Programming Languages and Compilers Commons^™

Evopass: Evolvable Graphical Password Against Shoulder-Surfing Attacks, Xingjie Yu, Zhan Wang, Yingjiu Li, Liang Li, Wen Tao Zhu, Li Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The passwords for authenticating users are susceptible to shoulder-surfing attacks in which attackers learn users' passwords through direct observations without any technical support. A straightforward solution to defend against such attacks is to change passwords periodically or even constantly, making the previously observed passwords useless. However, this may lead to a situation in which users run out of strong passwords they can remember, or they are forced to choose passwords that are weak, correlated, or difficult to memorize. To achieve both security and usability in user authentication, we propose EvoPass, the first evolvable graphical password authentication system. EvoPass transforms a …

Loopster: Static Loop Termination Analysis, Xiaofei Xie, Bihuan Chen, Liang Zou, Shang-Wei Lin, Yang Liu, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Loop termination is an important problem for proving the correctness of a system and ensuring that the system always reacts. Existing loop termination analysis techniques mainly depend on the synthesis of ranking functions, which is often expensive. In this paper, we present a novel approach, named Loopster, which performs an efficient static analysis to decide the termination for loops based on path termination analysis and path dependency reasoning. Loopster adopts a divide-and-conquer approach: (1) we extract individual paths from a target multi-path loop and analyze the termination of each path, (2) analyze the dependencies between each two paths, and then …

Automated Android Application Permission Recommendation, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Xin Xia, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The number of Android applications has increased rapidly as Android is becoming the dominant platform in the smartphone market. Security and privacy are key factors for an Android application to be successful. Android provides a permission mechanism to ensure security and privacy. This permission mechanism requires that developers declare the sensitive resources required by their applications. On installation or during runtime, users are required to agree with the permission request. However, in practice, there are numerous popular permission misuses, despite Android introducing official documents stating how to use these permissions properly. Some data mining techniques (e.g., association rule mining) have …

Ancr—An Adaptive Network Coding Routing Scheme For Wsns With Different-Success-Rate Links †, Xiang Ji, Anwen Wang, Chunyu Li, Chun Ma, Yao Peng, Dajin Wang, Qingyi Hua, Feng Chen, Dingyi Fang

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

As the underlying infrastructure of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in many applications. Network coding is a technique in WSNs to combine multiple channels of data in one transmission, wherever possible, to save node’s energy as well as increase the network throughput. So far most works on network coding are based on two assumptions to determine coding opportunities: (1) All the links in the network have the same transmission success rate; (2) Each link is bidirectional, and has the same transmission success rate on both ways. However, these assumptions may not be …

Can Syntax Help? Improving An Lstm-Based Sentence Compression Model For New Domains, Liangguo Wang, Jing Jiang, Hai Leong Chieu, Chen Hui Ong, Dandan Song, Lejian Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we study how to improve thedomain adaptability of a deletion-basedLong Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neuralnetwork model for sentence compression.We hypothesize that syntactic informationhelps in making such modelsmore robust across domains. We proposetwo major changes to the model: usingexplicit syntactic features and introducingsyntactic constraints through Integer LinearProgramming (ILP). Our evaluationshows that the proposed model works betterthan the original model as well as a traditionalnon-neural-network-based modelin a cross-domain setting.

Testing And Debugging: A Reality Check, Pavneet Singh Kochhar

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Testing and debugging are important activities during software development and maintenance. Testing is performed to check if the code contains errors whereas debugging is done to locate and fix these errors. Testing can be manual or automated and can be of different types such as unit, integration, system, stress etc. Debugging can also be manual or automated. These two activities have drawn attention of researchers in the recent years. Past studies have proposed many testing techniques such as automated test generation, test minimization, test case selection etc. Studies related to debugging have proposed new techniques to find bugs using various …

Real-Time Bursty Topic Detection And Virality Forecasting In Microblogs, Wei Xie

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Microblogs such as Twitter have become the largest social platforms for users around the world to share anything happening around them with friends and beyond. A bursty topic in microblogs is one that triggers a surge of relevant tweets within a short period of time, which often reflects important events of mass interest. How to leverage microblogs for early detection and further impact analysis of bursty topics has, therefore, become an important research problem with immense practical value.

