Software Engineering Commons^™

A Decomposition Method For Estimating Recursive Logit Based Route Choice Models, Tien Mai, Fabian Bastin, Emma Frejinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fosgerau et al. (2013) recently proposed the recursive logit (RL) model for route choice problems, that can be consistently estimated and easily used for prediction without any sampling of choice sets. Its estimation however requires solving many large-scale systems of linear equations, which can be computationally costly for real data sets. We design a decomposition (DeC) method in order to reduce the number of linear systems to be solved, opening the possibility to estimate more complex RL based models, for instance mixed RL models. We test the performance of the DeC method by estimating the RL model on two networks …

What Permissions Should This Android App Request?, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Xin Xia, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As Android is one of the most popular open source mobile platforms, ensuring security and privacy of Android applications is very important. Android provides a permission mechanism which requires developers to declare sensitive resources their applications need, and users need to agree with this request when they install (for Android API level 22 or lower) or run (for Android API level 23) these applications. Although Android provides very good official documents to explain how to properly use permissions, unfortunately misuses even for the most popular permissions have been reported. Recently, Karim et al. propose an association rule mining based approach …

How To Break An Api: Cost Negotiation And Community Values In Three Software Ecosystems, Christopher Bogart, Christian K\303\244stner, James Herbsleb, Ferdian Thung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Change introduces conict into software ecosystems: breaking changes may ripple through the ecosystem and trigger rework for users of a package, but often developers can invest additional effort or accept opportunity costs to alleviate or delay downstream costs. We performed a multiple case study of three software ecosystems with different tooling and philosophies toward change, Eclipse, R/CRAN, and Node.js/npm, to understand how developers make decisions about change and change-related costs and what practices, tooling, and policies are used. We found that all three ecosystems differ substantially in their practices and expectations toward change and that those differences can be explained …

Proteus: Computing Disjunctive Loop Summary Via Path Dependency Analysis, Xiaofei Xie, Bihuan Chen, Yang Liu, Wei Le, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Loops are challenging structures for program analysis, especially when loops contain multiple paths with complex interleaving executions among these paths. In this paper, we first propose a classification of multi-path loops to understand the complexity of the loop execution, which is based on the variable updates on the loop conditions and the execution order of the loop paths. Secondly, we propose a loop analysis framework, named Proteus, which takes a loop program and a set of variables of interest as inputs and summarizes path-sensitive loop effects on the variables. The key contribution is to use a path dependency automaton (PDA) …

Static Loop Analysis And Its Applications, Xiaofei Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Loops are challenging structures in program analysis, and an effective loop analysis is crucial in the applications, such as symbolic execution and program verification. In the research, we will first perform a deep analysis and propose a classification according to the complexity of the loops. Then try to propose techniques for analyzing and summarizing different loops. At last, we apply the techniques in multiple applications.

Vireo @ Trecvid 2016: Multimedia Event Detection, Ad-Hoc Video Search, Video-To-Text Description, Hao Zhang, Yi-Jie Lu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimedia events such as “birthday party” usually involve the complex interaction between humans and objects. Unlike actions and sports, these events rarely contain unique motion patterns to be vividly explored for recognition. To encode rich objects in the events, a common practice is to tag an individual video frame with object labels, represented as a vector signifying probabilities of object appearances. These vectors are then pooled across frames to obtain a video-level representation. The current practices suffer from two deficiencies due to the direct employment of deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) and standard feature pooling techniques. First, the use of …

Message From The Chairs, Andrew Begel, Fabio Calefato, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Workshop on Social Software Engineering (SSE) focuses on the interplay between social computing and software engineering. On one hand, social factors in software engineering activities, processes and tools are essential for improving the quality of development processes and the software produced by them. Examples include the role of situational awareness and multi-cultural factors in collaborative software development. On the other hand, social software mediates people-to-people communication, supporting human choices, actions, and interactions with each other. Social software needs to accommodate a wide range of social concepts, such as trust, governance, reputation, and privacy. Being social, the software would also …

