Software Engineering Commons^™

Editorial: Artificial Intelligence And Cybersecurity In Pervasive Computing, Ji-Jian Chin

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Pervasive computing, or ubiquitous computing, is rapidly increasing in capacity and capabilities. With the Internet of Things (IoT) becoming an integral part of daily life and the growing availability of edge computing resources, automation guided by data is advancing applications in healthcare, manufacturing, automotive, and other areas. It's natural that pervasive computing will intersect with artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. AI can improve detection, prediction, and anticipative responses to human needs, while cybersecurity addresses topics like misuse prevention, ethics, policies, and governance. This issue features seven articles on these intersections, including four AI articles exploring natural language processing and computer …

Sibling Discrimination Using Linear Fusion On Deep Learning Face Recognition Models, Rita Goel, Maida Alamgir, Haroon Wahab, Maria Alamgir, Irfan Mehmood, Hassan Ugail, Amit Sinha

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Facial recognition technology has revolutionised human identification, providing a non-invasive alternative to traditional biometric methods like signatures and voice recognition. The integration of deep learning has significantly enhanced the accuracy and adaptability of these systems, now widely used in criminal identification, access control, and security. Initial research focused on recognising full-frontal facial features, but recent advancements have tackled the challenge of identifying partially visible faces, a scenario that often reduces recognition accuracy. This study aims to identify siblings based on facial features, particularly in cases where only partial features like eyes, nose, or mouth are visible. Utilising advanced deep learning …

Hybrideval: An Improved Novel Hybrid Metric For Evaluation Of Text Summarization, Raheem Sarwar, Bilal Ahmad, Pin Shen Teh, Suppawong Tuarob, Tipajin Thaipisutikul, Farooq Zaman, Naif R. Aljohani, Jia Zhu, Saeed-Ul Hassan, Raheel Nawaz, Ali R Ansari, Muhammad A B Fayyaz

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

The present work re-evaluates the evaluation method for text summarization tasks. Two state-of-the-art assessment measures e.g., Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) and Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) are discussed along with their limitations before presenting a novel evaluation metric. The evaluation scores are significantly different because of the length and vocabulary of the sentences, this suggests that the primary restriction is its inability to preserve the semantics and meaning of the sentences and consistent weight distribution over the whole sentence. To address this, the present work organizes the phrases into six different groups and to evaluate “text summarization” problems, a …

Conditional Deployable Biometrics: Matching Periocular And Face In Various Settings, Jihyeon Kim, Tiong-Sik Ng, Andrew Beng Jin Teoh

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

In this paper, we introduce the concept of Conditional Deployable Biometrics (CDB), designed to deliver consistent performance across various biometric matching scenarios, including intra-modal, multimodal, and cross-modal applications. The CDB framework provides a versatile and deployable biometric authentication system that ensures reliable matching regardless of the biometric modality being used. To realize this framework, we have developed CDB-Net, a specialized deep neural network tailored for handling both periocular and face biometric modalities. CDB-Net is engineered to handle the unique challenges associated with these different modalities while maintaining high accuracy and robustness. Our extensive experimentation with CDB-Net across five diverse and …

In Search Of Suitable Methods For Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Cyber Risk Mitigation In Offshore Wind: A Survey, Yvonne Hwei-Syn Kam, Kevin Jones, Robert Rawlinson-Smith, Kimberly Tam

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

In recent years, notable incidents have highlighted the vulnerability of wind energy infrastructure, making cybersecurity crucial for the offshore wind industry. However, justifying the costs of cybersecurity measures is essential. A cost benefit analysis (CBA) is commonly utilised to support decision-making for risk mitigation. With a cost benefit analysis, risk mitigation strategies that strike an optimal balance between the costs of mitigation measures and the resulting risk reduction can be identified. This survey of literature was carried out to identify the existing proposed solutions for cost benefit analysis on cyber risk mitigation measures for offshore wind cyber physical systems. After …

Wip: An Engaging Undergraduate Intro To Model Checking In Software Engineering Using Tla+, Konstantin Laufer, Gunda Mertin, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Background: In this Innovative Practice Work in Progress, we present our initial efforts to integrate formal methods, with a focus on model-checking specifications written in Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA⁺), into computer science education, targeting undergraduate juniors/seniors and graduate students. Many safety-critical systems and services crucially depend on correct and reliable behavior. Formal methods can play a key role in ensuring correct and safe system behavior, yet remain underutilized in educational and industry contexts.

Aims: We aim to (1) qualitatively assess the state of formal methods in computer science programs, (2) construct level-appropriate examples that could be included …

2024 Gateway Magazine, College Of Computing, Michigan Technological University

College of Computing Annual Magazines

Table of Contents

• 50 Years of Computer Science at Michigan Tech
• Data Science for a Changing Planet
• Healthcare Transformed
• Mechatronics Matters
• Powered by Michigan Tech Talent
• Esports: Bringing Everything Great about Sports to More People
• The Michigander Scholars Program: Electrifying Careers in Michigan
• College of Computing News

Transforming Information Systems Management: A Reference Model For Digital Engineering Integration, John Bonar, John Hastings

Research & Publications

Digital engineering practices offer significant yet underutilized potential for improving information assurance and system lifecycle management. This paper examines how capabilities like model-based engineering, digital threads, and integrated product lifecycles can address gaps in prevailing frameworks. A reference model demonstrates applying digital engineering techniques to a reference information system, exhibiting enhanced traceability, risk visibility, accuracy, and integration. The model links strategic needs to requirements and architecture while reusing authoritative elements across views. Analysis of the model shows digital engineering closes gaps in compliance, monitoring, change management, and risk assessment. Findings indicate purposeful digital engineering adoption could transform cybersecurity, operations, service …

Weed Seed Wizard Case Study - Don't Stop Harvest Weed Management Because It’S A Dry Year, Department Of Primary Industries And Regional Development, Western Australia

Biosecurity research reports

The Weed Seed Wizard is a national collaborative project that uses paddock management information to predict weed emergence and crop losses now and in the future.

