Software Engineering Commons^™

A Polyglot Approach To Bioinformatics Data Integration: Phylogenetic Analysis Of Hiv-1, Steven Reisman, Catherine Putonti, George K. Thiruvathukal, Konstantin Läufer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

RNA-interference has potential therapeutic use against HIV-1 by targeting highly-functional mRNA sequences that contribute to the virulence of the virus. Empirical work has shown that within cell lines, all of the HIV-1 genes are affected by RNAi-induced gene silencing. While promising, inherent in this treatment is the fact that RNAi sequences must be highly specific. HIV, however, mutates rapidly, leading to the evolution of viral escape mutants. In fact, such strains are under strong selection to include mutations within the targeted region, evading the RNAi therapy and thus increasing the virus’ fitness in the host. Taking a phylogenetic approach, we …

Simulating Inflation, Ryan M. Heathcote

Senior Honors Theses

Inflation is a common problem in modern economics, and it seems to persist, requiring government financial policy intervention on a regular basis in order to properly manage. The mechanics of inflation are difficult to understand, since the best metric modern society has for inflation involves taking samples of prices across the country. A simulation can give deeper insight into more than the mere fact that prices rise over time: a simulation can help to answer the “why” question. The problem with this statement is that developing a simulation is not as simple as writing some code. A simulation is developed …

Sensual Cultures: Exploring Sensory Orientation, Lauren Sonnenstrahl Benedict

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

We use our senses every day, consciously or unconsciously, based on our cultural needs and preferences. These sensory orientations shape and are shaped by what a given culture defines as acceptable. For this reason, different sensory orientations result in different strengths and areas of emphasis and de-emphasis. Becoming aware of different sensory orientations and their associated cultures allows us to realize what we are missing in our own sensory orientations that inform our cultural habits. Familiarity with various sensory orientations may cultivate greater cultural acceptance as well. To analyze and illustrate such differences, an educational app for iPads was created …

Towards Omnidirectional Passive Human Detection, Zimu Zhou, Zheng Yang, Chenshu Wu, Longfei Shangguan, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Passive human detection and localization serve as key enablers for various pervasive applications such as smart space, human-computer interaction and asset security. The primary concern in devising scenario-tailored detecting systems is the coverage of their monitoring units. In conventional radio-based schemes, the basic unit tends to demonstrate a directional coverage, even if the underlying devices are all equipped with omnidirectional antennas. Such an inconsistency stems from the link-centric architecture, creating an anisotropic wireless propagating environment. To achieve an omnidirectional coverage while retaining the link-centric architecture, we propose the concept of Omnidirectional Passive Human Detection, and investigate to harness the PHY …

Arraytrack: A Fine-Grained Indoor Location System, Jie Xiong, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With myriad augmented reality, social networking, and retail shopping applications all on the horizon for the mobile handheld, a fast and accurate location technology will become key to a rich user experience. When roaming outdoors, users can usually count on a clear GPS signal for accurate location, but indoors, GPS often fades, and so up until recently, mobiles have had to rely mainly on rather coarse-grained signal strength readings. What has changed this status quo is the recent trend of dramatically increasing numbers of antennas at the indoor access point, mainly to bolster capacity and coverage with multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) …

Predicting Sql Injection And Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities Through Mining Input Sanitization Patterns, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

ContextSQL injection (SQLI) and cross site scripting (XSS) are the two most common and serious web application vulnerabilities for the past decade. To mitigate these two security threats, many vulnerability detection approaches based on static and dynamic taint analysis techniques have been proposed. Alternatively, there are also vulnerability prediction approaches based on machine learning techniques, which showed that static code attributes such as code complexity measures are cheap and useful predictors. However, current prediction approaches target general vulnerabilities. And most of these approaches locate vulnerable code only at software component or file levels. Some approaches also involve process attributes that …

Senior Project Report - Doctest, Stephen Weessies

Computer Engineering

DocTest is a program that, simply put, allows a programmer or user to document STANAG 4586 (a standard for unmanned aerial vehicle interoperability) messages and test the vehicle system at Lockheed Martin [5]. The program is extensible to allow for further development aiding our software team to do what they do best and not get bogged down in tedious but necessary documentation. DocTest is also used to aid in testing, keeping track of the issues and bugs found and creating a document that captures each issue so an issue is not missed or forgotten. This program was made for use …

Software Project Risk Assessment And Effort Contingency Model Based On Cocomo Cost Factors, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

In the early stages of a software development life cycle, effort estimation plays a critical role in helping project managers predict the demands with respect to the budgeting, scheduling, and the allocation of resources. In this situation, the ideal estimation calculation should provide an approximate value figure, which will consist of a base estimation value plus a contingency allowance value, which will cover the risks and assumptions necessary for particular estimation calculations.

However, most software effort estimation methodologies, which include the COCOMO model, provide a fixed effort estimate value instead of an approximate value, and consequently the existing effort estimation …

Object-Oriented Programming: Some History, And Challenges For The Next Fifty Years, Andrew P. Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Object-oriented programming is inextricably linked to the pioneering work of Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard on the design of the Simula language, which started at the Norwegian Computing Centre in the Spring of 1961. However, object-orientation, as we think of it today—fifty years later—is the result of a complex interplay of ideas, constraints and people. Dahl and Nygaard would certainly recognize it as their progeny, but might also be amazed at how much it has grown up. This article is based on a lecture given on 22nd August 2011, on the occasion of the scientific opening of the Ole-Johan …

Infrastructure-Assisted Smartphone-Based Adl Recognition In Multi-Inhabitant Smart Environments, Nirmalya Roy, Archan Misra, Diane Cook

