Software Engineering Commons^™

A Verification System For Timed Interval Calculus, Chunqing Chen, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Timed Interval Calculus (TIC) is a highly expressive set-based notation for specifying and reasoning about embedded real-time systems. However, it lacks mechanical proving support, as its verification usually involves infinite time intervals and continuous dynamics. In this paper, we develop a system based on a generic theorem prover, Prototype Verification System (PVS), to assist formal verification of TIC at a high grade of automation. TIC semantics has been constructed by the PVS typed higher-order logic. Based on the encoding, we have checked all TIC reasoning rules and discovered subtle flaws. A translator has been implemented in Java to automatically transform …

Scalable Detection Of Semantic Clones, Mark Gabel, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Several techniques have been developed for identifying similar code fragments in programs. These similar fragments, referred to as code clones, can be used to identify redundant code, locate bugs, or gain insight into program design. Existing scalable approaches to clone detection are limited to finding program fragments that are similar only in their contiguous syntax. Other, semantics-based approaches are more resilient to differences in syntax, such as reordered statements, related statements interleaved with other unrelated statements, or the use of semantically equivalent control structures. However, none of these techniques have scaled to real world code bases. These approaches capture semantic …

A Scalable Approach To Multi-Style Architectural Modeling And Verification, Stephen Wong, Jing Sun, Ian Warren, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software Architecture represents the high level description of a system in terms of components, external properties and communication. Despite its importance in the software engineering process, the lack of formal description and verification support limits the value of developing architectural models. Automated formal engineering methods can provide an effective means to precisely describe and rigorously verify intended structures and behaviors of software systems. In this paper, we present an approach to support the design and verification of software architectural models using the Alloy analyzer. Based on our earlier work, we propose a fundamental library for specifying system structures in terms …

A Formal Model Of Semantic Web Service Ontology (Wsmo) Execution, Hai H. Wang, Nick Gibbins, Terry R. Payne, Ahmed Saleh, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Semantic Web services have been one of the most significant research areas within the semantic Web vision, and have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential. Current semantic Web service research focuses on defining models and languages for the semantic markup of all relevant aspects of services, which are accessible through a Web service interface. The Web service modelling ontology (WSMO) is one of the most significant semantic Web service framework proposed to date. To support the standardization and tool support of WSMO, a formal semantics of the language is highly desirable. As there are a …

Getting Started With Prpl, Qingfeng Guan

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

pRPL is an open-source1 general-purpose parallel Raster Processing programming Library developed by Qingfeng Guan, in the Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara. pRPL encapsulates complex parallel computing utilities and routines specifically for raster processing (e.g., raster data decomposition, distribution and gathering among multiple processors, inter-processor communication and data exchange), and provides an easy-to-use interface for users to parallelize almost any raster processing algorithm with any arbitrary neighborhood (or moving window) configuration. pRPL enables the implementation of parallel raster-processing algorithms without requiring a deep understanding of parallel computing and programming, thus it greatly reduces the development complexity. Moreover, even …

Cots-Based Software Product Line Development, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed, Shereef Al-Maati, Zaher Alaghbari

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software Product Line (SPL) is at the forefront among the techniques for reducing costs, decreasing schedule time, and ensuring commonality of features across a family of products - as components off-the-shelf (COTS) are reused in multiple products. A disciplined process for software product line development is still needed. We propose the Y-model for COTS-based software product line development. The model put forward identifies and elaborates the essential phases and activities of software product line development from COTS-based repository. The Y-model provides an efficient way of integrating the approaches of software product line and COTS-based development as a cohesive software development …

Measurement And Estimation Of Network Qos Among Peer Xbox 360 Game Players, Youngki Lee, Sharad Agarwal, Chris Butcher, Jitu Padhye

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The research community has proposed several techniques for estimating the quality of network paths in terms of delay and capacity. However, few techniques have been studied in the context of large deployed applications. Network gaming is an application that is extremely sensitive to network path quality [1,2,3]. Yet, the quality of network paths among players of large, wide-area games and techniques for estimating it have not received much attention from the research community.