Auditing Anti-Malware Tools By Evolving Android Malware And Dynamic Loading Technique, Yinxing Xue, Guozhu Meng, Yang Liu, Tian Huat Tan, Hongxu Chen, Jun Sun, Jie Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although a previous paper shows that existing antimalware tools (AMTs) may have high detection rate, the report is based on existing malware and thus it does not imply that AMTs can effectively deal with future malware. It is desirable to have an alternative way of auditing AMTs. In our previous paper, we use malware samples from android malware collection GENOME to summarize a malware meta-model for modularizing the common attack behaviors and evasion techniques in reusable features. We then combine different features with an evolutionary algorithm, in which way we evolve malware for variants. Previous results have shown that the …

Iupdater: Low Cost Rss Fingerprints Updating For Device-Free Localization, Liqiong Chang, Jie Xiong, Yu Wang, Xiaojiang Chen, Junhao Hu, Dingyi Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While most existing indoor localization techniques are device-based, many emerging applications such as intruder detection and elderly monitoring drive the needs of device-free localization, in which the target can be localized without any device attached. Among the diverse techniques, received signal strength (RSS) fingerprint-based methods are popular because of the wide availability of RSS readings in most commodity hardware. However, current fingerprint-based systems suffer from high human labor cost to update the fingerprint database and low accuracy due to the large degree of RSS variations. In this paper, we propose a fingerprint-based device-free localization system named iUpdater to significantly reduce …

Cloud-Based Query Evaluation For Energy-Efficient Mobile Sensing, Tianli Mo, Lipyeow Lim, Sougata Sen, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we reduce the energy overheads of continuous mobile sensing, specifically for the case of context-aware applications that are interested in collective context or events, i.e., events expressed as a set of complex predicates over sensor data from multiple smartphones. We propose a cloud-based query management and optimization framework, called CloQue, that can support thousands of such concurrent queries, executing over a large number of individual smartphones. Our central insight is that the context of different individuals & groups often have significant correlation, and that this correlation can be learned through standard association rule mining on historical data. …

Convergence Technologies For Sensor Systems In The Next Generation Networks, Conor Gildea, Declan Barber

The ITB Journal

This paper describes an approach to the internetworking of sensory nodes in a converged network environment. This preliminary investigation of sensory network creation is driven by a joint applied research project which seeks to establish the feasibility of the real-time remote monitoring of animal welfare while in transit between Ireland, Europe and the Middle East. This paper examines the use of Java to create sensor services in converging architectures which leverage the Internetworking protocols and describes our implementation of such a system.

Levity Polymorphism, Richard A. Eisenberg, Simon Peyton Jones

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

Parametric polymorphism is one of the linchpins of modern typed programming, but it comes with a real performance penalty. We describe this penalty; offer a principled way to reason about it (kinds as calling conventions); and propose levity polymorphism. This new form of polymorphism allows abstractions over calling conventions; we detail and verify restrictions that are necessary in order to compile levity-polymorphic functions. Levity polymorphism has created new opportunities in Haskell, including the ability to generalize nearly half of the type classes in GHC's standard library.

Fusing Mobile, Wearable And Infrastructure Sensing For Immersive Daily Lifestyle Analytics, Sougata Sen

Dissertations and Theses Collection

With the prevalence of sensors in public infrastructure as well as in personal devices, exploitation of data from these sensors to monitor and profile basic activities (e.g., locomotive states such as walking, and gestural actions such as smoking) has gained popularity. Basic activities identified by these sensors will drive the next generation of lifestyle monitoring applications and services. To provide more advanced and personalized services, these next-generation systems will need to capture and understand increasingly finer-grained details of various common daily life activities. In this dissertation, I demonstrate the possibility of building systems using offthe- shelf devices, that not only …

Dgaselid: An R Package For Selecting A Variable Number Of Features In High Dimensional Data, Nicolae Teodor Melita, Stefan Holban

