Software Engineering Commons^™

Towards Automatic Repair Of Xacml Policies, Shuai Peng

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In a complex information system, controlling the access to resources is challenging. As a new generation of access control techniques, Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) can provide more flexible and fine-grained access control than Role-Based-Access Control (RBAC). XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) is an industrial standard for specifying ABAC policies. XACML policies tend to be complex because of the great variety of attribute types for fine-grained access control. This means that XACML policies are prone to errors and difficult to debug. This paper presents a first attempt at automating the debugging process of XACML policies. Two techniques are used for …

Assertion Generation Through Active Learning, Long H. Pham, Jun Sun, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Program assertions are useful for many program analysis tasks. They are however often missing in practice. In this work, we develop a novel approach for generating likely assertions automatically based on active learning. Our target is complex Java programs which cannot be symbolically executed (yet). Our key idea is to generate candidate assertions based on test cases and then apply active learning techniques to iteratively improve them. The experiments show that active learning really helps to improve the generated assertions.

Feedback-Based Debugging, Yun Lin, Jun Sun, Yinxing Xue, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software debugging has long been regarded as a time and effort consuming task. In the process of debugging, developers usually need to manually inspect many program steps to see whether they deviate from their intended behaviors. Given that intended behaviors usually exist nowhere but in human mind, the automation of debugging turns out to be extremely hard, if not impossible. In this work, we propose a feedback-based debugging approach, which (1) builds on light-weight human feedbacks on a buggy program and (2) regards the feedbacks as partial program specification to infer suspicious steps of the buggy execution. Given a buggy …

Parametric Model Checking Timed Automata Under Non-Zenoness Assumption, Étienne Andre, Hoang Gia Nguyen, Laure Petrucci, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time systems often involve hard timing constraints and concurrency, and are notoriously hard to design or verify. Given a model of a real-time system and a property, parametric model-checking aims at synthesizing timing valuations such that the model satisfies the property. However, the counter-example returned by such a procedure may be Zeno (an infinite number of discrete actions occurring in a finite time), which is unrealistic. We show here that synthesizing parameter valuations such that at least one counterexample run is non-Zeno is undecidable for parametric timed automata (PTAs). Still, we propose a semi-algorithm based on a transformation of PTAs …

Towards Distributed Machine Learning In Shared Clusters: A Dynamically-Partitioned Approach, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Shengen Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many cluster management systems (CMSs) have been proposed to share a single cluster with multiple distributed computing systems. However, none of the existing approaches can handle distributed machine learning (ML) workloads given the following criteria: high resource utilization, fair resource allocation and low sharing overhead. To solve this problem, we propose a new CMS named Dorm, incorporating a dynamicallypartitioned cluster management mechanism and an utilizationfairness optimizer. Specifically, Dorm uses the container-based virtualization technique to partition a cluster, runs one application per partition, and can dynamically resize each partition at application runtime for resource efficiency and fairness. Each application directly launches …

Search-Driven String Constraint Solving For Vulnerability Detection, Julian Thome, Lwin Khin Shar, Domenico Bianculli, Lionel Briand

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

—Constraint solving is an essential technique for detecting vulnerabilities in programs, since it can reason about input sanitization and validation operations performed on user inputs. However, real-world programs typically contain complex string operations that challenge vulnerability detection. State-ofthe-art string constraint solvers support only a limited set of string operations and fail when they encounter an unsupported one; this leads to limited effectiveness in finding vulnerabilities. In this paper we propose a search-driven constraint solving technique that complements the support for complex string operations provided by any existing string constraint solver. Our technique uses a hybrid constraint solving procedure based on …

A Data-Driven Approach For Benchmarking Energy Efficiency Of Warehouse Buildings, Wee Leong Lee, Kar Way Tan, Zui Young Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study proposes adata-driven approach for benchmarking energy efficiency of warehouse buildings.Our proposed approach provides an alternative to the limitation of existingbenchmarking approaches where a theoretical energy-efficient warehouse was usedas a reference. Our approach starts by defining the questions needed to capturethe characteristics of warehouses relating to energy consumption. Using an existingdata set of warehouse building containing various attributes, we first cluster theminto groups by their characteristics. The warehouses characteristics derivedfrom the cluster assignments along with their past annual energy consumptionare subsequently used to train a decision tree model. The decision tree providesa classification of what factors contribute to different …