Enforcing Behavioral Constraints In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Programs, Raffi Khatchadourian, Johan Dovland, Neelam Soundarajan

Publications and Research

Reasoning, specification, and verification of Aspect-Oriented (AO) programs presents unique challenges especially as such programs evolve over time. Components, base-code and aspects alike, may be easily added, removed, interchanged, or presently unavailable at unpredictable frequencies. Consequently, modular reasoning of such programs is highly attractive as it enables tractable evolution, otherwise necessitating that the entire program be reexamined each time a component is changed. It is well known, however, that modular reasoning about AO programs is difficult. In this paper, we present our ongoing work in constructing a rely-guarantee style reasoning system for the Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) paradigm, adopting a trace-based …

Rate-Diversity And Resource-Aware Broadcast And Multicast In Multi-Rate Wireless Mesh Networks, Bao Hua Liu, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Sanjay Jha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on the problem of increasing the traffic capacity (volume of admissible traffic) of broadcast and multicast flows in a wireless mesh network (WMN). We study and suggest routing strategies where the process of constructing the forwarding tree considers three distinct features: (a) the ability of individual mesh nodes to perform link-layer broadcasts at multiple rates, (b) the wireless broadcast advantage, whereby a single broadcast transmission covers multiple neighboring receivers and (c) the residual transmission capacity at a WMN node, subject to intereference-based constraints from existing traffic flows in its neighborhood. Our metric of interest is the total …

K-Sketch: A 'Kinetic' Sketch Pad For Novice Animators, Richard C. Davis, Brien Colwell, James A. Landay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Because most animation tools are complex and timeconsuming to learn and use, most animations today are created by experts. To help novices create a wide range of animations quickly, we have developed a general-purpos informal, 2D animation sketching system called K-Sketch. Field studies investigating the needs of animatorsnd would-be animators helped us collect a library of usage scenarios for our tool. A novel optimization technique enabled us to design an interface that is simultaneously fast, simple, and powerful. The result is a pen-based system that relies on users’ intuitive sense of space and time while still supporting a wide range …

Comp-Ref: A Technique To Guide The Delegation Of Responsibilities To Components In Software Systems, Subhajit Datta, Robert Van Engelen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In software systems, components collaborate to collectively fulfill requirements. A key concern of software design is the delegation of responsibilities to components such that user needs are most expediently met. This paper presents the COMP-REF technique based on a set of metrics and Linear Programming (LP) to guide the allocation of responsibilities of a system’s components. We define the metrics Aptitude Index, Requirement Set, and Concordance Index to extract some design characteristics and use these metrics in an optimization algorithm. Results from experimental validation of the COMP-REF technique across a range of software systems are reported. We also …

Harmoni: Context-Aware Filtering Of Sensor Data For Continuous Remote Health Monitoring, Iqbal Mohomed, Archan Misra, Maria Ebling, William Jerome

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A promising architecture for remote healthcare monitoring involves the use of a pervasive device (such as a cellular phone), which aggregates data from multiple body-worn medical sensors and transmits the data to the backend. Unfortunately, the volume of data generated by increasingly sophisticated continuouslyactive sensors can overwhelm the resources on the mobile device. We propose imbuing the mobile device with the intelligence to perform context-aware filtering of sensor data streams in order to reduce transmissions in cases where the observed data corresponds to the norm expected by the system in a given context. To investigate the efficacy of this technique, …

Obfuscation Framework Based On Functionally Equivalent Combinatorial Logic Families, Moses C. James

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to be a few building blocks in the bridge between theoretical and practical software obfuscation that researchers will one day construct. We provide a method for random uniform selection of circuits based on a functional signature and specific construction specifiers. Additionally, this thesis includes the first formal definition of an algorithm that performs only static analysis on a program; that is analysis that does not rely on the input and output behavior of the analyzed program. This is analogous to some techniques used in real-world software reverse engineering. Finally, this thesis uses the equivalent circuit library to …

Software Obfuscation With Symmetric Cryptography, Alan C. Lin

Theses and Dissertations

Software protection is of great interest to commercial industry. Millions of dollars and years of research are invested in the development of proprietary algorithms used in software programs. A reverse engineer that successfully reverses another company‘s proprietary algorithms can develop a competing product to market in less time and with less money. The threat is even greater in military applications where adversarial reversers can use reverse engineering on unprotected military software to compromise capabilities on the field or develop their own capabilities with significantly less resources. Thus, it is vital to protect software, especially the software’s sensitive internal algorithms, from …