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a hybrid approach for recognizing complex Activities of Daily Living that lie between the two extremes of intensive use of body-worn sensors and the use of infrastructural sensors. Our approach harnesses the power of infrastructural sensors (e.g., motion sensors) to provide additional `hidden' context (e.g., room-level location) of an individual and combines this context with smartphone-based sensing of micro-level postural/locomotive states. The major novelty is our focus on multi-inhabitant environments, where we show how spatiotemporal constraints can be used to significantly improve the accuracy and computational overhead of traditional coupled-HMM based approaches. Experimental results on a smart home …

Adoption Of Software Testing In Open Source Projects: A Preliminary Study On 50,000 Projects, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Tegawende F. Bissyande, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In software engineering, testing is a crucial activity that is designed to ensure the quality of program code. For this activity, development teams spend substantial resources constructing test cases to thoroughly assess the correctness of software functionality. What is however the proportion of open source projects that include test cases? What kind of projects are more likely to include test cases? In this study, we explore 50,000 projects and investigate the correlation between the presence of test cases and various project development characteristics, including the lines of code and the size of development teams.

Network Structure Of Social Coding In Github, Ferdian Thung, Tegawende F. Bissyande, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social coding enables a different experience of software development as the activities and interests of one developer are easily advertized to other developers. Developers can thus track the activities relevant to various projects in one umbrella site. Such a major change in collaborative software development makes an investigation of networkings on social coding sites valuable. Furthermore, project hosting platforms promoting this development paradigm have been thriving, among which GitHub has arguably gained the most momentum. In this paper, we contribute to the body of knowledge on social coding by investigating the network structure of social coding in GitHub. We collect …

Understanding Widespread Changes: A Taxonomic Study, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Improving Webide Through Delightful Design And Gamification, Michael Hilton

Master's Theses

WebIDE is a web-based online learning environment. WebIDE has been used

successfully to teach CS0 and CS1 students Java and C concepts and software

engineering best practices, specically Test Driven Development. Previous Web-

IDE development has concentrated on developing functionality. The main goal

of this eort is to improve two non-functional aspects of WebIDE. The rst is to

design a more delightful user interface. The second is to add a scoring mecha-

nism that encourages students to develop best practices. The scoring mechanism

rewards students who answer the question correctly on the rst attempt, dis-

couraging them from spamming the …

Predicting Project Outcome Leveraging Socio-Technical Network Patterns, Didi Surian, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Hong Cheng, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There are many software projects started daily, some are successful, while others are not. Successful projects get completed, are used by many people, and bring benefits to users. Failed projects do not bring similar benefits. In this work, we are interested in developing an effective machine learning solution that predicts project outcome (i.e., success or failures) from developer socio-technical network. To do so, we investigate successful and failed projects to find factors that differentiate the two. We analyze the socio-technical aspect of the software development process by focusing at the people that contribute to these projects and the interactions among …

Empirical Evaluation Of Bug Linking, Tegawende F. Bissyande, Ferdian Thung, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Laurent Reveillere

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To collect software bugs found by users, development teams often setup bug trackers using systems such as Bugzilla. Developers would then fix some of the bugs and commit corresponding code changes into version control systems such as svn or git. Unfortunately, the links between bug reports and code changes are missing for many software projects as the bug tracking and version control systems are often maintained separately. Yet, linking bug reports to fix commits is important as it could shed light into the nature of bug fixing processes and expose patterns in software management. Bug linking solutions, such as ReLink, …

Understanding Widespread Changes: A Taxonomic Study, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many active research studies in software engineering, such as detection of recurring bug fixes, detection of copyand- paste bugs, and automated program transformation tools, are motivated by the assumption that many code changes (e.g., changing an identifier name) in software systems are widespread to many locations and are similar to one another. However, there is no study so far that actually analyzes widespread changes in software systems. Understanding the nature of widespread changes could empirically support the assumption, which provides insight to improve the research studies and related tools. Our study in this paper addresses such a need. We propose …

An Empirical Study On Developer Interactions In Stackoverflow, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

StackOverflow provides a popular platform where developers post and answer questions. Recently, Treude et al. manually label 385 questions in StackOverflow and group them into 10 categories based on their contents. They also analyze how tags are used in StackOverflow. In this study, we extend their work to obtain a deeper understanding on how developers interact with one another on such a question and answer web site. First, we analyze the distributions of developers who ask and answer questions. We also investigate if there is a segregation of the StackOverflow community into questioners and answerers. We also perform automated text …

Combining Crowdsourcing And Google Street View To Identify Street-Level Accessibility Problems, Kotaro Hara, Victoria Le, Jon Froehlich

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Jon FroehlichAbstractPoorly maintained sidewalks, missing curb ramps, and other obstacles pose considerable accessibility challenges; however, there are currently few, if any, mechanisms to determine accessible areas of a city a priori. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using untrained crowd workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk (turkers) to find, label, and assess sidewalk accessibility problems in Google Street View imagery. We report on two studies: Study 1 examines the feasibility of this labeling task with six dedicated labelers including three wheelchair users; Study 2 investigates the comparative performance of turkers. In all, we collected 13,379 labels and 19,189 verification …

Mutual Assessment In The Social Programmer Ecosystem: An Empirical Investigation Of Developer Profile Aggregators, Leif Singer, Fernando Figueira Filho, Brendan Cleary, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey, Kurt Schneider

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The multitude of social media channels that programmers can use to participate in software development has given rise to online developer profiles that aggregate activity across many services. Studying members of such developer profile aggregators, we found an ecosystem that revolves around the social programmer. Developers are assessing each other to evaluate whether other developers are interesting, worth following, or worth collaborating with. They are self-conscious about being assessed, and thus manage their public images. They value passion for software development, new technologies, and learning. Some recruiters participate in the ecosystem and use it to find candidates for hiring; other …