The R Journal

The dGAselID package proposes an original approach to feature selection in high dimensional data. The method is built upon a diploid genetic algorithm. The genotype to phenotype mapping is modeled after the Incomplete Dominance Inheritance, over passing the necessity to define a dominance scheme. The fitness evaluation is done by user selectable supervised classifiers, from a broad range of options. Cross validation options are also accessible. A new approach to crossover, inspired from the random assortment of chromosomes during meiosis is included. Several mutation operators, inspired from genetics, are also proposed. The package is fully compatible with the data formats …

Checkmate: Fast Argument Checks For Defensive R Programming, Michel Lang

The R Journal

Dynamically typed programming languages like R allow programmers to write generic, flexible and concise code and to interact with the language using an interactive Readeval-print-loop (REPL). However, this flexibility has its price: As the R interpreter has no information about the expected variable type, many base functions automatically convert the input instead of raising an exception. Unfortunately, this frequently leads to runtime errors deeper down the call stack which obfuscates the original problem and renders debugging challenging. Even worse, unwanted conversions can remain undetected and skew or invalidate the results of a statistical analysis. As a resort, assertions can be …

Pgee: An R Package For Analysis Of Longitudinal Data With High-Dimensional Covariates, Gul Inan, Lan Wang

The R Journal

We introduce an R package PGEE that implements the penalized generalized estimating equations (GEE) procedure proposed by Wang et al. (2012) to analyze longitudinal data with a large number of covariates. The PGEE package includes three main functions: CVfit, PGEE, and MGEE. The CVfit function computes the cross-validated tuning parameter for penalized generalized estimating equations. The function PGEE performs simultaneous estimation and variable selection for longitudinal data with high-dimensional covariates; whereas the function MGEE fits unpenalized GEE to the data for comparison. The R package PGEE is illustrated using a yeast cell-cycle gene expression data set.

Pdp: An R Package For Constructing Partial Dependence Plots, Brandon M. Greenwell

The R Journal

Complex nonparametric models—like neural networks, random forests, and support vector machines—are more common than ever in predictive analytics, especially when dealing with large observational databases that don’t adhere to the strict assumptions imposed by traditional statistical techniques (e.g., multiple linear regression which assumes linearity, homoscedasticity, and normality). Unfortunately, it can be challenging to understand the results of such models and explain them to management. Partial dependence plots offer a simple solution. Partial dependence plots are low dimensional graphical renderings of the prediction function so that the relationship between the outcome and predictors of interest can be more easily understood. These …

Changes In R, R Core Team

The R Journal

CHANGES IN R 3.4.1

CHANGES IN R 3.4.0

CHANGES IN R 3.3.3

The R Journal (June 2017) 9(1): Complete Issue, The R Foundation

The R Journal

Editorial, Roger Bivand

Contributed Research Articles

iotools: High-Performance I/O Tools for R, Taylor Arnold, Michael J. Kane, and Simon Urbanek

IsoGeneGUI: Multiple Approaches for Dose-Response Analysis of Microarray Data Using R, Martin Otava, Rudradev Sengupta, Ziv Shkedy, Dan Lin, Setia Pramana, Tobias Verbeke, Philippe Haldermans, Ludwig A. Hothorn, Daniel Gerhard, Rebecca M. Kuiper, Florian Klinglmueller, and Adetayo Kasim

Network Visualization with ggplot2, Sam Tyner, François Briatte, and Heike Hofmann

OrthoPanels: An R Package for Estimating a Dynamic Panel Model with Fixed Effects Using the Orthogonal Reparameterization Approach, Mark Pickup, Paul Gustafson, Davor Cubranic, and Geoffrey Evans

The mosaic Package: Helping …

Changes On Cran, Kurt Hornik, Uwe Ligges, Achim Zeileis

The R Journal

In the past 4 months, 794 new packages were added to the CRAN package repository. 16 packages were unarchived, 98 archived and 1 removed. The following shows the growth of the number of active packages in the CRAN package repository: