Software Engineering Commons^™

Using Intel Realsense Depth Data For Hand Tracking In Unreal Engine 4, Granger Lang

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

This project describes how to build a hand tracking method for VR/AR using the raw data from a depth sensing camera.

Mining Sandboxes For Linux Containers, Zhiyuan Wan, David Lo, Xin Xia, Liang Cai, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A container is a group of processes isolated from other groups via distinct kernel namespaces and resource allocation quota. Attacks against containers often leverage kernel exploits through system call interface. In this paper, we present an approach that mines sandboxes for containers. We first explore the behaviors of a container by leveraging automatic testing, and extract the set of system calls accessed during testing. The set of system calls then results as a sandbox of the container. The mined sandbox restricts the container's access to system calls which are not seen during testing and thus reduces the attack surface. In …

Whole-System Analysis For Understanding Publicly Accessible Functions In Android, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Lingxiao Jiang, Thanh Tho Quan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android has become the most popular mobile operating system. Millions of applications, including many malwares, haven been developed for it. Android itself evolves constantly with changing features and higher complexities. It is challenging for application developers to keep up with the changes and maintain the compatibility of their apps across Android versions. Therefore, there are many challenges for application analysis tools to accurately model and analyze app behaviors across Android versions. Even though the overall system architecture of Android and many APIs are documented, many other APIs and implementation details are not, not to mention potential bugs and vulnerabilities. Techniques …

Ui X-Ray: Interactive Mobile Ui Testing Based On Computer Vision, Chun-Fu Richard Chen, Marco Pistoia, Conglei Shi, Paolo Girolami, Joseph W. Ligman, Yong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User Interface/eXperience (UI/UX) significantly affects the lifetime of any software program, particularly mobile apps. A bad UX can undermine the success of a mobile app even if that app enables sophisticated capabilities. A good UX, however, needs to be supported of a highly functional and user friendly UI design. In spite of the importance of building mobile apps based on solid UI designs, UI discrepancies- inconsistencies between UI design and implementation-Are among the most numerous and expensive defects encountered during testing. This paper presents UI X-RAY, an interactive UI testing system that integrates computer-vision methods to facilitate the correction of …

Detecting Similar Repositories On Github, Yun Zhang, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Xin Xia, Quanlai Li, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

GitHub contains millions of repositories among which many are similar with one another (i.e., having similar source codes or implementing similar functionalities). Finding similar repositories on GitHub can be helpful for software engineers as it can help them reuse source code, build prototypes, identify alternative implementations, explore related projects, find projects to contribute to, and discover code theft and plagiarism. Previous studies have proposed techniques to detect similar applications by analyzing API usage patterns and software tags. However, these prior studies either only make use of a limited source of information or use information not available for projects on GitHub. …

Collaboration Trumps Homophily In Urban Mobile Crowd-Sourcing, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Randy Tandriansyah Daratan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper establishes the power of dynamic collaborative task completion among workers for urban mobile crowdsourcing. Collaboration is defined via the notion of peer referrals, whereby a worker who has accepted a location-specific task, but is unlikely to visit that location, offloads the task to a willing friend. Such a collaborative framework might be particularly useful for task bundles, especially for bundles that have higher geographic dispersion. The challenge, however, comes from the high similarity observed in the spatiotemporal pattern of task completion among friends. Using extensive real-world crowd-sourcing studies conducted over 7 weeks and 1000+ workers on a campus-based …

Empath-D: Empathetic Design For Accessibility, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Kiat Wee Tan, Archan Misra, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe our vision for Empath-D, our system to enable Empathetic User Interface Design. Our key idea is to leverage Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR / AR) displays to provide an Immersive Reality environment, where developers/designers can emulate impaired interactions by elderly or disabled users while testing the usability of their applications. Our early experiences with the Empath-D prototype show that Empath-D can emulate a cataract vision impairment of the elderly and guide designers to create accessible web pages with less mental workload.

Clcminer: Detecting Cross-Language Clones Without Intermediates, Xiao Cheng, Zhiming Peng, Lingxiao Jiang, Hao Zhong, Haibo Yu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The proliferation of diverse kinds of programming languages and platforms makes it a common need to have the same functionality implemented in different languages for different platforms, such as Java for Android applications and C# forWindows phone applications. Although versions of code written in different languages appear syntactically quite different from each other, they are intended to implement the same software and typically contain many code snippets that implement similar functionalities, which we call cross-language clones. When the version of code in one language evolves according to changing functionality requirements and/or bug fixes, its cross-language clones may also need be …

Let’S Try Something New: Service Learning In Boise State's Computer Science Department, Daniel Kondratyuk

International Journal of Undergraduate Community Engagement

In this article I explain how a group of Computer Science students at Boise State University participated in a new service learning project. I provide a few testimonials on the students’ experiences and describe the rewarding aspects of service learning in the greater Computer Science community.

Using Smartphones To Turn Cities Into Innovation Engines, Singapore Management University

Research@SMU: Connecting the Dots

Can smartphones improve our quality of life and make cities run more efficiently? Professor Rajesh Balan is working towards this vision.

See the papers:

• Real-time trip information service for a large taxi fleet
• Smartwatch based food diary and eating analytics
• Need accurate user behaviour?: Pay attention to groups!

Pushing Boundaries In Software Analytics, Singapore Management University

Research@SMU: Connecting the Dots

Professor David Lo is working to push the boundaries of what can be done by analysing huge amounts of software data.

See the papers:

• AutoQuery: Automatic construction of dependency queries for code search
• Information retrieval and spectrum based bug localization: Better together

Smart Homes Enhance Seniors’ Safety, Singapore Management University

Research@SMU: Connecting the Dots

Professor Tan Hwee Pink and researchers at iCity Lab are using sensors to increase the safety of seniors who live independently in their own homes.

See the papers:

• Online detection of behavioral change using unobtrusive eldercare monitoring system
• Improving the sensitivity of unobtrusive inactivity detection in sensor-enabled homes for the elderly
• SHINESeniors: Personalized services for active ageing-in-place

Impact Of Reviewer Social Interaction On Online Consumer Review Fraud Detection, Kunal Goswami, Younghee Park, Chungsik Song

Faculty Publications

Background Online consumer reviews have become a baseline for new consumers to try out a business or a new product. The reviews provide a quick look into the application and experience of the business/product and market it to new customers. However, some businesses or reviewers use these reviews to spread fake information about the business/product. The fake information can be used to promote a relatively average product/business or can be used to malign their competition. This activity is known as reviewer fraud or opinion spam. The paper proposes a feature set, capturing the user social interaction behavior to identify fraud. …

Using Consumer Accessible Mobile Devices To Collect Vehicle Emissions Compliance Data, Joshua N. Jensen

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

The emissions inspection procedure has been largely stagnate for the last 20 years. Vehicle owners in the United States spend approximately 1.7 billion dollars annually for a technician to perform the simple task of plugging an emissions inspection computer into their car’s computer. Smart Emissions was developed as an Android application to provide a new procedure for emissions inspection utilizing consumer-accessible mobile devices and an ELM327 Bluetooth adapter. With Smart Emissions, vehicle owners utilize the Android devices they already own to connect to a Bluetooth adapter inserted into the diagnostic link connector port of their vehicle. The adapter communicates with …

An Ensemble Learning Framework For Anomaly Detection In Building Energy Consumption, Daniel B. Araya, Katarina Grolinger, Hany F. Elyamany, Miriam Am Capretz, Girma T. Bitsuamlak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

During building operation, a significant amount of energy is wasted due to equipment and human-related faults. To reduce waste, today's smart buildings monitor energy usage with the aim of identifying abnormal consumption behaviour and notifying the building manager to implement appropriate energy-saving procedures. To this end, this research proposes a new pattern-based anomaly classifier, the collective contextual anomaly detection using sliding window (CCAD-SW) framework. The CCAD-SW framework identifies anomalous consumption patterns using overlapping sliding windows. To enhance the anomaly detection capacity of the CCAD-SW, this research also proposes the ensemble anomaly detection (EAD) framework. The EAD is a generic framework …

Impact Analysis In Web Applications, Drake Svoboda

Research Opportunities for Engineering Undergraduates (ROEU) Program 2017-18

This report defines a method for a condensed single process of software change for web applications by identifying a clear impact to widgets in the user interface. The method described is demonstrated in two sample changes conducted on an open source web application. The full source code for these two case studies can be found in an open access code repository (AScrum).

Data Mining By Grid Computing In The Search For Extrasolar Planets, Oisin Creaner [Thesis]

Doctoral

A system is presented here to provide improved precision in ensemble differential photometry. This is achieved by using the power of grid computing to analyse astronomical catalogues. This produces new catalogues of optimised pointings for each star, which maximise the number and quality of reference stars available. Astronomical phenomena such as exoplanet transits and small-scale structure within quasars may be observed by means of millimagnitude photometric variability on the timescale of minutes to hours. Because of atmospheric distortion, ground-based observations of these phenomena require the use of differential photometry whereby the target is compared with one or more reference stars. …

Building A Foundation For Digital Animation, Paulynne Castillo

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

An analysis of the Philippine digital animation sub-sector reveals that the key areas on which resources should be focused to move up the industry’s value chain are: 1) recruiting, developing, and retaining talent; 2) financing the cultivation of original content; and 3) expanding and improving the country’s information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure.

Grace's Inheritance, James Noble, Andrew P. Black, Kim B. Bruce, Michael Homer, Timothy Jones

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article is an apologia for the design of inheritance in the Grace educational programming language: it explains how the design of Grace’s inheritance draws from inheritance mechanisms in predecessor languages, and defends that design as the best of the available alternatives. For simplicity, Grace objects are generated from object constructors, like those of Emerald, Lua, and Javascript; for familiarity, the language also provides classes and inheritance, like Simula, Smalltalk and Java. The design question we address is whether or not object constructors can provide an inheritance semantics similar to classes.

Automated Refactoring Of Legacy Java Software To Default Methods, Raffi Khatchadourian, Hidehiko Masuhara

Publications and Research

Java 8 default methods, which allow interfaces to contain (instance) method implementations, are useful for the skeletal implementation software design pattern. However, it is not easy to transform existing software to exploit default methods as it requires analyzing complex type hierarchies, resolving multiple implementation inheritance issues, reconciling differences between class and interface methods, and analyzing tie-breakers (dispatch precedence) with overriding class methods to preserve type-correctness and confirm semantics preservation. In this paper, we present an efficient, fully-automated, type constraint-based refactoring approach that assists developers in taking advantage of enhanced interfaces for their legacy Java software. The approach features an extensive …