Software Engineering Commons^™

Coffee_Shop: Investigations Into Modern Word Processors., Nathaniel Welch

Computer Science and Software Engineering

My senior project was spent building a desktop application similar to WriteRoom and OmmWriter. These two applications are both word processors for the Macintosh OS X operating system. Both of these applications are designed to be a reset on word processing software, bringing their interfaces back to the days of Microsoft Word 3.0 and Word Perfect. They do this by spending more time on focusing on the design of the software interface, and focusing on keeping it minimalistic, instead of filling the product with new obscure features, which is a common complaint against the current iterations of Microsoft Word.

The …

Real-Time Trip Information Service For A Large Taxi Fleet, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Nguyen Xuan Khoa, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we describe the design, analysis, implementation, and operational deployment of a real-time trip information system that provides passengers with the expected fare and trip duration of the taxi ride they are planning to take. This system was built in cooperation with a taxi operator that operates more than 15,000 taxis in Singapore. We first describe the overall system design and then explain the efficient algorithms used to achieve our predictions based on up to 21 months of historical data consisting of approximately 250 million paid taxi trips. We then describe various optimisations (involving region sizes, amount of …

Android Application Controlled Surge Protector, Lok An

Electrical Engineering

A significant amount of consumer electronics cannot be switched off completely without being unplugged. Standby power, also known as phantom power, refers to the electric power consumed by electronic appliances when they are switched off. There are some devices that need constant power; items like alarm clocks and security systems need constant power to function correctly. Some devices, such as video game consoles and televisions, consume power without offering any features. Electricity lost from standby power has been increasing with the amount of consumer electronics increasing in households.

This project’s goal is to create a low power remote that can …

A Study Of Semi-Automated Tracing, Jeffrey Holden

Master's Theses

Requirements tracing is crucial for software engineering practices including change analysis, regression testing, and reverse engineering. The requirements tracing process produces a requirements traceability matrix(TM) which links high- and low-level document elements. Manually generating a TM is laborious, time consuming, and error-prone. Due to these challenges TMs are often neglected. Automated information retrieval(IR) techniques are used with some efficiency. However, in mission- or safety-critical systems a human analyst is required to vet the candidate TM. This introduces semi-automated requirements tracing, where IR methods present a candidate TM and a human analyst validates it, producing a final TM. In semi-automated tracing …

High-Performance Composite Event Monitoring System Supporting Large Numbers Of Queries And Sources, Sangjeong Lee, Youngki Lee, Byoungjip Kim, K. Selcuk Candan, Yunseok Rhee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a novel data structure, called Event-centric Composable Queue (ECQ), a basic building block of a new scalable composite event monitoring (CEM) framework, SCEMon. In particular, we focus on the scalability issues when large numbers of CEM queries and event sources exist in upcoming CEM environments. To address these challenges effectively, we take an event-centric sharing approach rather than dealing with queries and sources separately. ECQ is a shared queue, which stores incoming event instances of a primitive event class. ECQs are designed to facilitate efficient shared evaluations of multiple queries over very large volumes of event streams …

Optimizing Sensor Data Acquisition For Energy-Efficient Smartphone-Based Continuous Event Processing, Archan Misra, Lipyeow Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many pervasive applications, such as activity recognition or remote wellness monitoring, utilize a personal mobile device (aka smartphone) to perform continuous processing of data streams acquired from locally-connected, wearable, sensors. To ensure the continuous operation of such applications on a battery-limited mobile device, it is essential to dramatically reduce the energy overhead associated with the process of sensor data acquisition and processing. To achieve this goal, this paper introduces a technique of "acquisition-cost" aware continuous query processing, as part of the Acquisition Cost-Aware Query Adaptation (ACQUA) framework. ACQUA replaces the current paradigm, where the data is typically streamed (pushed) from …

