Software Engineering Commons^™

Algorithmic Music Generation For Pedagogy Of Sight Reading, Ryan Stephen Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Autodeus is the name of the program that has been developed and was designed to aid guitar students in the attainment and betterment of musical notation sight reading skills. Its primary goal is to provide a very flexible tool that has the ability to generate virtually endless types of sight reading exercises at many various skill levels.

A complimentary 2 year-long comprehensive guitar sight-reading course syllabus can be implemented via Autodeus as it is capable of generating all the necessary exercises. It is able to generate these exercises quickly and efficiently through the use of a back tracking algorithm that …

Support Vector Machines For Image Spam Analysis, Aneri Chavda, Katerina Potika, Fabio Di Troia, Mark Stamp

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

Email is one of the most common forms of digital communication. Spam is unsolicited bulk email, while image spam consists of spam text embedded inside an image. Image spam is used as a means to evade text-based spam filters, and hence image spam poses a threat to email-based communication. In this research, we analyze image spam detection using support vector machines (SVMs), which we train on a wide variety of image features. We use a linear SVM to quantify the relative importance of the features under consideration. We also develop and analyze a realistic “challenge” dataset that illustrates the limitations …

On The Effectiveness Of Generic Malware Models, Naman Bagga, Fabio Di Troia, Mark Stamp

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

Malware detection based on machine learning typically involves training and testing models for each malware family under consideration. While such an approach can generally achieve good accuracy, it requires many classification steps, resulting in a slow, inefficient, and potentially impractical process. In contrast, classifying samples as malware or benign based on more generic “families” would be far more efficient. However, extracting common features from extremely general malware families will likely result in a model that is too generic to be useful. In this research, we perform controlled experiments to determine the tradeoff between generality and accuracy—over a variety of machine …

Motivations, Team Dynamics, Development Practices And How They Impact The Success Of Open Source Software: A Study Of Projects Of Code For America Brigades, Le Chang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Open data movement has nurtured the growth of civic open source software (OSS) in the recent decade. This emerging phenomenon has demonstrated a way that a community can collectively utilize technology to solve its problems.

This study is based on software projects in brigades of Code for America, which is a network of organizations that group volunteers to create digital solutions to community problems. In this study, we analyze the software engineering practices of current civic open source software development, participants' motivations and perceptions of the projects, and provide insights on the antecedents of success of the application development.

A …

Universality Of Egoless Behavior Of Software Engineering Students, Pradeep Waychal, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software organizations have relied on process and technology initiatives to compete in a highly globalized world. Unfortunately, that has led to little or no success. We propose that the organizations start working on people initiatives, such as inspiring egoless behavior among software developers. This paper proposes a multi-stage approach to develop egoless behavior and discusses the universality of the egoless behavior by studying cohorts from three different countries, i.e., Japan, India, and Canada. The three stages in the approach are self-assessment, peer validation, and action plan development. The paper covers the first stage of self-assssment using an instrument based on …

Energy Slices: Benchmarking With Time Slicing, Katarina Grolinger, Hany F. Elyamany, Wilson Higashino, Miriam Am Capretz, Luke Seewald

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Benchmarking makes it possible to identify low-performing buildings, establishes a baseline for measuring performance improvements, enables setting of energy conservation targets, and encourages energy savings by creating a competitive environment. Statistical approaches evaluate building energy efficiency by comparing measured energy consumption to other similar buildings typically using annual measurements. However, it is important to consider different time periods in benchmarking because of differences in their consumption patterns. For example, an office can be efficient during the night, but inefficient during operating hours due to occupants’ wasteful behavior. Moreover, benchmarking studies often use a single regression model for different building categories. …

Smartphone-Based Self Rescue System For Disaster Rescue, Xitong Zhou

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Recent ubiquitous earthquakes have been leading to mass destruction of electrical power and cellular infrastructures, and deprive the innocent lives across the world. Due to the wide-area earthquake disaster, unavailable power and communication infrastructure, limited man-power and resources, traditional rescue operations and equipment are inefficient and time-consuming, leading to the golden hours missed. With the increasing proliferation of powerful wireless devices, like smartphones, they can be assumed to be abundantly available among the disaster victims and can act as valuable resources to coordinate disaster rescue operations. In this paper, we propose a smartphone-based self-rescue system, also referred to as RescueMe, …

A Formally Verified Heap Allocator, Arash Sahebolamri, Scott D. Constable, Steve J. Chapin

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Technical Reports

We present the formal verification of a heap allocator written in C. We use the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant to formally verify the correctness of the heap allocator at the source code level. The C source code of the heap allocator is imported into Isabelle/HOL using CParser and AutoCorres. In addition to providing the guarantee that the heap allocator is free of bugs and therefore is suitable for use in security critical projects, our work facilitates verification of other projects written in C that utilize Isabelle and AutoCorres.

Ransomware Behavioural Analysis On Windows Platforms, Nikolai Hampton, Zubair A. Baig, Sherali Zeadally

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Ransomware infections have grown exponentially during the recent past to cause major disruption in operations across a range of industries including the government. Through this research, we present an analysis of 14 strains of ransomware that infect Windows platforms, and we do a comparison of Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls made through ransomware processes with baselines of normal operating system behaviour. The study identifies and reports salient features of ransomware as referred through the frequencies of API calls

The Application Of Gpu To Molecular Communication Studies, Tobias J. Cain

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

This thesis applies the recent trends in parallel processing, via graphics processing unit (GPU), to the field of molecular communications (MC), an investigation into communication possibilities of futuristic in vivo nanomachines. Existing MC simulations have not fully accounted for structural boundaries and the associated simulation of a massive number of messenger molecule paths for stochastic evaluation. These molecules are influenced by a Brownian motion as well as the flow of the blood, which is modeled using numerical methods based on the Fokker-Planck stochastic differential equation. By using a GPU these paths can be calculated on a massive scale, both in …

An Iterated Local Search Algorithm For The Team Orienteering Problem With Variable Profits, Aldy Gunawan, Kien Ming Ng, Graham Kendall, Junhan Lai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The orienteering problem (OP) is a routing problem that has numerous applications in various domains such as logistics and tourism. The objective is to determine a subset of vertices to visit for a vehicle so that the total collected score is maximized and a given time budget is not exceeded. The extensive application of the OP has led to many different variants, including the team orienteering problem (TOP) and the team orienteering problem with time windows. The TOP extends the OP by considering multiple vehicles. In this article, the team orienteering problem with variable profits (TOPVP) is studied. The main …

Software Safety And Security Risk Mitigation In Cyber-Physical Systems, Miklos Biro, Atif Mashkoor, Johannes Sametinger, Remzi Seker

Publications

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) offer many opportunities but pose many challenges--especially regarding functional safety, cybersecurity, and their interplay, as well as the systems' impact on society. Consequently, new methods and techniques are needed for CPS development and assurance. This article [and issue] aims to address some of these challenges.

Exercising Efficiently With An Equipment Ticketing Mobile Application, Eric Merryman

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project is to explore the discipline of developing mobile applications using a cross-platform framework. Mobile devices have had a large influence on our lifestyles and with the global mobile application market grossing billions of dollars, many companies are adapting to the change and creating mobile applications for their business. With a variety of competing mobile devices and operating systems, companies must cater to each system. Cross-platform frameworks allow developers to quickly create mobile applications that can be used on many different devices. Xamarin.Forms is a cross-platform framework that allows developers to create a mobile application using …

Mobile Cloud Computing: A Comparison Study Of Cuckoo And Aiolos Offloading Frameworks, Inan Kaddour

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Currently, smart mobile devices are used for more than just calling and texting. They can run complex applications such as GPS, antivirus, and photo editor applications. Smart devices today offer mobility, flexibility, and portability, but they have limited resources and a relatively weak battery. As companies began creating mobile resource intensive and power intensive applications, they have realized that cloud computing was one of the solutions that they could utilize to overcome smart device constraints. Cloud computing helps decrease memory usage and improve battery life. Mobile cloud computing is a current and expanding research area focusing on methods that allow …

Logic -> Proof -> Rest, Maxwell Taylor

Senior Independent Study Theses

REST is a common architecture for networked applications. Applications that adhere to the REST constraints enjoy significant scaling advantages over other architectures. But REST is not a panacea for the task of building correct software. Algebraic models of computation, particularly CSP, prove useful to describe the composition of applications using REST. CSP enables us to describe and verify the behavior of RESTful systems. The descriptions of each component can be used independently to verify that a system behaves as expected. This thesis demonstrates and develops CSP methodology to verify the behavior of RESTful applications.

Smart-Teleprompter: An Online Teleprompter With Text Editing, Mikyla Wilfred

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Mikyla Wilfred

Major: Computer Science

Project Sponsor: Dr. Collard

Number of Project Credits: 3

Smart-Teleprompter

The smart-teleprompter is a website that allows a logged in user to edit text files as well as teleprompt them straight to the screen. A teleprompter is used by newscasters and other media professionals to read scripts while still looking at or near the camera. My project uses this concept creating a page that defaults to white font on a black background that can scroll through the script. The website allows the logged in user to save defaults of font color, background color, font style …

Comparing The Usage Of React Native And Ionic, Sam Borick

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project will compare two popular programming frameworks for building mobile applications. These frameworks are called ‘cross-platform frameworks’ as they can develop applications on multiple platforms. The scope of this project is to understand the structural reasons for the differences in these frameworks. While this project does speculate on reasons for choosing either framework, this project does not attempt to make a hard recommendation.

In this project, I built two applications, as similar as possible, in React Native and Ionic. I found that there were differences in the goals of these frameworks, lending each of the two better to different …

A Behavior-Driven Recommendation System For Stack Overflow Posts, Chase D. Greco

Theses and Dissertations

Developers are often tasked with maintaining complex systems. Regardless of prior experience, there will inevitably be times in which they must interact with parts of the system with which they are unfamiliar. In such cases, recommendation systems may serve as a valuable tool to assist the developer in implementing a solution. Many recommendation systems in software engineering utilize the Stack Overflow knowledge-base as the basis of forming their recommendations. Traditionally, these systems have relied on the developer to explicitly invoke them, typically in the form of specifying a query. However, there may be cases in which the developer is in …

Consuming Digital Debris In The Plasticene, Stephen R. Parks

Theses and Dissertations

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D …

Utilizing Hypervisor To Enhance Trustzone’S Introspection Capabilities On Non-Secure World, Zhang-Kai Zhang, Zhou-Jun Li, Chun-He Xia, Jin-Xin Ma, Jinhua Cui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Widely used on the Android phones, the technology of ARM TrustZone divides the hardware resources of Android phones into two worlds:non-secure world and secure world. The Android operating system used by user is running in the non-secure world, while the non-secure world's introspection systems (e.g., KNOX, Hypervisor) that are based on TrustZone are running in the secure world. These introspection systems have the high privilege. They can dynamically check Android kernel integrity and perform memory management of non-secure world instead of Android kernel. But TrustZonecan can not completely introspect the hardware resources (e.g., Cache) of non-secure world because of the …