Software Engineering Commons^™

Just In Time Assembly (Jita) - A Run Time Interpretation Approach For Achieving Productivity Of Creating Custom Accelerators In Fpgas, Sen Ma

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The reconfigurable computing community has yet to be successful in allowing programmers to access FPGAs through traditional software development flows. Existing barriers that prevent programmers from using FPGAs include: 1) knowledge of hardware programming models, 2) the need to work within the vendor specific CAD tools and hardware synthesis. This thesis presents a series of published papers that explore different aspects of a new approach being developed to remove the barriers and enable programmers to compile accelerators on next generation reconfigurable manycore architectures. The approach is entitled Just In Time Assembly (JITA) of hardware accelerators. The approach has been defined …

Careermapper: An Automated Resume Evaluation Tool, Vivian Lai, Kyong Jin Shim, Richard J. Oentaryo, Philips K. Prasetyo, Casey Vu, Ee-Peng Lim, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The advent of the Web brought about major changes in the way people search for jobs and companies look for suitable candidates. As more employers and recruitment firms turn to the Web for job candidate search, an increasing number of people turn to the Web for uploading and creating their online resumes. Resumes are often the first source of information about candidates and also the first item of evaluation in candidate selection. Thus, it is imperative that resumes are complete, free of errors and well-organized. We present an automated resume evaluation tool called 'CareerMapper'. Our tool is designed to conduct …

Demystifying And Puncturing The Inflated Delay In Smartphone-Based Wifi Network Measurement, Weichao Li, Daoyuan Wu, Rocky K. C. Chang, Ricky K. P. Mok

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Using network measurement apps has become a very effective approach to crowdsourcing WiFi network performance data. However, these apps usually measure the user-level performancemetrics instead of the network-level performance which is important for diagnosing performance problems. In this paper we report for the first time that a major source of measurement noises comes from the periodical SDIO (Secure Digital Input Output) bus sleep inside the phone. The additional latency introduced by SDIO and Power Saving Mode can inflate and unstablize network delay measurement significantly. We carefully design and implement a scheme to wake up the phone for delay measurement by …

Towards Learning And Verifying Invariants Of Cyber-Physical Systems By Code Mutation, Yuqi Chen, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS), which integrate algorithmic control with physical processes, often consist of physically distributed components communicating over a network. A malfunctioning or compromised component in such a CPS can lead to costly consequences, especially in the context of public infrastructure. In this short paper, we argue for the importance of constructing invariants (or models) of the physical behaviour exhibited by CPS, motivated by their applications to the control, monitoring, and attestation of components. To achieve this despite the inherent complexity of CPS, we propose a new technique for learning invariants that combines machine learning with ideas from mutation testing. …

Towards Learning And Verifying Invariants Of Cyber-Physical Systems By Code Mutation, Yuqi Chen, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS), which integrate algorithmic control with physical processes, often consist of physically distributed components communicating over a network. A malfunctioning or compromised component in such a CPS can lead to costly consequences, especially in the context of public infrastructure. In this short paper, we argue for the importance of constructing invariants (or models) of the physical behaviour exhibited by CPS, motivated by their applications to the control, monitoring, and attestation of components. To achieve this despite the inherent complexity of CPS, we propose a new technique for learning invariants that combines machine learning with ideas from mutation testing. …

Towards Concolic Testing For Hybrid Systems, Pingfan Kong, Yi Li, Xiaohong Chen, Jun Sun, Meng Sun, Jingyi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hybrid systems exhibit both continuous and discrete behavior. Analyzing hybrid systems is known to be hard. Inspired by the idea of concolic testing (of programs), we investigate whether we can combine random sampling and symbolic execution in order to effectively verify hybrid systems. We identify a sufficient condition under which such a combination is more effective than random sampling. Furthermore, we analyze different strategies of combining random sampling and symbolic execution and propose an algorithm which allows us to dynamically switch between them so as to reduce the overall cost. Our method has been implemented as a web-based checker named …

Automated Verification Of Timed Security Protocols With Clock Drift, Li Li, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Time is frequently used in security protocols to provide better security. For instance, critical credentials often have limited lifetime which improves the security against brute-force attacks. However, it is challenging to correctly use time in protocol design, due to the existence of clock drift in practice. In this work, we develop a systematic method to formally specify as well as automatically verify timed security protocols with clock drift. We first extend the previously proposed timed applied ππ -calculus as a formal specification language for timed protocols with clock drift. Then, we define its formal semantics based on timed logic rules, …

