The Aim To Decentralize Economic Systems With Blockchains And Crypto, 2024 The Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas
The Aim To Decentralize Economic Systems With Blockchains And Crypto, Mary Lacity
Arkansas Law Review
As an information systems (“IS”) professor, I wrote this Article for legal professionals new to blockchains and crypto. This target audience likely is most interested in crypto for its legal implications—depending on whether it functions as currencies, securities, commodities, or properties; however, legal professionals also need to understand crypto’s origin, how transactions work, and how they are governed.
Piecing Together Performance: Collaborative, Participatory Research-Through-Design For Better Diversity In Games, 2024 Chapman University
Piecing Together Performance: Collaborative, Participatory Research-Through-Design For Better Diversity In Games, Daniel L. Gardner, Louanne Boyd, Reginald T. Gardner
Engineering Faculty Articles and Research
Digital games are a multi-billion-dollar industry whose production and consumption extend globally. Representation in games is an increasingly important topic. As those who create and consume the medium grow ever more diverse, it is essential that player or user-experience research, usability, and any consideration of how people interface with their technology is exercised through inclusive and intersectional lenses. Previous research has identified how character configuration interfaces preface white-male defaults [39, 40, 67]. This study relies on 1-on-1 play-interviews where diverse participants attempt to create “themselves” in a series of games and on group design activities to explore how participants may …
Clearspeech: Improving Voice Quality Of Earbuds Using Both In-Ear And Out-Ear Microphones, 2024 Singapore Management University
Clearspeech: Improving Voice Quality Of Earbuds Using Both In-Ear And Out-Ear Microphones, Dong Ma, Ting Dang, Ming Ding, Rajesh Krishna Balan
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Wireless earbuds have been gaining increasing popularity and using them to make phone calls or issue voice commands requires the earbud microphones to pick up human speech. When the speaker is in a noisy environment, speech quality degrades significantly and requires speech enhancement (SE). In this paper, we present ClearSpeech, a novel deep-learningbased SE system designed for wireless earbuds. Specifically, by jointly using the earbud’s in-ear and out-ear microphones, we devised a suite of techniques to effectively fuse the two signals and enhance the magnitude and phase of the speech spectrogram. We built an earbud prototype to evaluate ClearSpeech under …
Remote Multi-Person Heart Rate Monitoring With Smart Speakers: Overcoming Separation Constraint, 2024 Singapore Management University
Remote Multi-Person Heart Rate Monitoring With Smart Speakers: Overcoming Separation Constraint, Ngoc Doan Thu Tran, Dong Ma, Rajesh Krishna Balan
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Heart rate is a key vital sign that can be used to understand an individual’s health condition. Recently, remote sensing techniques, especially acoustic-based sensing, have received increasing attention for their ability to non-invasively detect heart rate via commercial mobile devices such as smartphones and smart speakers. However, due to signal interference, existing methods have primarily focused on monitoring a single user and required a large separation between them when monitoring multiple people. These limitations hinder many common use cases such as couples sharing the same bed or two or more people located in close proximity. In this paper, we present …
Conversational Localization: Indoor Human Localization Through Intelligent Conversation, 2024 Singapore Management University
Conversational Localization: Indoor Human Localization Through Intelligent Conversation, Sheshadri Smitha, Kotaro Hara
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
We propose a novel sensorless approach to indoor localization by leveraging natural language conversations with users, which we call conversational localization. To show the feasibility of conversational localization, we develop a proof-of-concept system that guides users to describe their surroundings in a chat and estimates their position based on the information they provide. We devised a modular architecture for our system with four modules. First, we construct an entity database with available image-based floor maps. Second, we enable the dynamic identification and scoring of information provided by users through our utterance processing module. Then, we implement a conversational agent that …
Big Code Search: A Bibliography, 2024 Singapore Management University
Big Code Search: A Bibliography, Kisub Kim, Sankalp Ghatpande, Dongsun Kim, Xin Zhou, Kui Liu, Tegawende F. Bissyande, Jacques Klein, Traon Yves Le
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Code search is an essential task in software development. Developers often search the internet and other code databases for necessary source code snippets to ease the development efforts. Code search techniques also help learn programming as novice programmers or students can quickly retrieve (hopefully good) examples already used in actual software projects. Given the recurrence of the code search activity in software development, there is an increasing interest in the research community. To improve the code search experience, the research community suggests many code search tools and techniques. These tools and techniques leverage several different ideas and claim a better …
Provably Secure Decisions Based On Potentially Malicious Information, 2024 Singapore Management University
Provably Secure Decisions Based On Potentially Malicious Information, Dongxia Wang, Tim Muller, Jun Sun
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
There are various security-critical decisions routinely made, on the basis of information provided by peers: routing messages, user reports, sensor data, navigational information, blockchain updates, etc. Jury theorems were proposed in sociology to make decisions based on information from peers, which assume peers may be mistaken with some probability. We focus on attackers in a system, which manifest as peers that strategically report fake information to manipulate decision making. We define the property of robustness: a lower bound probability of deciding correctly, regardless of what information attackers provide. When peers are independently selected, we propose an optimal, robust decision mechanism …
Conceptthread: Visualizing Threaded Concepts In Mooc Videos, 2024 Singapore Management University
Conceptthread: Visualizing Threaded Concepts In Mooc Videos, Zhiguang Zhou, Li Ye, Lihong Cai, Lei Wang, Yigang Wang, Yongheng Wang, Wei Chen, Yong Wang
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) platforms are becoming increasingly popular in recent years. Online learners need to watch the whole course video on MOOC platforms to learn the underlying new knowledge, which is often tedious and time-consuming due to the lack of a quick overview of the covered knowledge and their structures. In this paper, we propose ConceptThread , a visual analytics approach to effectively show the concepts and the relations among them to facilitate effective online learning. Specifically, given that the majority of MOOC videos contain slides, we first leverage video processing and speech analysis techniques, including shot recognition, …
Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, 2023 Brigham Young University
Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia
Journal of Nonprofit Innovation
Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.
