming, David Moskowitz

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Soft methods of artificial intelligence are often used in the prediction of non-deterministic time series that cannot be modeled using standard econometric methods. These series, such as occur in finance, often undergo changes to their underlying data generation process resulting in inaccurate approximations or requiring additional human judgment and input in the process, hindering the potential for automated solutions.

Genetic programming (GP) is a class of nature-inspired algorithms that aims to evolve a population of computer programs to solve a target problem. GP has been applied to time series prediction in finance and other domains. However, most GP-based approaches to …

Demo: Sound Localization Using Smartphone, Amit Sharma, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smartphones based sound direction estimation can be helpful in many situations. For example, a deaf person in a meeting room can look at the smartphone to find out which direction the speaker is in and then he can look in appropriate direction to read lips/gestures of the speaker. Many smartphones today come with two built-in microphones located at physically different positions. This difference in position can cause time difference of arrival (TDOA) of sound on both microphones. Value of TDOA for two microphones may vary depending on the location of sound source with respect to the smartphone. This time difference …

Communication Patterns And Strategies In Software Development Communities Of Practice, Shreya Kumar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Some of the greatest challenges in the relatively new field of software development lie in the decidedly old technology of communication between humans. Software projects require sophisticated and varied communication skills because software developers work in a world of incomplete, imperfect information where teams evolve rapidly in response to evolving requirements and changing collaborators. While prescriptive models for software process such as Agile suggest ways of doing, in reality these codified practices must adapt to the complexities of a real workplace. Patterns, rather than rules of behavior within software process are more suitable to the varied and mutable nature of …

On The Limits And Practice Of Automatically Designing Self-Stabilization, Alex Klinkhamer

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

A protocol is said to be self-stabilizing when the distributed system executing it is guaranteed to recover from any fault that does not cause permanent damage. Designing such protocols is hard since they must recover from all possible states, therefore we investigate how feasible it is to synthesize them automatically. We show that synthesizing stabilization on a fixed topology is NP-complete in the number of system states. When a solution is found, we further show that verifying its correctness on a general topology (with any number of processes) is undecidable, even for very simple unidirectional rings. Despite these negative results, …

Data Persistence In Eiffel, Jimmy J. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

This dissertation describes an extension to the Eiffel programming language that provides automatic object persistence (the ability of programs to store objects and later recreate those objects in a subsequent execution of a program). The mechanism is orthogonal to other aspects of the Eiffel language. The mechanism serves four main purposes: 1) it gives Eiffel programmers a needed service, filling a gap between serialization, which provides limited persistence functions and database-mapping, which is cumbersome to use; 2) it greatly reduces the coding burden incurred by the programmer when objects must persist, allowing the programmer to focus instead on the business …

An Optical Character Recognition Engine For Graphical Processing Units, Jeremy Reed

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

This dissertation investigates how to build an optical character recognition engine (OCR) for a graphical processing unit (GPU). I introduce basic concepts for both building an OCR engine and for programming on the GPU. I then describe the SegRec algorithm in detail and discuss my findings.

Spest – A Tool For Specification-Based Testing, Corrigan Redford Johnson

Master's Theses

This thesis presents a tool for SPEcification based teSTing (SPEST). SPEST is designed to use well known practices for automated black-box testing to reduce the burden of testing on developers. The tool uses a simple formal specification language to generate highly-readable unit tests that embody best practices for thorough software testing. Because the specification language used to generate the assertions about the code can be compiled, it can also be used to ensure that documentation describing the code is maintained during development and refactoring.

The utility and effectiveness of SPEST were validated through several exper- iments conducted with students in …

Srcmx: A Gui Application For Srcml, Brian Kovacs

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

srcMX is a GUI application that utilizes the srcML command-line tool to convert and display source code using the srcML format. The goal is for srcMX to promote the manipulation and exploration of source code using srcML. I also hope that the user-friendly nature inherent to GUI applications allows srcMX to introduce a larger audience to the many features offered by srcML. The application is written in C++ using the Qt and Qt Quick frameworks.

Evaluating And Improving The Efficiency Of Software And Algorithms For Sequence Data Analysis, Hugh L. Eaves

Theses and Dissertations

With the ever-growing size of sequence data sets, data processing and analysis are an increasingly large portion of the time and money spent on nucleic acid sequencing projects. Correspondingly, the performance of the software and algorithms used to perform that analysis has a direct effect on the time and expense involved. Although the analytical methods are widely varied, certain types of software and algorithms are applicable to a number of areas. Targeting improvements to these common elements has the potential for wide reaching rewards. This dissertation research consisted of several projects to characterize and improve upon the efficiency of several …

Automated Refactoring Of Legacy Java Software To Enumerated Types, Raffi Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Modern Java languages introduce several new features that offer significant improvements over older Java technology. In this article we consider the new enum construct, which provides language support for enumerated types. Prior to recent Java languages, programmers needed to employ various patterns (e.g., the weak enum pattern) to compensate for the absence of enumerated types in Java. Unfortunately, these compensation patterns lack several highly-desirable properties of the enum construct, most notably, type safety. We present a novel fully-automated approach for transforming legacy Java code to use the new enumeration construct. This semantics-preserving approach increases type safety, produces code that is …

Regular Symmetry Patterns, Anthony W. Lin, Truong Khanh Nguyen, Philipp Rümmer, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Symmetry reduction is a well-known approach for alleviating the state explosion problem in model checking. Automatically identifying symmetries in concurrent systems, however, is computationally expensive. We propose a symbolic framework for capturing symmetry patterns in parameterised systems (i.e. an infinite family of finite-state systems): two regular word transducers to represent, respectively, parameterised systems and symmetry patterns. The framework subsumes various types of “symmetry relations” ranging from weaker notions (e.g. simulation preorders) to the strongest notion (i.e. isomorphisms). Our framework enjoys two algorithmic properties: (1) symmetry verification: given a transducer, we can automatically check whether it is a symmetry pattern of …

Synergizing Specification Miners Through Model Fissions And Fusions, Le Bui Tien Duy, Le Dinh Xuan Bach, David Lo, Ivan Beschastnikh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software systems are often developed and released without formal specifications. For those systems that are formally specified, developers have to continuously maintain and update the specifications or have them fall out of date. To deal with the absence of formal specifications, researchers have proposed techniques to infer the missing specifications of an implementation in a variety of forms, such as finite state automaton (FSA). Despite the progress in this area, the efficacy of the proposed specification miners needs to improve if these miners are to be adopted. We propose SpecForge, a new specification mining approach that synergizes many existing specification …

Demo: Real-World Deployment Of Seat Occupancy Detectors, Nguyen Huy Hoang Nguyen, Gihan Hettiarachchi, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Detecting occupancy of seats in library is important for librarians to check seats’ usage, and for students to find available seats in crowded time. In our prior work [1], we presented in-lab micro benchmarks to show feasibility of capacitive sensing for seat occupancy detection. In this demo paper, we present larger scale real-world deployment of occupancy detection system and its performance.

Demo: Towards Immersive And Interactive Gym Exercises, Fazlay Rabbi, Taiwoo Park, Biyi Fang, Mi Zhang, Youngki Lee, Rajiv Ranganathan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We demonstrate JARVIS, a novel virtual coaching system based on virtual reality (VR) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. It creates a truly immersive gym exercising experience for machine-based strength training and guides users in a highly interactive manner. With these unique advantages, we believe that JARVIS has a potential to revolutionize personal fitness experiences.