Who Will Leave The Company?: A Large-Scale Industry Study Of Developer Turnover By Mining Monthly Work Report, Lingfeng Bao, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developer turnover has become a big challenge for information technology (IT) companies. The departure of key software developers might cause big loss to an IT company since they also depart with important business knowledge and critical technical skills. Understanding developer turnover is very important for IT companies to retain talented developers and reduce the loss due to developers' departure. Previous studies mainly perform qualitative observations or simple statistical analysis of developers' activity data to understand developer turnover. In this paper, we investigate whether we can predict the turnover of software developers in non-open source companies by automatically analyzing monthly …

A Preliminary Evaluation Of A Gamification Framework To Jump Start Collaboration Behavior Change, Flavio Steffens, Sabrina Marczak, Fernando Figueira Filho, Christoph Treude, Cleidson R. B. Da Souza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this notes paper we report on a preliminary qualitative evaluation of a gamification framework to address collaboration issues in software engineering. Findings suggest that the use of game elements indeed is prone to motivate software developers to foster the resolution of collaboration issues in their teams. Our preliminary results motivated us to design large scale, in-depth, and longitudinal studies to further evaluate the framework. In a long run, we expect that our findings will be informative for project managers and tool designers and anyone else who is interested in helping software teams to overcome collaboration barriers and succeed on …

Neural Correlates Of User Experience In Gaming, Y. Tejaswini, F. Nah, Keng Siau, L. Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The objective of this research is to understand the neural correlates of user states of experience in human-computer interaction using electroencephalogram (EEG). Such user states include flow, boredom, and anxiety that are experienced when a user interacts with a computer-based system. We propose using a within-subjects experiment to collect EEG data to assess and compare the neural correlates of three main states of user experience (i.e., flow, boredom, and anxiety) as well as compare them with the resting state as a baseline. We expect the findings from this research to contribute to an improved understanding of psychophysiological means of assessing …

Choosing An Nlp Library For Analyzing Software Documentation: A Systematic Literature Review And A Series Of Experiments, Fouad N. A. Al Omran, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To uncover interesting and actionable information from natural language documents authored by software developers, many researchers rely on "out-of-the-box" NLP libraries. However, software artifacts written in natural language are different from other textual documents due to the technical language used. In this paper, we first analyze the state of the art through a systematic literature review in which we find that only a small minority of papers justify their choice of an NLP library. We then report on a series of experiments in which we applied four state-of-the-art NLP libraries to publicly available software artifacts from three different sources. Our …

Fusing Social Media And Mobile Analytics For Urban Sense-Making, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The project was motivated by the observation that urban environments are increasingly characterized by a variety of non-traditional “sensors”, whose data streams can be harnessed to infer a variety of latent events and urban context. For example, users spontaneously generate huge amounts of content (text, images and video) on social network channels, whereas GPS & other sensors on taxis and buses increasingly provide near-real time traces of their movement throughout the city. Similarly, advances in Wi-Fi based sensing allow us to passively capture the individual and collective movement of visitors across various public spaces, such as college campuses, museums and …

A Hybrid Partially Reconfigurable Overlay Supporting Just-In-Time Assembly Of Custom Accelerators On Fpgas, Zeyad Tariq Aklah

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The state of the art in design and development flows for FPGAs are not sufficiently mature to allow programmers to implement their applications through traditional software development flows. The stipulation of synthesis as well as the requirement of background knowledge on the FPGAs' low-level physical hardware structure are major challenges that prevent programmers from using FPGAs. The reconfigurable computing community is seeking solutions to raise the level of design abstraction at which programmers must operate, and move the synthesis process out of the programmers' path through the use of overlays. A recent approach, Just-In-Time Assembly (JITA), was proposed that enables …