Imagine Doris, who is …
Enhancing Urban Life: A Policy-Based Autonomic Smart City Management System For Efficient, Sustainable, And Self-Adaptive Urban Environments, 2023 Western University
Enhancing Urban Life: A Policy-Based Autonomic Smart City Management System For Efficient, Sustainable, And Self-Adaptive Urban Environments, Elham Okhovat
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis proposes the concept of the Policy-based Autonomic Smart City Management System, an innovative framework designed to comprehensively manage diverse aspects of urban environments, ranging from environmental conditions such as temperature and air quality to the infrastructure which comprises multiple layers of infrastructure, from sensors and devices to advanced IoT platforms and applications. Efficient management requires continuous monitoring of devices and infrastructure, data analysis, and real-time resource assessment to ensure seamless city operations and improve residents' quality of life. Automating data monitoring is essential due to the vast array of hardware and data exchanges, and round-the-clock monitoring is critical. …
Cm-Ii Meditation As An Intervention To Reduce Stress And Improve Attention: A Study Of Ml Detection, Spectral Analysis, And Hrv Metrics, 2023 Kennesaw State University
Cm-Ii Meditation As An Intervention To Reduce Stress And Improve Attention: A Study Of Ml Detection, Spectral Analysis, And Hrv Metrics, Sreekanth Gopi
Master of Science in Computer Science Theses
Students frequently face heightened stress due to academic and social pressures, particularly in de- manding fields like computer science and engineering. These challenges are often associated with serious mental health issues, including ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), depression, and an increased risk of suicide. The average student attention span has notably decreased from 21⁄2 minutes to just 47 seconds, and now it typically takes about 25 minutes to switch attention to a new task (Mark, 2023). Research findings suggest that over 95% of individuals who die by suicide have been diagnosed with depression (Shahtahmasebi, 2013), and almost 20% of students …
Μakka: Mutation Testing For Actor Concurrency In Akka Using Real-World Bugs, 2023 Oakland University
Μakka: Mutation Testing For Actor Concurrency In Akka Using Real-World Bugs, Mohsen Moradi Moghadam, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Raffi Takvor Khatchadourian Ph,D,, Hamid Bagheri
Publications and Research
Actor concurrency is becoming increasingly important in the real-world and mission-critical software. This requires these applications to be free from actor bugs, that occur in the real world, and have tests that are effective in finding these bugs. Mutation testing is a well-established technique that transforms an application to induce its likely bugs and evaluate the effectiveness of its tests in finding these bugs. Mutation testing is available for a broad spectrum of applications and their bugs, ranging from web to mobile to machine learning, and is used at scale in companies like Google and Facebook. However, there still is …
Adaptable Object And Animation System For Game Development, 2023 Western Kentucky University
Adaptable Object And Animation System For Game Development, Isaiah Turner
Masters Theses & Specialist Projects
In contemporary times, video games have swiftly evolved into a prominent medium, excelling in both entertainment and narrative delivery, positioning themselves as significant rivals to traditional forms such as film and theater. The burgeoning popularity of gaming has led to a surge in aspiring game developers seeking to craft their own creations, driven by both commercial aspirations and personal passion. However, a common challenge faced by these individuals involves the considerable time investment required to acquire essential skills and establish a foundational framework for their projects. Accessible game development engines that offer a diverse range of fundamental features play a …
Vertical Free-Swinging Photovoltaic Racking Energy Modeling: A Novel Approach To Agrivoltaics, 2023 Western University
Vertical Free-Swinging Photovoltaic Racking Energy Modeling: A Novel Approach To Agrivoltaics, Koami Soulemane Hayibo, Joshua M. Pearce
Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications
To enable lower-cost building materials, a free-swinging bifacial vertical solar photovoltaic (PV) rack has been proposed, which complies with Canadian building codes and is the lowest capital-cost agrivoltaics rack. The wind force applied to the free-swinging PV, however, causes it to have varying tilt angles depending on the wind speed and direction. No energy performance model accurately describes such a system. To provide a simulation model for the free-swinging PV, where wind speed and direction govern the array tilt angle, this study builds upon the open-source System Advisor Model (SAM) using Python. After the SAM python model is validated, a …
Towards Safer Code Reuse: Investigating And Mitigating Security Vulnerabilities And License Violations In Copy-Based Reuse Scenarios, 2023 University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Towards Safer Code Reuse: Investigating And Mitigating Security Vulnerabilities And License Violations In Copy-Based Reuse Scenarios, David Reid
Doctoral Dissertations
Background: A key benefit of open source software is the ability to copy code to reuse in other projects. Code reuse provides benefits such as faster development time, lower cost, and improved quality. There are several ways to reuse open source software in new projects including copy-based reuse, library reuse, and the use of package managers. This work specifically looks at copy-based code reuse.
Motivation: Code reuse has many benefits, but also has inherent risks, including security and legal risks. The reused code may contain security vulnerabilities, license violations, or other issues. Security vulnerabilities may persist in projects that copy …
Refinement-Based Specification And Analysis Of Multi-Core Arinc 653 Using Event-B, 2023 Singapore Management University
Refinement-Based Specification And Analysis Of Multi-Core Arinc 653 Using Event-B, Feng Zhang, Leping Zhang, Yongwang Zhao, Yang Liu, Jun Sun
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
ARINC 653 as the de facto standard of partitioning operating systems has been applied in many safety-critical domains. The multi-core version of ARINC 653, ARINC 653 Part 1-4 (Version 4), provides support for services to be utilized with a module that contains multiple processor cores. Formal specification and analysis of this standard document could provide a rigorous specification and uncover concealed errors in the textual description of service requirements. This article proposes a specification method for concurrency on a multi-core platform using Event-B, and a refinement structure for the complicated ARINC 653 Part 1-4 provides a comprehensive, stepwise refinement-based Event-B …
Mrim: Lightweight Saliency-Based Mixed-Resolution Imaging For Low-Power Pervasive Vision, 2023 Singapore Management University
Mrim: Lightweight Saliency-Based Mixed-Resolution Imaging For Low-Power Pervasive Vision, Jiyan Wu, Vithurson Subasharan, Minh Anh Tuan Tran, Kasun Pramuditha Gamlath, Archan Misra
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
While many pervasive computing applications increasingly utilize real-time context extracted from a vision sensing infrastructure, the high energy overhead of DNN-based vision sensing pipelines remains a challenge for sustainable in-the-wild deployment. One common approach to reducing such energy overheads is the capture and transmission of lower-resolution images to an edge node (where the DNN inferencing task is executed), but this results in an accuracy-vs-energy tradeoff, as the DNN inference accuracy typically degrades with a drop in resolution. In this work, we introduce MRIM, a simple but effective framework to tackle this tradeoff. Under MRIM, the vision sensor platform first executes …
Better Pay Attention Whilst Fuzzing, 2023 Singapore Management University
Better Pay Attention Whilst Fuzzing, Shunkai Zhu, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Jie Yang, Xingwei Lin, Liyi Zhang, Peng Cheng
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Fuzzing is one of the prevailing methods for vulnerability detection. However, even state-of-the-art fuzzing methods become ineffective after some period of time, i.e., the coverage hardly improves as existing methods are ineffective to focus the attention of fuzzing on covering the hard-to-trigger program paths. In other words, they cannot generate inputs that can break the bottleneck due to the fundamental difficulty in capturing the complex relations between the test inputs and program coverage. In particular, existing fuzzers suffer from the following main limitations: 1) lacking an overall analysis of the program to identify the most “rewarding” seeds, and 2) lacking …
Software Architecture In Practice: Challenges And Opportunities, 2023 Singapore Management University
Software Architecture In Practice: Challenges And Opportunities, Zhiyuan Wan, Yun Zhang, Xin Xia, Yi Jiang, David Lo
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Software architecture has been an active research field for nearly four decades, in which previous studies make significant progress such as creating methods and techniques and building tools to support software architecture practice. Despite past efforts, we have little understanding of how practitioners perform software architecture related activities, and what challenges they face. Through interviews with 32 practitioners from 21 organizations across three continents, we identified challenges that practitioners face in software architecture practice during software development and maintenance. We reported on common software architecture activities at software requirements, design, construction and testing, and maintenance stages, as well as corresponding …
C³: Code Clone-Based Identification Of Duplicated Components, 2023 Singapore Management University
C³: Code Clone-Based Identification Of Duplicated Components, Yanming Yang, Ying Zou, Xing Hu, David Lo, Chao Ni, John C. Grundy, Xin: Xia
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Reinventing the wheel is a detrimental programming practice in software development that frequently results in the introduction of duplicated components. This practice not only leads to increased maintenance and labor costs but also poses a higher risk of propagating bugs throughout the system. Despite numerous issues introduced by duplicated components in software, the identification of component-level clones remains a significant challenge that existing studies struggle to effectively tackle. Specifically, existing methods face two primary limitations that are challenging to overcome: 1) Measuring the similarity between different components presents a challenge due to the significant size differences among them; 2) Identifying …