Rapid Deployment Indoor Localization Without Prior Human Participation, Han Xu, Zimu Zhou, Longfei Shangguan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we propose RAD, a RApid Deployment localization framework without human sampling. The basic idea of RAD is to automatically generate a fingerprint database through space partition, of which each cell is fingerprinted by its maximum influence APs. Based on this robust location indicator, fine-grained localization can be achieved by a discretized particle filter utilizing sensor data fusion. We devise techniques for CIVD-based field division, graph-based particle filter, EM-based individual character learning, and build a prototype that runs on commodity devices. Extensive experiments show that RAD provides a comparable performance to the state-of-the-art RSSbased methods while relieving it …

Towards Using Concurrent Java Api Correctly, Shuang Liu, Guangdong Bai, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Concurrent Programs are hard to analyze or debug due to the complex program logic and unpredictable execution environment. In practice, ordinary programmers often adopt existing well-designed concurrency related API (e.g., those in java.util.concurrent) so as to avoid dealing with these issues. These API can however often be used incorrectly, which results in hardto-debug concurrent bugs. In this work, we propose an approach for enforcing the correct usage of concurrency-related Java API. Our idea is to annotate concurrency-related Java classes with annotations related to misuse of these API and develop lightweight type checker to detect concurrent API misuse based on the …

Improving Quality Of Use Case Documents Through Learning And User Interaction, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Hao Xiao, Bimlesh Wadhwa, Jin Song Dong, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Use cases are widely used to capture user requirements based on interactions between different roles in the system. They are mostly documented in natural language and sometimes aided with graphical illustrations in the form of use case diagrams. Use cases serve as an important means to communicate among stakeholders, requirement engineers and system engineers as they are easy to understand and are produced early in the software development process. Having high quality use cases are beneficial in many ways, e.g., in avoiding inconsistency/incompleteness in requirements, in guiding system design, in generating test cases. In this work, we propose an approach …

Game Development Software Engineering Process Life Cycle: A Systematic Review, Saiqa Alemm, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software game is a kind of application that is used not only for entertainment, but also for serious purposes that can be applicable to different domains such as education, business, and health care. Multidisciplinary nature of the game development processes that combine sound, art, control systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and human factors, makes the software game development practice different from traditional software development. However, the underline software engineering techniques help game development to achieve maintainability, flexibility, lower effort and cost, and better design. The purpose of this study is to assesses the state of the art research on the game …

Neural Network Models For Software Development Effort Estimation: A Comparative Study, Ali Bou Nassif, Mohammad Azzeh, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software development effort estimation (SDEE) is one of the main tasks in software project management. It is crucial for a project manager to efficiently predict the effort or cost of a software project in a bidding process, since overestimation will lead to bidding loss and underestimation will cause the company to lose money. Several SDEE models exist; machine learning models, especially neural network models, are among the most prominent in the field. In this study, four different neural network models – Multilayer Perceptron, General Regression Neural Network, Radial Basis Function Neural Network, and Cascade Correlation Neural Network – are compared …

Integration Of Lightweight & Energy Efficient Cipher In Wireless Body Area Network Fore-Health Monitoring, Azza Zayed Aishamsi

Theses

There is an increase in the diseases of the circulatory system in United Arab Emirates, which makes it the first leading cause of death. This led to a high demand for a continuous care that can be achieved by adopting an emerging technology of e- Health monitoring system using Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) that can collect patient’s data. Since patient’s data is private, securing the communication within WBAN becomes highly essential. In this research thesis, we propose an architecture to secure the data transmission within the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) in e-Health monitoring. More specifically, our proposed architecture …

Vireo @ Trecvid 2016: Multimedia Event Detection, Ad-Hoc Video Search, Video-To-Text Description, Hao Zhang, Yi-Jie Lu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimedia events such as “birthday party” usually involve the complex interaction between humans and objects. Unlike actions and sports, these events rarely contain unique motion patterns to be vividly explored for recognition. To encode rich objects in the events, a common practice is to tag an individual video frame with object labels, represented as a vector signifying probabilities of object appearances. These vectors are then pooled across frames to obtain a video-level representation. The current practices suffer from two deficiencies due to the direct employment of deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) and standard feature pooling techniques. First, the use of …