Press: Personalized Event Scheduling Recommender System (Demonstration), Hoong Chuin Lau, Aldy Gunawan, Pradeep Varakantham, Wenjie Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a personalized event scheduling recom-mender system, PRESS, for a large conference setting with multiple parallel tracks. PRESS is a mobile application that gathers personalized information from a user and recommends talks/demos to be attend. The input from a user include a list of keyword preferences and (optionally) preferred talks. We use the MALLET topic model package to analyze the set of conference papers and classify them based on automatically identified topics. We propose an algorithm to generate a list of recommended papers based on the user keywords and the MALLET topics. An optimization model is then applied …

Elderly Medication Adherence With The Internet Of Things, Xiaoping Toh, Hwee Xian Tan, Hwee-Pink Tan, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the growth in elderly population in Singapore, healthcare expenditure and prevalence of age-related illnesses are expected to increase. Non-adherence among the elderly is a common issue that leads to adverse health complications, particularly among those with chronic conditions. However, existing studies typically focus on identifying predictors of medication adherence, and provide neither user-friendly nor actionable solutions that can be easily adopted by the elderly. In this paper, we use the Internet of Things to monitor medication adherence and detect changes in medication consumption patterns among the elderly, thus enabling timely interventions by caregivers to take place. Sensor-enabled medication boxes …

Insights From Machine-Learned Diet Success Prediction, Ingmar Weber, Palakorn Achananuparp

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To support people trying to lose weight and stay healthy, more and more fitness apps have sprung up including the ability to track both calories intake and expenditure. Users of such apps are part of a wider “quantified self“ movement and many opt-in to publicly share their logged data. In this paper, we use public food diaries of more than 4,000 long-term active MyFitnessPal users to study the characteristics of a (un-)successful diet. Concretely, we train a machine learning model to predict repeatedly being over or under self-set daily calories goals and then look at which features contribute to the …

Salient Pairwise Spatio-Temporal Interest Points For Real-Time Activity Recognition, Mengyuan Liu, Hong Liu, Qianru Sun, Tianwei Zhang, Runwei Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time Human action classification in complex scenes has applications in various domains such as visual surveillance, video retrieval and human robot interaction. While, the task is challenging due to computation efficiency, cluttered backgrounds and intro-variability among same type of actions. Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based methods have shown promising results to tackle human action classification in complex scenes efficiently. However, the state-of-the-art works typically utilize bag-of-visual words (BoVW) model which only focuses on the word distribution of STIPs and ignore the distinctive character of word structure. In this paper, the distribution of STIPs is organized into a salient directed graph, …

We Can Hear You With Wi-Fi!, Guanhua Wang, Yongpan Zou, Zimu Zhou, Kaishun Wu, Lionel M. Ni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent literature advances Wi-Fi signals to “see” people’s motions and locations. This paper asks the following question: Can Wi-Fi “hear” our talks? We present WiHear, which enables Wi-Fi signals to “hear” our talks without deploying any devices. To achieve this, WiHear needs to detect and analyze fine-grained radio reflections from mouth movements. WiHear solves this micro-movement detection problem by introducing Mouth Motion Profile that leverages partial multipath effects and wavelet packet transformation. Since Wi-Fi signals do not require line-of-sight, WiHear can “hear” people talks within the radio range. Further, WiHear can simultaneously “hear” multiple people’s talks leveraging MIMO technology. We …

Sutm System Api At Unlv: Small Uas Traffic Management System Api, Monetta Angelique Shaw, Ju-Yeon Jo, Yoohwan Kim

Computer Science Faculty Research

This file contains the set of APIs for small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) Traffic Management (sUTM). The sUTM server hosts a web service that allows any software or device that can use the Internet to utilize the server’s sUAS traffic management (sUTM) functions through these application programming interfaces (API). This library was developed as part of the MS thesis by Monetta Shaw in Spring 2016, "A web based solution for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) traffic management". The summary of the library and its usage instructions are described in the thesis.

Interactively Cutting And Constraining Vertices In Meshes Using Augmented Matrices, Yu-Hong Yeung, Jessica Crouch, Alex Pothen

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a finite-element solution method that is well suited for interactive simulations of cutting meshes in the regime of linear elastic models. Our approach features fast updates to the solution of the stiffness system of equations to account for real-time changes in mesh connectivity and boundary conditions. Updates are accomplished by augmenting the stiffness matrix to keep it consistent with changes to the underlying model, without refactoring the matrix at each step of cutting. The initial stiffness matrix and its Cholesky factors are used to implicitly form and solve a Schur complement system using an iterative solver. As changes …

Users Acceptance Of Health Behavioral Change Support Systems, Mohammad Al-Ramahi, Insu Park, Jun Liu

Research & Publications

Behavioral Change Support Systems (BCSSs) is a socio-technical information systems with psychological and behavioral outcomes aim to change users’ behavior and lifestyle. The promising outcomes of BCSSs make them especially useful in certain areas such as healthcare, where these systems could be leveraged to motivate people toward healthy behavior and then help them to achieve their goals better. However, health BCSSs cannot help facilitate self-monitoring and self-management or even improve patients’ health outcomes when patients do not accept the technology first. In this article, we extend the existing literature of users’ acceptance of health BCSSs by introducing new variables that …

Ambiguityvis: Visualization Of Ambiguity In Graph Layouts, Yong Wang, Qiaomu Shen, Zhiguang Zhou, Min Zhu, Sixiao Yang, Qu Huamin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Node-link diagrams provide an intuitive way to explore networks and have inspired a large number of automated graph layout strategies that optimize aesthetic criteria. However, any particular drawing approach cannot fully satisfy all these criteria simultaneously, producing drawings with visual ambiguities that can impede the understanding of network structure. To bring attention to these potentially problematic areas present in the drawing. this paper presents a technique that highlights common types of visual ambiguities: ambiguous spatial relationships between nodes and edges, visual overlap between community structures, and ambiguity in edge bundling and metanodes. Metrics, including newly proposed metrics for abnormal edge …

Demo: Profiling Power Utilization Behaviours Of Smartwatch Applications, Joseph Joo Keng Chan, Lingxiao Jiang, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smartwatches complement the main mobile phone and are able to profile user-activity as well as provide links, updates and notifications with work or personal utilities (e.g. Email, Social Media, Messaging etc.). Although very promising, smartwatches are still limited by low battery life. This is due to the small size of the battery as well as the need to continuously perform sensing. Battery drain issues by apps as well as the system are a common complaint by users. Improved tools for power analysis and profiling of smartwatch apps can help both developers (by providing a platform for pre-release analysis) and users …

Demo: Sensing Gamers' Emotions Using Physiological Sensors, Sinh Huynh, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding emotions of gamers can benefit game designers in various ways. How gamers feel while they playing a game can be treated as valuable user feedback to improve the development process of that game. Sensing player emotions also enables game designers to create adaptive game that can adjust itself to provide best gaming experience based on player emotions. However, how to effectively evaluate emotions of gamers is still an open research challenge. Two common techniques to evaluate emotional state are using self-assessments such as questionnaires or interviews, and to recognize expressed emotions by analyzing videos or images of facial expression, …

Demo: Smartwatch Based Food Diary And Eating Analytics, Sougata Sen, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Archan Misra, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Monitoring an individual’s daily dietary intake can provide various insights regarding the health of the individual. Applications such as My Fitness Pal exists, which allows individuals to monitor all items that the individual consumed. However, manual monitoring can be labour intensive. To overcome this limitation, wrist worn sensor based eating habit monitoring has been studied by various researchers. These systems can detect eating gesture, but they cannot determine what is being eaten. We have built a system which can (i) detect eating gesture using the smartwatch's inertial sensors (ii) use the smartwatch's camera to capture images of food consumed at …

Powerforecaster: Predicting Power Impact Of Mobile Sensing Applications At Pre-Installation Time, Chulhong Min, Youngki Lee, Chungkuk Yoo, Seungwoo Kang, Inseok Hwang, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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