Adaptive Display Power Management For Mobile Games, Bhojan Anand, Karthik Thirugnanam, Jeena Sebastian, Pravein G. Kannan, Akhihebbal L. Ananda, Mun Choon Chan, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we show how tone mapping techniques can be used to dynamically increase the image brightness, thus allowing the LCD backlight levels to be reduced. This saves significant power as the majority of the LCD’s display power is consumed by its backlight. The Gamma function (or equivalent) can be efficiently implemented in smartphones with minimal resource cost. We describe how we overcame the Gamma function’s non-linear nature by using adaptive thresholds to apply different Gamma values to images with differing brightness levels. These adaptive thresholds allow us to save significant amounts of power while preserving the image quality. …

On Combining State Space Reductions With Global Fairness Assumptions, Shao Jie Zhang, Jun Sun, Jun Pang, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking has established itself as an effective system analysis method, as it is capable of proving/dis-proving properties automatically. Its application to practical systems is however limited by state space explosion. Among effective state reduction techniques are symmetry reduction and partial order reduction. Global fairness often plays a vital role in designing self-stabilizing population protocols. It is known that combining fairness and symmetry reduction is nontrivial. In this work, we first show that global fairness, unlike weak/strong fairness, can be combined with symmetry reduction. We extend the PAT model checker with the technique and demonstrate its usability by verifying recently …

Kb-Anonymity: A Model For Anonymized Behavior-Preserving Test And Debugging Data, Aditya Budi, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Lucia Lucia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is often very expensive and practically infeasible to generate test cases that can exercise all possible program states in a program. This is especially true for a medium or large industrial system. In practice, industrial clients of the system often have a set of input data collected either before the system is built or after the deployment of a previous version of the system. Such data are highly valuable as they represent the operations that matter in a client's daily business and may be used to extensively test the system. However, such data often carries sensitive information and cannot …

Developing Digital Field Guides For Plants: A Study From The Perspective Of Users, Emily Roseanne Schwarz

Master's Theses

A field guide is a tool to identify an object of natural history. Field guides
cover a wide range of topics from plants to fungi, birds to mammals, and shells to minerals. Traditionally, field guides are books, usually small enough to be carried outdoors . They enjoy wide popularity in modern life; almost every American home and library owns at least one field guide, and the same is also true for other areas of the world.

At this time, companies, non-profits, and universities are developing computer
technologies to replace printed field guides for identifying plants. This thesis
examines the state …

Intelligent Systems Development In A Non Engineering Curriculum, Emily A. Brand, William L. Honig, Matthew Wojtowicz

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Much of computer system development today is programming in the large - systems of millions of lines of code distributed across servers and the web. At the same time, microcontrollers have also become pervasive in everyday products, economical to manufacture, and represent a different level of learning about system development. Real world systems at this level require integrated development of custom hardware and software.

How can academic institutions give students a view of this other extreme - programming on small microcontrollers with specialized hardware? Full scale system development including custom hardware and software is expensive, beyond the range of any …

Animation And Visualization Of 3d Underwater Sensor Networks, Matthew T. Tran

Master's Theses

Simulation and visualization are critical for the development of new systems and protocols in the area of computer networking. As real-world field testing is expensive and time-consuming, simulations are often preferred as they can be performed repeatedly and inexpensively while still reflecting the outcome of field tests to an extent. Visualizations of the simulation and field test results often follow to provide researchers with a vivid animation of the events, allowing for a much more intuitive understanding of the system than tediously reading through trace files. While there are currently a multitude of simulators and animators for land-based networks, few …

A Relativistic Enhancement To Software Transactional Memory, Philip William Howard, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Relativistic Programming is a technique that allows low overhead, linearly-scalable concurrent reads. It also allows joint access parallelism between readers and a writer. Unfortunately, it has so far been limited to a single writer so it does not scale on the write side. Software Transactional Memory (STM) is a technique that allows programs to take advantage of disjoint access parallelism on both the read-side and write-side. Unfortunately, STM systems have a higher overhead than many other synchronization mechanisms so although STM scales, STM starts from a lower baseline. We propose combining relativistic programming and software transactional memory in a way …

Measuring Api Documentation On The Web, Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development blogs, developer forums and Q&A websites are changing the way software is documented. With these tools, developers can create and communicate knowledge and experiences without relying on a central authority to provide official documentation. Instead, any content created by a developer is just a web search away. To understand whether documentation via social media can replace or augment more traditional forms of documentation, we study the extent to which the methods of one particular API — jQuery — are documented on the Web. We analyze 1,730 search results and show that software development blogs in particular cover 87.9% …