A Survey On Wireless Indoor Localization From The Device Perspective, Jiang Xiao, Zimu Zhou, Youwen Yi, Lionel M. Ni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the marvelous development of wireless techniques and ubiquitous deployment of wireless systems indoors, myriad indoor location-based services (ILBSs) have permeated into numerous aspects of modern life. The most fundamental functionality is to pinpoint the location of the target via wireless devices. According to how wireless devices interact with the target, wireless indoor localization schemes roughly fall into two categories: device based and device free. In device-based localization, a wireless device (e.g., a smartphone) is attached to the target and computes its location through cooperation with other deployed wireless devices. In device-free localization, the target carries no wireless devices, while …

Service Adaptation With Probabilistic Partial Models, Manman Chen, Tian Huat Tan, Jun Sun, Jingyi Wang, Yang Liu, Jing Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web service composition makes use of existing Web services to build complex business processes. Non-functional requirements are crucial for the Web service composition. In order to satisfy non-functional requirements when composing a Web service, one needs to rely on the estimated quality of the component services. However, estimation is seldom accurate especially in the dynamic environment. Hence, we propose a framework, ADFlow, to monitor and adapt the workflow of the Web service composition when necessary to maximize its ability to satisfy the non-functional requirements automatically. To reduce the monitoring overhead, ADFlow relies on asynchronous monitoring. ADFlow has been implemented and …

Scaling Bdd-Based Timed Verification With Simulation Reduction, Truong Khanh Nguyen, Tian Huat Tan, Jun Sun, Jiaying Li, Yang Liu, Manman Chen, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Digitization is a technique that has been widely used in real-time model checking. With the assumption of digital clocks, symbolic model checking techniques (like those based on BDDs) can be applied for real-time systems. The problem of model checking real-time systems based on digitization is that the number of tick transitions increases rapidly with the increment of clock upper bounds. In this paper, we propose to improve BDD-based verification for real-time systems using simulation reduction. We show that simulation reduction allows us to verify timed automata with large clock upper bounds and to converge faster to the fixpoint. The presented …

Designing Minimal Effective Normative Systems With The Help Of Lightweight Formal Methods, Jianye Hao, Eunsuk Kang, Jun Sun, Daniel Jackson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Normative systems are an important approach to achieving effective coordination among (often an arbitrary number of) agents in multiagent systems. A normative system should be effective in ensuring the satisfaction of a desirable system property, and minimal (i.e., not containing norms that unnecessarily over-constrain the behaviors of agents). Designing or even automatically synthesizing minimal effective normative systems is highly non-trivial. Previous attempts on synthesizing such systems through simulations often fail to generate normative systems which are both minimal and effective. In this work, we propose a framework that facilitates designing of minimal effective normative systems using lightweight formal methods. Given …

Learning Sentence Embeddings With Auxiliary Tasks For Cross-Domain Sentiment Classification, Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study cross-domain sentiment classification with neural network architectures. We borrow the idea from Structural Correspondence Learning and use two auxiliary tasks to help induce a sentence embedding that supposedly works well across domains for sentiment classification. We also propose to jointly learn this sentence embedding together with the sentiment classifier itself. Experiment results demonstrate that our proposed joint model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on five benchmark datasets.

What Permissions Should This Android App Request?, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Xin Xia, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As Android is one of the most popular open source mobile platforms, ensuring security and privacy of Android applications is very important. Android provides a permission mechanism which requires developers to declare sensitive resources their applications need, and users need to agree with this request when they install (for Android API level 22 or lower) or run (for Android API level 23) these applications. Although Android provides very good official documents to explain how to properly use permissions, unfortunately misuses even for the most popular permissions have been reported. Recently, Karim et al. propose an association rule mining based approach …

How To Break An Api: Cost Negotiation And Community Values In Three Software Ecosystems, Christopher Bogart, Christian K\303\244stner, James Herbsleb, Ferdian Thung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Change introduces conict into software ecosystems: breaking changes may ripple through the ecosystem and trigger rework for users of a package, but often developers can invest additional effort or accept opportunity costs to alleviate or delay downstream costs. We performed a multiple case study of three software ecosystems with different tooling and philosophies toward change, Eclipse, R/CRAN, and Node.js/npm, to understand how developers make decisions about change and change-related costs and what practices, tooling, and policies are used. We found that all three ecosystems differ substantially in their practices and expectations toward change and that those differences can be explained …

Proteus: Computing Disjunctive Loop Summary Via Path Dependency Analysis, Xiaofei Xie, Bihuan Chen, Yang Liu, Wei Le, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Loops are challenging structures for program analysis, especially when loops contain multiple paths with complex interleaving executions among these paths. In this paper, we first propose a classification of multi-path loops to understand the complexity of the loop execution, which is based on the variable updates on the loop conditions and the execution order of the loop paths. Secondly, we propose a loop analysis framework, named Proteus, which takes a loop program and a set of variables of interest as inputs and summarizes path-sensitive loop effects on the variables. The key contribution is to use a path dependency automaton (PDA) …

Static Loop Analysis And Its Applications, Xiaofei Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Loops are challenging structures in program analysis, and an effective loop analysis is crucial in the applications, such as symbolic execution and program verification. In the research, we will first perform a deep analysis and propose a classification according to the complexity of the loops. Then try to propose techniques for analyzing and summarizing different loops. At last, we apply the techniques in multiple applications.

