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Articles 3301 - 3330 of 4404

Full-Text Articles in Software Engineering

The Case For Cloud-Enabled Mobile Sensing Services, Sougata Sen, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Lipyeow Lim Aug 2012

The Case For Cloud-Enabled Mobile Sensing Services, Sougata Sen, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Lipyeow Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We make the case for cloud-enabled mobile sensing services that support an emerging application class, one which infers near-real time collective context using sensor data obtained continuously from a large set of consumer mobile devices. We present the high-level architecture and functional requirements for such a mobile sensing service, and argue that such a service can significantly improve the scalability and energy-efficiency of large-scale mobile sensing by coordinating the sensing & processing tasks across multiple devices. We then focus specifically on the problem of energy efficiency and provide early exemplars of how optimizing query execution jointly over multiple phones can …


Toward A Mobile Platform For Pervasive Games, Inseok Hwang, Youngki Lee, Taiwoo Park, Junehwa Song Aug 2012

Toward A Mobile Platform For Pervasive Games, Inseok Hwang, Youngki Lee, Taiwoo Park, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Emerging pervasive games will be immersed into real-life situations and leverage new types of contextual interactions therein. For instance, a player’s punching gesture, running activity, and fast heart rate conditions can be used as the game inputs. Although the contextual interaction is the core building blocks of pervasive games, individual game developers hardly utilize a rich set of interactions within a game play. Most challenging, it is significantly difficult for developers to expect dynamic availability of input devices in real life, and adapt to the situation without system-level support. Also, it is challenging to coordinate its resource use with other …


Improved Bdd-Based Discrete Analysis Of Timed Systems, Truong Khanh Nguyen, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong, Yan Liu Aug 2012

Improved Bdd-Based Discrete Analysis Of Timed Systems, Truong Khanh Nguyen, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong, Yan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking timed systems through digitization is relatively easy, compared to zone-based approaches. The applicability of digitization, however, is limited mainly for two reasons, i.e., it is only sound for closed timed systems; and clock ticks cause state space explosion. The former is mild as many practical systems are subject to digitization. It has been shown that BDD-based techniques can be used to tackle the latter to some extent. In this work, we significantly improve the existing approaches by keeping the ticks simple in the BDD encoding. Taking advantage of the ‘simple’ nature of clock ticks, we fine-tune the encoding …


Automatic Compositional Verification Of Timed Systems, Shang-Wei Lin, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong, Étienne André Aug 2012

Automatic Compositional Verification Of Timed Systems, Shang-Wei Lin, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong, Étienne André

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification and verification of real-time systems are important research topics with crucial applications; however, the so-called state space explosion problem often prevents model checking to be used in practice for large systems. In this work, we present a self-contained toolkit to analyze real-time systems specified using event-recording automata (ERAs), which supports system modeling, animated simulation, and fully automatic compositional verification based on learning techniques. Experimental results show that our tool outperforms the state-of-the-art timed model checker.


Adaptive Display Power Management For Oled Displays, Kiat Wee Tan, Rajesh Krishna Balan Aug 2012

Adaptive Display Power Management For Oled Displays, Kiat Wee Tan, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile gaming has become increasingly popular in the past few years with the proliferation of smartphones that have the increased CPU, memory, and network (3.5G etc.) capabilities to support a vast range of interesting games. In addition, these phones also have high quality displays, such as Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED) displays, that allow the intricate details in games to be shown in vivid detail to end users. Unfortunately, these displays tend to consume a lot of energy which in turn limits the amount of time that a user can spend actually playing games on these devices. In this paper, …


Control-Theoretic Utility Maximization In Multihop Wireless Networks Under Mission Dynamics, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Thomas La Porta Aug 2012

Control-Theoretic Utility Maximization In Multihop Wireless Networks Under Mission Dynamics, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Both bandwidth and energy become important resource constraints when multi-hop wireless networks are used to transport high data rate traffic for a moderately long duration. In such networks, it is important to control the traffic rates to not only conform to the link capacity bounds but also to ensure that the energy of battery-powered forwarding nodes is utilized judiciously to avoid premature exhaustion (i.e., the network lasts as long as the applications require data from the sources) without being unneccesarily conservative (i.e., ensuring that the applications derive the maximum utility possible). Unlike prior work that focuses on the instantaneous distributed …


Adapting Video Delivery Based On Motion Triggered Visual Attention, Hari Kalva, V. Adzic, Lai-Tee Cheok Aug 2012

Adapting Video Delivery Based On Motion Triggered Visual Attention, Hari Kalva, V. Adzic, Lai-Tee Cheok

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cues from human visual system (HVS) can be used for further optimization of compression in modern hybrid video coding platforms. We present work that explores and exploits motion related attentional limitations. Algorithms for exploiting motion triggered attention were developed and compared with MPEG AVC/H.264 encoder with various settings for different bitrate levels. For the sequences with high motion activity our algorithm provides up to 8% bitrate savings.