Follow-My-Lead: Intuitive Indoor Path Creation And Navigation Using See-Through Interactive Videos, Quentin Roy, Simon T. Perrault, Shengdong Zhao, Richard Davis, Anuroop Pattena Vaniyar, Velko Vechev, Youngki Lee, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present Follow-My-Lead, an alternative indoor navigation technique that uses visual information recorded on an actual navigation path as a navigational guide. Its design revealed a trade-off between the fidelity of information provided to users and their effort to acquire it. Our first experiment revealed that scrolling through a continuous image stream of the navigation path is highly informative, but it becomes tedious with constant use. Discrete image checkpoints require less effort, but can be confusing. A balance may be struck by adding fast video transitions between image checkpoints, but precise control is required to handle difficult situations. Authoring still …

Real-Time Vision-Based Lane Detection With 1d Haar Wavelet Transform On Raspberry Pi, Vikas Reddy Sudini

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Rapid progress is being made towards the realization of autonomous cars. Since the technology is in its early stages, human intervention is still necessary in order to ensure hazard-free operation of autonomous driving systems. Substantial research efforts are underway to enhance driver and passenger safety in autonomous cars. Toward that end GreedyHaarSpiker, a real-time vision-based lane detection algorithm is proposed for road lane detection in different weather conditions. The algorithm has been implemented in Python 2.7 with OpenCV 3.0 and tested on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B ARMv8 1GB RAM coupled to a Raspberry Pi camera board v2. To …

Experiences With Scala Across The College-Level Curriculum, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal, Mark C. Lewis

Emerging Technologies Laboratory

Various hybrid-functional languages, designed to balance compile-time error detection, conciseness, and performance, have emerged. Scala, e.g., is interoperable with Java and has become an early leader in adoption, especially in the start-up and open-source spaces.

As educators, we have recognized Scala’s value as a teaching language across the CS curriculum. In CS1, the read-eval-print loop and simple, uniform syntax aid programming in the small. In CS2, higher-order methods allow concise, efficient manipulation of collections. In a programming languages course, advanced constructs facilitate the separation of concerns, program representation and interpretation, and concurrent programming. In advanced applied courses, language mechanisms and …

The Creation Of A Building Map Application For A University Setting, William T. Whitesell

Senior Honors Theses

The use of navigational technology in mobile and web devices has sharply increased in recent years. With the capability to create interactive maps now available, navigating in real time between locations has become possible. This is especially essential in areas and organizations experiencing rapid expansion like Liberty University (LU). Therefore, the author proposes a project to create an interactive map application (IMA) for LU’s academic buildings that is scalable and usable through both the university’s website and with a mobile application. There are several considerations that must be taken into account when creating the LU map application, such as development …

Design And Implementation Of An Rfid-Based Customer Shopping Behavior Mining System, Zimu Zhou, Longfei Shangguan, Xiaolong Zheng, Lei Yang, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shopping behavior data is of great importance in understanding the effectiveness of marketing and merchandising campaigns. Online clothing stores are capable of capturing customer shopping behavior by analyzing the click streams and customer shopping carts. Retailers with physical clothing stores, however, still lack effective methods to comprehensively identify shopping behaviors. In this paper, we show that backscatter signals of passive RFID tags can be exploited to detect and record how customers browse stores, which garments they pay attention to, and which garments they usually pair up. The intuition is that the phase readings of tags attached to items will demonstrate …

The Chess Puzzle Lock Screen, Ryan J. Hayes

Student Scholar Showcase

The Chess Puzzle Lock Screen

Many times each day, owners of cellphones use their phone’s lock screen in order to access their device. The goal of this project has been to take advantage of the action of unlocking one’s device by incorporating an element of self-help into the process. Every time a user who is interested in learning a new field attempts to access their device, that user is faced with a problem pertaining to a subject they are interested in learning more about. After many repetitions of this scenario, the user will have increased their understanding of this field. …

Virtual Reality: Google Cardboard And Unity, Emma Elliott

Student Scholar Showcase

Virtual Reality is currently the hottest way for people to play video games because it provides an immersive and interactive world to explore. It uses computer software to create sounds, realistic images, and other effects to simulate a virtual setting. The current craze started on the Oculus Rift headset and has incited other companies to make their own, but most are expensive or require another system to play. Instead of buying an expensive headset, anyone with a smartphone can play in Virtual Reality with Google’s cheap alternative, the Google Cardboard. The goal of this project is to complete a prototype …