Integration Of Lightweight & Energy Efficient Cipher In Wireless Body Area Network Fore-Health Monitoring, Azza Zayed Aishamsi

Theses

There is an increase in the diseases of the circulatory system in United Arab Emirates, which makes it the first leading cause of death. This led to a high demand for a continuous care that can be achieved by adopting an emerging technology of e- Health monitoring system using Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) that can collect patient’s data. Since patient’s data is private, securing the communication within WBAN becomes highly essential. In this research thesis, we propose an architecture to secure the data transmission within the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) in e-Health monitoring. More specifically, our proposed architecture …

Software Engineering For Science, Jeffrey C. Carver, Neil P. Chue Hong, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Software Engineering for Science provides an in-depth collection of peer-reviewed chapters that describe experiences with applying software engineering practices to the development of scientific software. It provides a better understanding of how software engineering is and should be practiced, and which software engineering practices are effective for scientific software.

The book starts with a detailed overview of the Scientific Software Lifecycle, and a general overview of the scientific software development process. It highlights key issues commonly arising during scientific software development, as well as solutions to these problems.

The second part of the book provides examples of the use of …

Connecting Program Synthesis And Reachability: Automatic Program Repair Using Test-Input Generation, Thanhvu Nguyen, Westley Weimer, Deepak Kapur, Stephanie Forrest

School of Computing: Technical Reports

We prove that certain formulations of program synthesis and reachability are equivalent. Specifically, our constructive proof shows the reductions between the template-based synthesis problem, which generates a program in a pre-specified form, and the reachability problem, which decides the reachability of a program location. This establishes a link between the two research fields and allows for the transfer of techniques and results between them.

To demonstrate the equivalence, we develop a program repair prototype using reachability tools. We transform a buggy program and its required specification into a specific program containing a location reachable only when the original program can …

Computer-Aided Design Of Algorithms Of Pulsed Control Of Arc Welding Process Based On Numerical Simulation, Oksana I. Shpigunova, Anatoliy A. Glazunov

The 8th International Conference on Physical and Numerical Simulation of Materials Processing

No abstract provided.

Code Metrics For Predicting Risk Levels Of Android Applications, Akond A. Rahman

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Android applications pose security and privacy risks for end-users. Early prediction of risk levels that are associated with Android applications can help Android developers is releasing less risky applications to end-users. Researchers have showed how code metrics can be used as early predictors of failure prone software components. Whether or not code metrics can be used to predict risk levels of Android applications requires systematic exploration. The goal of this paper is to aid Android application developers in assessing the risk associated with developed Android applications by identifying code metrics that can be used as predictors to predict two levels …

Techniques For Identifying Mobile Platform Vulnerabilities And Detecting Policy-Violating Applications, Mon Kywe Su

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Mobile systems are generally composed of three layers of software: application layer where third-party applications are installed, framework layer where Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are exposed, and kernel layer where low-level system operations are executed. In this dissertation, we focus on security and vulnerability analysis of framework and application layers. Security mechanisms, such as Android’s sandbox and permission systems, exist in framework layer, while malware scanners protects application layer. However, there are rooms for improvement in both mechanisms. For instance, Android’s permission system is known to be implemented in ad-hoc manner and not well-tested for vulnerabilities. Application layer also focuses …

Mabic: Mobile Application Builder For Interactive Communication, Huy Manh Nguyen

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Nowadays, the web services and mobile technology advance to a whole new level. These technologies make the modern communication faster and more convenient than the traditional way. People can also easily share data, picture, image and video instantly. It also saves time and money. For example: sending an email or text message is cheaper and faster than a letter. Interactive communication allows the instant exchange of feedback and enables two-way communication between people and people, or people and computer. It increases the engagement of sender and receiver in communication.