Using Monterey Phoenix To Formalize And Verify System Architectures, Jiexin Zhang, Yang Liu, Mikhail Auguston, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong Jul 2012

Using Monterey Phoenix To Formalize And Verify System Architectures, Jiexin Zhang, Yang Liu, Mikhail Auguston, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling and analyzing software architectures are useful for helping to understand 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 hinders the development of quality architectural models. In this work, we develop an approach for modeling and verifying software architectures specified using Monterey Phoenix (MP) architecture description language. Firstly, we formalize the syntax and operational semantics for MP. This language is capable of modeling system and environment behaviors based on event traces, as well as supporting different architecture composition operations and views. Secondly, …


Generating Minimal T-Wise Test Suites, Luis C. Gutierrez, Carlos Nieto, Francisco Zapata, Martine Ceberio Jul 2012

Generating Minimal T-Wise Test Suites, Luis C. Gutierrez, Carlos Nieto, Francisco Zapata, Martine Ceberio

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Summer 2012

As the use of computing devices increases every day, users rely on the adequate functioning of software. When software is not tested properly, it can yield erroneous information or a complete failure of the system. The NIST estimates that defective software cost the United States economy close to $60 billion a year. Therefore, there is a need to develop software testing techniques that are time and cost effective. Fully testing software under all possible combinations of parameters values cannot be reduced. However, testing can focus on covering all combinations of subsets of parameters and empirical data shows that doing so …


Probabilistic Model Checking Multi-Agent Behaviors In Dispersion Games Using Counter Abstraction, Jianye Hao, Songzheng Song, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Lin Gui, Jin Song Dong, Ho-Fung Leung Jul 2012

Probabilistic Model Checking Multi-Agent Behaviors In Dispersion Games Using Counter Abstraction, Jianye Hao, Songzheng Song, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Lin Gui, Jin Song Dong, Ho-Fung Leung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Accurate analysis of the stochastic dynamics of multi-agent system is important but challenging. Probabilistic model checking, a formal technique for analysing a system which exhibits stochastic behaviors, can be a natural solution to analyse multi-agent systems. In this paper, we investigate this problem in the context of dispersion games focusing on two strategies: basic simple strategy (BSS) and extended simple strategies (ESS). We model the system using discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) and reduce the state space of the models by applying counter abstraction technique. Two important properties of the system are considered: convergence and convergence rate. We show that these …


Formal Analysis Of Pervasive Computing Systems, Yan Liu, Xian Zhang, Jin Song Dong, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jit Biswas, Mounir Mokhtari Jul 2012

Formal Analysis Of Pervasive Computing Systems, Yan Liu, Xian Zhang, Jin Song Dong, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jit Biswas, Mounir Mokhtari

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pervasive computing systems are heterogenous and complex as they usually involve human activities, various sensors and actuators as well as middleware for system controlling. Therefore, analyzing such systems is highly nontrivial. In this work, we propose to use formal methods for analyzing pervasive computing systems. Firstly, a formal modeling framework is proposed to cover the main characteristics of pervasive computing systems (e.g., context-awareness, concurrent communications, layered architectures). Secondly, we identify the safety requirements (e.g., free of deadlocks and conflicts etc.) and propose their specifications as safety and liveness properties. Finally, we demonstrate our ideas using a case study of a …


A Model Checker For Hierarchical Probabilistic Real-Time Systems, Songzheng Song, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong Jul 2012

A Model Checker For Hierarchical Probabilistic Real-Time Systems, Songzheng Song, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-life systems are usually hard to control, due to their complicated structures, quantitative time factors and even stochastic behaviors. In this work, we present a model checker to analyze hierarchical probabilistic real-time systems. A modeling language called PRTS is used to specify such systems, and automatic zone-abstraction approach, which is probability preserving, is used to generate finite state MDP. We have implemented PRTS in model checking framework PAT so that friendly user interface can be used to edit, simulate and verify PRTS models. Some experiments are conducted to show our tool’s efficiency.


Parameter Synthesis For Hierarchical Concurrent Real-Time Systems, Étienne André, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong Jul 2012

Parameter Synthesis For Hierarchical Concurrent Real-Time Systems, Étienne André, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling and verifying complex real-time systems, involving timing delays, are notoriously difficult problems. Checking the correctness of a system for one particular value for each delay does not give any information for other values. It is hence interesting to reason parametrically, by considering that the delays are parameters (unknown constants) and synthesize a constraint guaranteeing a correct behavior. We present here Parametric Stateful Timed CSP, a language capable of specifying hierarchical real-time systems with complex data structures. Although we prove that the synthesis is undecidable in general, we present an algorithm for efficient parameter synthesis that behaves well in practice.


Translating Pddl Into Csp# - The Pat Approach, Yi Li, Jing Sun, Jin Song Dong, Yang Liu, Jun Sun Jul 2012

Translating Pddl Into Csp# - The Pat Approach, Yi Li, Jing Sun, Jin Song Dong, Yang Liu, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking provides a way to automatically verify hardware and software systems, whereas the goal of planning is to produce a sequence of actions that leads from the initial state to the desired goal state. Recently research indicates that there is a strong connection between model checking and planning problem solving. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using a newly developed model checking framework, Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT), to serve as a planning solution provider for upper layer applications. We first carried out a number of experiments on different planning tools in order to compare their performance and …


Mydeal: The Context-Aware Urban Shopping Assistant, Kartik Muralidharan, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan Jul 2012

Mydeal: The Context-Aware Urban Shopping Assistant, Kartik Muralidharan, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Narayan Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common problem in large Urban cities, of the sort seen in Asia, is the huge number of retail options available in the city. In particular, it is not uncommon to find multiple malls, each with hundreds of stores inside, just a short distance from each other in almost every part of these cities. These factors make it incredibly hard for consumers to identify stores of interest to them in any particular mall.In response, a number of shopping assistance applications have been created for mobile phones.However, these applications mostly just allow users to know which stores are where or to …


Analyzing Multi-Agent Systems With Probabilistic Model Checking Approach, Songzheng Song, Jianye Hao, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Ho-Fung Leung, Jin Song Dong Jun 2012

Analyzing Multi-Agent Systems With Probabilistic Model Checking Approach, Songzheng Song, Jianye Hao, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Ho-Fung Leung, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-agent systems, which are composed of autonomous agents, have been successfully employed as a modeling paradigm in many scenarios. However, it is challenging to guarantee the correctness of their behaviors due to the complex nature of the autonomous agents, especially when they have stochastic characteristics. In this work, we propose to apply probabilistic model checking to analyze multi-agent systems. A modeling language called PMA is defined to specify such kind of systems, and LTL property and logic of knowledge combined with probabilistic requirements are supported to analyze system behaviors. Initial evaluation indicates the effectiveness of our current progress; meanwhile some …


Mining Input Sanitization Patterns For Predicting Sql Injection And Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan Jun 2012

Mining Input Sanitization Patterns For Predicting Sql Injection And Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Static code attributes such as lines of code and cyclomatic complexity have been shown to be useful indicators of defects in software modules. As web applications adopt input sanitization routines to prevent web security risks, static code attributes that represent the characteristics of these routines may be useful for predicting web application vulnerabilities. In this paper, we classify various input sanitization methods into different types and propose a set of static code attributes that represent these types. Then we use data mining methods to predict SQL injection and cross site scripting vulnerabilities in web applications. Preliminary experiments show that our …


Software Engineering Education Needs More Engineering, A. Frank Ackerman, Ph.D., Sushil Acharua, D.Eng. Jun 2012

Software Engineering Education Needs More Engineering, A. Frank Ackerman, Ph.D., Sushil Acharua, D.Eng.

Computer Science & Software Engineering

To what extent is “software engineering” really “engineering” as this term is commonly understood? A hallmark of the products of the traditional engineering disciplines is trustworthiness based on dependability. But in his keynote presentation at ICSE 2006 Barry Boehm pointed out that individuals’, systems’, and peoples’ dependency on software is becoming increasingly critical, yet that dependability is generally not the top priority for software intensive system producers. Continuing in an uncharacteristic pessimistic vein, Professor Boehm said that this situation will likely continue until a major software-induced system catastrophe similar in impact to the 9/11 World Trade Center catastrophe stimulates action …


Usability Bugs In Open Source Software And Online Forums, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed Jun 2012

Usability Bugs In Open Source Software And Online Forums, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

No abstract provided.


Resource-Aware Video Multicasting Via Access Gateways In Wireless Mesh Networks, Wanqing Tu, Cormac Sreenan, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Sanjay Jha Jun 2012

Resource-Aware Video Multicasting Via Access Gateways In Wireless Mesh Networks, Wanqing Tu, Cormac Sreenan, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Sanjay Jha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies video multicasting in large scale areas using wireless mesh networks. The focus is on the use of Internet access gateways that allow a choice of alternative routes to avoid potentially lengthy and low capacity multi-hop wireless paths. A set of heuristic-based algorithms are described that together aim to maximize network capacity: the two-tier integrated architecture algorithm, the weighted gateway uploading algorithm, the link controlled routing tree algorithm, and the dynamic group management algorithm. These algorithms use different approaches to arrange nodes involved in video multicasting into a clustered and two-tier integrated architecture in which network protocols can …


Where Should The Bugs Be Fixed? More Accurate Information Retrieval-Based Bug Localization Based On Bug Reports, Jian Zhou, Hongyu Zhang, David Lo Jun 2012

Where Should The Bugs Be Fixed? More Accurate Information Retrieval-Based Bug Localization Based On Bug Reports, Jian Zhou, Hongyu Zhang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

For a large and evolving software system, the project team could receive a large number of bug reports. Locating the source code files that need to be changed in order to fix the bugs is a challenging task. Once a bug report is received, it is desirable to automatically point out to the files that developers should change in order to fix the bug. In this paper, we propose BugLocator, an information retrieval based method for locating the relevant files for fixing a bug. BugLocator ranks all files based on the textual similarity between the initial bug report and the …


Short Message Service (Sms) Command And Control (C2) Awareness In Android-Based Smartphones Using Kernel-Level Auditing, Robert J. Olipane Jun 2012

Short Message Service (Sms) Command And Control (C2) Awareness In Android-Based Smartphones Using Kernel-Level Auditing, Robert J. Olipane

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses the emerging threat of botnets in the smartphone domain and focuses on the Android platform and botnets using short message service (SMS) as the command and control (C2) channel. With any botnet, C2 is the most important component contributing to its overall resilience, stealthiness, and effectiveness. This thesis develops a passive host-based approach for identifying covert SMS traffic and providing awareness to the user. Modifying the kernel and implementing this awareness mechanism is achieved by developing and inserting a loadable kernel module that logs all inbound SMS messages as they are sent from the baseband radio to …


Solving The Search For Suitable Code: An Initial Implementation, Kathryn T. Stolee, Sebastian Elbaum Jun 2012

Solving The Search For Suitable Code: An Initial Implementation, Kathryn T. Stolee, Sebastian Elbaum

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Searching for code is a common task among programmers, with the ultimate goal of finding and reusing code or getting ideas for implementation. While the process of searching for code - issuing a query and selecting a relevant match - is straightforward, several costs must be balanced, including the costs of specifying the query, examining the results to find desired code, and not finding a relevant result. For the popular syntactic searches the query cost is quite low, but the results are often vague or irrelevant, so the examination cost is high and matches may not be found. Semantic searches …


Mining Quantified Temporal Rules: Formalism, Algorithms, And Evaluation, David Lo, Ganesan Ramalingam, Venkatesh Prasad Ranganath, Kapil Vaswani Jun 2012

Mining Quantified Temporal Rules: Formalism, Algorithms, And Evaluation, David Lo, Ganesan Ramalingam, Venkatesh Prasad Ranganath, Kapil Vaswani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Libraries usually impose constraints on how clients should use them. Often these constraints are not well-documented. In this paper, we address the problem of recovering such constraints automatically, a problem referred to as specification mining. Given some client programs that use a given library, we identify constraints on the library usage that are (almost) satisfied by the given set of clients.The class of rules we target for mining combines simple binary temporal operators with state predicates (composed of equality constraints) and quantification. This is a simple yet expressive subclass of temporal properties (LTL formulae) that allows us to capture many …