Second International Workshop On Web 2.0 For Software Engineering (Web2se 2011), Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey, Arie Van Deursen, Andrew Begel, Sue Black

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social software is built around an "architecture of participation" where user data is aggregated as a side-effect of using Web 2.0 applications. Web 2.0 implies that processes and tools are socially open, and that content can be used in several different contexts. Web 2.0 tools and technologies support interactive information sharing, data interoperability and user centered design. For instance, wikis, blogs, tags and feeds help us organize, manage and categorize content in an informal and collaborative way. Some of these technologies have made their way into collaborative software development processes and development platforms. These processes and environments are just scratching …

Design And Performance Analysis Of Mac Schemes For Wireless Sensor Networks Powered By Ambient Energy Harvesting, Zhi Ang Eu, Hwee-Pink Tan, Winston K. G. Seah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Energy consumption is a perennial issue in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which typically rely on portable sources like batteries for power. Recent advances in ambient energy harvesting technology have made it a potential and promising alternative source of energy for powering WSNs. By using energy harvesters with supercapacitors, WSNs are able to operate perpetually until hardware failure and in places where batteries are hard or impossible to replace. In this paper, we study the performance of different medium access control (MAC) schemes based on CSMA and polling techniques for WSNs which are solely powered by ambient energy …

Sandcanvas: A Multi-Touch Art Medium Inspired By Sand Animation, Rubaiat Habib Kazi, Kien-Chuan Chua, Shengdong Zhao, Richard Christopher Davis, Kok-Lim Low

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sand animation is a performance art technique in which an artist tells stories by creating animated images with sand. Inspired by this medium, we have developed a new multitouch digital artistic medium named SandCanvas that simplifies the creation of sand animations. SandCanvas also goes beyond traditional sand animation with tools for mixing sand animation with video and replicating recorded free-form hand gestures. In this paper, we analyze common sand animation hand gestures, present SandCanvas’s intuitive UI, and describe implementation challenges we encountered. We also present an evaluation with professional and novice artists that shows the importance and unique affordances of …

How Do Programmers Ask And Answer Questions On The Web? (Nier Track), Christoph Treude, Ohad Barzilay, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, use social media to facilitate knowledge exchange between programmers and fill archives with millions of entries that contribute to the body of knowledge in software development. Understanding the role of Q&A websites in the documentation landscape will enable us to make recommendations on how individuals and companies can leverage this knowledge effectively. In this paper, we analyze data from Stack Overflow to categorize the kinds of questions that are asked, and to explore which questions are answered well and which ones remain unanswered. Our preliminary findings indicate that Q&A websites are …

Configuring Global Software Teams: A Multi-Company Analysis Of Productivity, Quality, And Profits, Narayanasamy Ramasubbu, Marcelo Cataldo, Rajesh Krishna Balan, James Herbsleb

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we examined the impact of project-level configurational choices of globally distributed software teams on project productivity, quality, and profits. Our analysis used data from 362 projects of four different firms. These projects spanned a wide range of programming languages, application domain, process choices, and development sites spread over 15 countries and 5 continents. Our analysis revealed fundamental tradeoffs in choosing configurational choices that are optimized for productivity, quality, and/or profits. In particular, achieving higher levels of productivity and quality require diametrically opposed configurational choices. In addition, creating imbalances in the expertise and personnel distribution of project teams …

Sandcanvas: New Possibilities In Sand Animation, Rubaiat Habib Kazi, Kien-Chuan Chua, Shengdong Zhao, Richard Christopher Davis, Kok-Lim Low

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sand animation is a performance art technique in which an artist tells stories by creating animated images with sand. This video demonstrates the creative possibilities of SandCanvas, a new multi-touch digital artistic medium inspired by sand animation that simplifies the creation of sand animations. SandCanvas’s color and texture features enable faster, more dramatic transitions, while its mixed media and gesture recording features make it possible to create entirely new experiences. Session recording and frame capture complement these capabilities by simplifying postproduction of sand animation performances.