A Framework For Relationship Pattern Languages, Sudarshan Murthy, David Maier

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

A relationship pattern is an abstraction of a recurring need when establishing relationships among information elements in specific contexts. By developing or leveraging a relationship pattern, modelers can solve a class of problems once and describe many relationship types at once. We have developed a framework for specifying relationship patterns and pattern languages (sets of patterns) in both modeling-language-independent and modeling-language-specific ways. We describe this framework both informally and formally. We provide examples of some commonly observed relationship patterns and show how to use them in ER with the help of a relationship pattern language called Exemplar. We also provide …

Better Refactoring Tools For A Better Refactoring Strategy, Andrew P. Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Refactoring tools can improve the speed and accuracy with which we create and maintain software – but only if they are used. In practice, tools are not used as much as they could be; this seems to be because they do not align with the refactoring strategy preferred by the majority of programmers: floss refactoring. We propose five principles that characterize successful floss refactoring tools – principles that can help programmers to choose the most appropriate refactoring tools and also help toolsmiths to design more usable tools.

A Primer On Spreadsheet Analytics, Thomas A. Grossman Jr.

Business Analytics and Information Systems

This paper provides guidance to an analyst who wants to extract insight from a spreadsheet model. It discusses the terminology of spreadsheet analytics, how to prepare a spreadsheet model for analysis, and a hierarchy of analytical techniques. These techniques include sensitivity analysis, tornado charts, and backsolving (or goal-seeking). This paper presents native-Excel approaches for automating these techniques, and discusses add-ins that are even more efficient. Spreadsheet optimization and spreadsheet Monte Carlo simulation are briefly discussed. The paper concludes by calling for empirical research, and describing desired features spreadsheet sensitivity analysis and spreadsheet optimization add-ins.

Viewing Virtual Property Ownership Through The Lens Of Innovation, Ryan G. Vacca

Law Faculty Scholarship

Over the past several years scholars have wrestled with how property rights in items created in virtual worlds should be conceptualized. Regardless of how the property is conceptualized and what property theory best fits, most agree the law ought to recognize virtual property as property and vest someone with those rights.

College Of Extended Learning Online Registration System, Chai-Ching Tsai

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project is to provide staff and future students at College of Extended Learning a web based interface to process course registration online. This system is called College of Extended Learning Online Registration System C♯ (CELORS-C♯). This project is a revision of a previous version of College of Extended Learning Online Registration System. The previous version of CELORS has been used by College of Extended Learning as of March 2007. The difference between the previous CELORS and CELORS-C♯ is that the previous CELORS is coded in JAVA but CELORS-C♯ is coded in C. Also, CELORS-C♯ has a …

Implementation Of Reinforcement Learning In Game Strategy Design, Chien-Yu Lin

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study is to apply reinforcement learning to the design of game strategy. In the gaming industry, the strategy used by computers to win a game is usually pre-programmed by game designers according to the game patterns or a set of rules.

Moops: A Web Implementation Of The Personal Software Process Reporting System, Thomas Russell Gigler Iii.

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of Moops is to bridge the gap between PSP Scriber, geared very specifically to the CSCI655 class, and other available PSP implications which are so general they are difficult to use immediately without valuable time spent learning the software. Moops is a PHP/MySQL based web application designed to provide the students taking the CSCI655 graduate software engineering course at CSUSB with an intuitive, easy to use tool to implement the Personal Software Process (PSP). Moops eliminates the possibility of errors in calculations by completing all calculations for the user.

Design And Implementation Of A Multi-Player Role Playing Game, Giang Tuan Trang

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project was to solve a multiplayer computer game problem. A team of 15 students were formed to solve a game programming problem in the summer of 2008. The team consisted of students from various programming backgrounds and interests. The team's goal was to finish the first working artifact minus the art work by the end of summer 2008. This first artifact with a concrete, solid architecture will serve as a foundation for future students to learn game programming.

Building Web Applications Using Web Services, Keerthi Nannapaneni

Theses Digitization Project

This project was performed to get hands on experience on the implementation of web services. During this project execution, significant time was spent researching about existing web services and various programming environments that can be used for building the application. The following application - AJAX, JavaScript, Java, Java server pages, HTML, and CSS. Existing data content from the following web service resources were used in this application - Google API, ArcWebServices, Weather XML feed. The purpose of this application is to show the map location along with the weather of the place selected by the user. This application can be …

An Empirical Validation Of Object-Oriented Design Metrics For Fault Prediction, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Jie Xu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Object-oriented design has become a dominant method in software industry and many design metrics of object-oriented programs have been proposed for quality prediction, but there is no well-accepted statement on how significant those metrics are. In this study, empirical analysis is carried out to validate object-oriented design metrics for defects estimation. Approach: The Chidamber and Kemerer metrics suite is adopted to estimate the number of defects in the programs, which are extracted from a public NASA data set. The techniques involved are statistical analysis and neuro-fuzzy approach. Results: The results indicate that SLOC, WMC, CBO and RFC are reliable metrics …

Scalable Concurrent Hash Tables Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Existing approaches to concurrent programming often fail to account for synchronization costs on modern shared-memory multipro- cessor architectures. A new approach to concurrent programming, known as relativistic programming, can reduce or in some cases eliminate synchronization overhead on such architectures. This approach avoids the costs of inter-processor communication and memory access by permitting processors to operate from a relativistic view of memory provided by their own caches, rather than from an absolute reference frame of memory as seen by all processors. This research shows how relativistic programming techniques can provide the perceived advantages of optimistic synchronization without the useless parallelism …

Graphics Processor Based Implementation Of Bioinformatics Codes, Andrew Bellenir, Christian Trefftz, Greg Wolffe

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

We created a powerful computing platform based on video cards with the goal of accelerating the performance of bioinformatics codes. To satisfy the demands of the video gaming industry, modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have become very advanced computational devices, using a large set of stream processors to render multiple pixels in parallel. Recently, computer scientists have taken interest in a GPU's ability to execute a single instruction on multiple data (SIMD computation) for general applications, as opposed to graphics processing only. This is known as general purpose computation on a graphics processing unit, or GPGPU.

Our project was comprised …

Amvc: A Loosely-Coupled Architecture For Component-Based Clients, Brendan Lawlor

Theses

There is an architectural deficit in most currently undertaken rich client applications: In n-tier applications the presentation layer is represented as a single layer. This is as true of browser-based rich clients (Rich Internet Applications) as of rich desktop clients since both are designed along component-based, event-driven lines. The result of creating rich clients without sufficient application architecture underpinning is often tightly-coupled code of unnecessary complexity, with the associated high cost of maintenance. No commonly understood pattern is currently evident that would allow rich client components to be combined into a loosely coupled application. This paper describes the theory and …

Development Of Integrated Process Simulation System Model For Spent Fuel Treatment Facility Design, Yitung Chen, Sean Hsieh

Separations Campaign (TRP)

The major objectives will lead to the creation of a framework that combines all the strengths of AMUSE’s complicated calculations, well-established commercial system process package, and ISOPro’s flexible parameter optimization modules. Development of the process simulation code can be done using the solvent extraction process at Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with the research team from the Mechanical Engineering Department at UNLV.

Research accomplishments:

• Completed final version of the ISOPro User Manual associated with summarized ISOPro source codes.

• Redesigned and completed use case and design class diagrams (DCD) of the ISOPro package using ArgoUML.

• Improved ISOPro system …

Model-Based Instrumentation Of Distributed Applications, Jan Schäfer

Theses

Problems such as inconsistent or erroneous instrumentation often plague applications whose source code is manually instrumented during the implementation phase. Integrating performance instrumentation capabilities into the Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) process would greatly assist software engineers who do not have detailed knowledge of source code instrumentation technologies. This thesis presents an approach that offers instrumentation support to software designers and developers. A collection of instrumentation patterns is defined to represent typical instrumentation scenarios for distributed applications. A UML profile derived from these patterns is then used to annotate UML models. Based on suitable code generation templates, the annotated models …

A Translation Engine In Support Of Context-Level Interoperability, Kym J. Pohl, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The support of context-level interoperability demands increasing attention in today’s arena of semantics-oriented decision-support systems. Unlike data-oriented exchange, such semantic interoperability must venture beyond the elementary communication of discrete data values and endeavor to translate between significantly more expressive, context-rich representations. Further, support of this level of interoperability must not require a contamination of the native perspective embedded within each participant’s representation. Offered as a foundation upon which specific interoperability solutions can be developed, this paper presents a service-oriented framework supporting an extensible set of translation paradigms to effectively connect expressive ontology-based environments. Fundamental to this capability is the notion …