Identifying Linux Bug Fixing Patches, Yuan Tian, Julia Lawall, David Lo Jun 2012

Identifying Linux Bug Fixing Patches, Yuan Tian, Julia Lawall, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the evolution of an operating system there is a continuing tension between the need to develop and test new features, and the need to provide a stable and secure execution environment to users. A compromise, adopted by the developers of the Linux kernel, is to release new versions, including bug fixes and new features, frequently, while maintaining some older “longterm” versions. This strategy raises the problem of how to identify bug fixing patches that are submitted to the current version but should be applied to the longterm versions as well. The current approach is to rely on the individual …


Are Faults Localizable?, Lucia Lucia, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang Jun 2012

Are Faults Localizable?, Lucia Lucia, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many fault localization techniques have been proposed to facilitate debugging activities. Most of them attempt to pinpoint the location of faults (i.e., localize faults) based on a set of failing and correct executions and expect debuggers to investigate a certain number of located program elements to find faults. These techniques thus assume that faults are localizable, i.e., only one or a few lines of code that are close to one another are responsible for each fault. However, in reality, are faults localizable? In this work, we investigate hundreds of real faults in several software systems, and find that many faults …


Overcoming The Challenges In Cost Estimation For Distributed Software Projects, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan Jun 2012

Overcoming The Challenges In Cost Estimation For Distributed Software Projects, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe how we studied, in-situ, the operational processes of three large high process maturity distributed software development companies and discovered three common problems they faced with respect to early stage project cost estimation. We found that project managers faced significant challenges to accurately estimate project costs because the standard metrics-based estimation tools they used (a) did not effectively incorporate diverse distributed project configurations and characteristics, (b) required comprehensive data that was not fully available for all starting projects, and (c) required significant domain experience to derive accurate estimates. To address these challenges, we collaborated with practitioners at the three …


Cuda Web Api Remote Execution Of Cuda Kernels Using Web Services, Massimo J. Becker Jun 2012

Cuda Web Api Remote Execution Of Cuda Kernels Using Web Services, Massimo J. Becker

Master's Theses

Massively parallel programming is an increasingly growing field with the recent introduction of general purpose GPU computing. Modern graphics processors from NVIDIA and AMD have massively parallel architectures that can be used for such applications as 3D rendering, financial analysis, physics simulations, and biomedical analysis. These massively parallel systems are exposed to programmers through in- terfaces such as NVIDIAs CUDA, OpenCL, and Microsofts C++ AMP. These frame- works expose functionality using primarily either C or C++. In order to use these massively parallel frameworks, programs being implemented must be run on machines equipped with massively parallel hardware. These requirements limit …


Workitemexplorer: Visualizing Software Development Tasks Using An Interactive Exploration Environment, Christoph Treude, Patrick Gorman, Lars Grammel, Margaret-Anne Storey Jun 2012

Workitemexplorer: Visualizing Software Development Tasks Using An Interactive Exploration Environment, Christoph Treude, Patrick Gorman, Lars Grammel, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This demo introduces WorkItemExplorer, an interactive environment to visually explore data from software development tasks. WorkItemExplorer enables developers and managers to investigate activity and correlations in their task management system by making data exploration flexible and interactive, and by utilizing multiple coordinated views. Our preliminary evaluation shows that WorkItemExplorer is able to answer questions that developers ask, while also enabling them to gain new insights through the free exploration of data.


A Novel Unbalanced Tree Structure For Low-Cost Authentication Of Streaming Content On Mobile And Sensor Devices, Thivya Kandappu, Vijay Sivaraman, Roksana Boreli Jun 2012

A Novel Unbalanced Tree Structure For Low-Cost Authentication Of Streaming Content On Mobile And Sensor Devices, Thivya Kandappu, Vijay Sivaraman, Roksana Boreli

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider stored content being streamed to a resource-poor device (such as a sensor node or a mobile phone), and address the issue of authenticating such content in realtime at the receiver. Per-packet digital signatures incur high computational cost, while per-block signatures impose high delays. A Merkle hash tree combines the benefits of the two by having a single signature per-block (at the root of the tree), while allowing immediate per-packet verification by following a hash-path logarithmic in the number of packets. In this paper we explore how the structure of the Merkle tree can be adapted to improve playback …