Although many systems such as REDCap and Taverna are built for …

Xd-Track: Leveraging Multi-Dimensional Information For Passive Wi-Fi Tracking, Yaxiong Xie, Jie Xiong, Mo Li, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe the design and implementation of xD-Track, the first practical Wi-Fi based device-free localization system that employs a simultaneous and joint estimation of time-of-flight, angle-of-arrival, angle-of-departure, and Doppler shift to fully characterize the wireless channel between a sender and receiver. Using this full characterization, xD-Track introduces novel methods to measure and isolate the signal path that reflects off a person of interest, allowing it to localize a human with just a single pair of access points, or a single client-access point pair. Searching the multiple dimensions to accomplish the above is highly computationally burdensome, so xD-Track introduces novel methods …

"Automated Debugging Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful: A User Study Revisiting The Usefulness Of Spectra-Based Fault Localization Techniques With Professionals Using Real Bugs From Large Systems, Xin Xia, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the complexity of software systems, bugs are inevitable. Software debugging is tedious and time consuming. To help developers perform this crucial task, a number of spectra-based fault localization techniques have been proposed. In general, spectra-based fault localization helps developers to find the location of a bug given its symptoms (e.g., program failures). A previous study by Parnin and Orso however implies that several assumptions made by existing work on spectra-based fault localization do not hold in practice, which hinders the practical usage of these tools. Moreover, a recent study by Xie et al. claims that spectra-based fault localization …

Repmatch: Robust Feature Matching And Pose For Reconstructing Modern Cities, Wen-Yan Lin, Siying Liu, Minh N. Do, Ping Tan, Jiangbo Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A perennial problem in recovering 3-D models from images is repeated structures common in modern cities. The problem can be traced to the feature matcher which needs to match less distinctive features (permitting wide-baselines and avoiding broken sequences), while simultaneously avoiding incorrect matching of ambiguous repeated features. To meet this need, we develop RepMatch, an epipolar guided (assumes predominately camera motion) feature matcher that accommodates both wide-baselines and repeated structures. RepMatch is based on using RANSAC to guide the training of match consistency curves for differentiating true and false matches. By considering the set of all nearest-neighbor matches, RepMatch can …

A Novel Csi Pre-Processing Scheme For Device-Free Localization Indoors, Ju Wang, Lichao Zhang, Xuan Wang, Jie Xiong, Xiaojiang Chen, Dingyi Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Device-free localization of people and objects indoors not equipped with radios is playing a critical role in many emerging applications. This paper presents a novel channel state information (CSI) pre-processing scheme that enables accurate device-free localization indoors. The basic idea is simple: CSI is sensitive to a target's location and by modelling the CSI measurements of multiple wireless links as a set of power fading based equations, the target location can be determined. However, due to rich multipaths in indoor environment, the received signal strength (RSS) or even the fine-grained CSI can not be easily modelled. We observe that even …

Lifs: Low Human-Effort, Device-Free Localization With Fine-Grained Subcarrier Information, Ju Wang, Hongbo Jiang, Jie Xiong, Kyle Jamieson, Xiaojiang Chen, Dingyi Fang, Binbin Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Device-free localization of people and objects indoors not equipped with radios is playing a critical role in many emerging applications. This paper presents an accurate model-based device-free localization system LiFS, implemented on cheap commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi devices. Unlike previous COTS device-based work, LiFS is able to localize a target accurately without offline training. The basic idea is simple: channel state information (CSI) is sensitive to a target's location and by modelling the CSI measurements of multiple wireless links as a set of power fading based equations, the target location can be determined. However, due to rich multipath propagation indoors, …

Hydra: Massively Compositional Model For Cross-Project Defect Prediction, Xin Xia, David Lo, Sinno Jialin Pan, Nachiappan Nagappan, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most software defect prediction approaches are trained and applied on data from the same project. However, often a new project does not have enough training data. Cross-project defect prediction, which uses data from other projects to predict defects in a particular project, provides a new perspective to defect prediction. In this work, we propose a HYbrid moDel Reconstruction Approach (HYDRA) for cross-project defect prediction, which includes two phases: genetic algorithm (GA) phase and ensemble learning (EL) phase. These two phases create a massive composition of classifiers. To examine the benefits of HYDRA, we perform experiments on 29 datasets from the …