A Decomposition Method For Estimating Recursive Logit Based Route Choice Models, Tien Mai, Fabian Bastin, Emma Frejinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fosgerau et al. (2013) recently proposed the recursive logit (RL) model for route choice problems, that can be consistently estimated and easily used for prediction without any sampling of choice sets. Its estimation however requires solving many large-scale systems of linear equations, which can be computationally costly for real data sets. We design a decomposition (DeC) method in order to reduce the number of linear systems to be solved, opening the possibility to estimate more complex RL based models, for instance mixed RL models. We test the performance of the DeC method by estimating the RL model on two networks …

Message From The Chairs, Andrew Begel, Fabio Calefato, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Workshop on Social Software Engineering (SSE) focuses on the interplay between social computing and software engineering. On one hand, social factors in software engineering activities, processes and tools are essential for improving the quality of development processes and the software produced by them. Examples include the role of situational awareness and multi-cultural factors in collaborative software development. On the other hand, social software mediates people-to-people communication, supporting human choices, actions, and interactions with each other. Social software needs to accommodate a wide range of social concepts, such as trust, governance, reputation, and privacy. Being social, the software would also …

Software Engineering For Science, Jeffrey C. Carver, Neil P. Chue Hong, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Software Engineering for Science provides an in-depth collection of peer-reviewed chapters that describe experiences with applying software engineering practices to the development of scientific software. It provides a better understanding of how software engineering is and should be practiced, and which software engineering practices are effective for scientific software.

The book starts with a detailed overview of the Scientific Software Lifecycle, and a general overview of the scientific software development process. It highlights key issues commonly arising during scientific software development, as well as solutions to these problems.

The second part of the book provides examples of the use of …

Connecting Program Synthesis And Reachability: Automatic Program Repair Using Test-Input Generation, Thanhvu Nguyen, Westley Weimer, Deepak Kapur, Stephanie Forrest

School of Computing: Technical Reports

We prove that certain formulations of program synthesis and reachability are equivalent. Specifically, our constructive proof shows the reductions between the template-based synthesis problem, which generates a program in a pre-specified form, and the reachability problem, which decides the reachability of a program location. This establishes a link between the two research fields and allows for the transfer of techniques and results between them.

To demonstrate the equivalence, we develop a program repair prototype using reachability tools. We transform a buggy program and its required specification into a specific program containing a location reachable only when the original program can …

Computer-Aided Design Of Algorithms Of Pulsed Control Of Arc Welding Process Based On Numerical Simulation, Oksana I. Shpigunova, Anatoliy A. Glazunov

The 8th International Conference on Physical and Numerical Simulation of Materials Processing

No abstract provided.

Code Metrics For Predicting Risk Levels Of Android Applications, Akond A. Rahman

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Android applications pose security and privacy risks for end-users. Early prediction of risk levels that are associated with Android applications can help Android developers is releasing less risky applications to end-users. Researchers have showed how code metrics can be used as early predictors of failure prone software components. Whether or not code metrics can be used to predict risk levels of Android applications requires systematic exploration. The goal of this paper is to aid Android application developers in assessing the risk associated with developed Android applications by identifying code metrics that can be used as predictors to predict two levels …

Techniques For Identifying Mobile Platform Vulnerabilities And Detecting Policy-Violating Applications, Mon Kywe Su

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Mobile systems are generally composed of three layers of software: application layer where third-party applications are installed, framework layer where Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are exposed, and kernel layer where low-level system operations are executed. In this dissertation, we focus on security and vulnerability analysis of framework and application layers. Security mechanisms, such as Android’s sandbox and permission systems, exist in framework layer, while malware scanners protects application layer. However, there are rooms for improvement in both mechanisms. For instance, Android’s permission system is known to be implemented in ad-hoc manner and not well-tested for vulnerabilities. Application layer also focuses …