The Weed Seed Wizard is a computer simulation tool that:

• applies to all Australian grain growing areas

• helps growers understand and manage weed seedbanks on their farms

• uses farm management records to simulate how different crop rotations, weed control techniques, irrigation, grazing and harvest management tactics can affect weed numbers, the weed seedbank and yields

• uses farm-specific management and site-specific weather

• is multi-species

See www.dpird.wa.gov.au for further information on Weed Seed Wizard.

This case …

Enhancing Place-Based Interaction With Emotion Ai And Augmented Reality, Jake Maier, Ivan Martinez

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

This project explores the integration of augmented reality (AR) and Emotion AI technologies to enhance user experiences in physical environments. By seamlessly merging virtual elements with real-world contexts, we aim to deepen individuals’ interactions and perceptions of their surroundings. Leveraging AR technology enables users to access contextual information, engage with interactive content, and navigate spaces with heightened immersion and understanding. Additionally, Emotion AI enhances these experiences by detecting and responding to users’ emotional states, fostering personalized and emotionally resonant interactions. We aim to integrate digital content within physical environments using mixed-reality headsets equipped with eye-tracking capabilities and consumer-grade wireless EEG …

Fail Fast, Fail Small: Designing Resilient Systems For The Future Of Software Engineering, Jill Willard, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

The principles of "fail fast, fail small" have emerged as critical in modern software and system design. By planning for minor, manageable failures instead of catastrophic breakdowns, developers can ensure that systems degrade gracefully, maintaining functionality even when encountering issues. This article delves into strategies for designing resilient systems, beginning with the concept of slow degradation and distributed systems that prioritize core functions while allowing non-critical components to fail without significant user impact. The Netflix recommendation engine serves as a prime example of a system that continues to operate under failure conditions. Chaos engineering, a proactive methodology for stress-testing system …

Foss: Towards Fine-Grained Unknown Class Detection Against The Open-Set Attack Spectrum With Variable Legitimate Traffic, Ziming Zhao, Zhaoxuan Li, Xiaofei Xie, Jiongchi Yu, Fan Zhang, Rui Zhang, Binbin Chen, Xiangyang Luo, Ming Hu, Wenrui Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) are essential for ensuring cybersecurity. However, the security communities realize some limitations when they put most existing proposals into practice. The challenges are mainly concerned with (i) fine-grained unknown attack detection and (ii) ever-changing legitimate traffic adaptation. To tackle these problem, we present three key design norms. The core idea is to construct a model to split the data distribution hyperplane and leverage the concept of isolation, as well as advance the incremental model update. We utilize the isolation tree as the backbone to design our model, named FOSS, to echo back three norms. …

Digital Twin For Shelf Intelligence: Ai-Driven Inventory Management For Minimizing Food Waste, Charlotte Maples, Marvin Velazquez

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

This project aims to develop a solution for improving grocery store inventory management by leveraging AI-driven image recognition. Traditional inventory methods, which rely on manual counting or barcode scanning, are inefficient, labor-intensive, and prone to human error. Over an 8-week period, we designed and developed a basic iPad app capable of identifying specific types of fruit and automatically updating inventory records in real time. By utilizing the iPad’s camera and machine learning algorithms, the app demonstrates the potential to streamline inventory tracking, reduce manual labor, and improve accuracy in managing perishable goods. Future work will focus on expanding the app’s …

Exploring Conversations Between A Practitioner And A Person With Dementia, Kotaro Hara, Rosiana Natalie, Wei Soon Cheong, Jingjing Gu, Qianli Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In social service centers, practitioners engage in conversations with clients with dementia to facilitate their daily activities and provide support when they are distressed. However, the nature of the care demands the practitioner’s active engagement, which becomes difficult to deliver as the number of people who need care expands. Researchers have been investigating the efficacy of developing agents that assume conversational tasks to alleviate this work. To contribute to the future design of agents for caregiving, we collected and analyzed ten conversations between clients with mild dementia and practitioners who provide care. Our analyses of turn-taking dynamics and dialogue acts …

An Empirical Study Of Automatic Program Repair Techniques For Injection Vulnerabilities, Tingwei Zhu, Tongtong Xu, Kui Liu, Jiayuan Zhou, Xing Hu, Xin Xia, Tian Zhang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Injection vulnerabilities are among the most serious and dangerous security defects, as they can be exploited by attackers to inject malicious inputs and carry out cybercrimes. Timely fixing of injection vulnerabilities is crucial. However, manual repairs of injection vulnerabilities often require specialized knowledge and are prone to errors, posing a challenge and a heavy burden on developers. In recent years, Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques have shown promising momentum in automatically fixing general defects. Yet, there has been no research on how APR techniques perform in repairing injection vulnerabilities. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct an empirical study. We first …

Generative Ai In Software Engineering Must Be Human-Centered: The Copenhagen Manifesto, D. Russo, S. Van Berkel Baltes, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence—systems that can produce human-like content such as text, music, visual art, or source code—marks not only a significant leap for Artificial Intelligence (AI) but also a pivotal moment for software practitioners and researchers. The role of software engineering researchers and practitioners in adopting the technologies that shape our world is critical. Historically, the human aspects of developing software have been treated as secondary to more technical innovations. However, the emergence of Generative AI will simultaneously enhance human capabilities while surfacing complex ethical, social, legal, and technical challenges.While primarily aimed at software engineering (SE) researchers …

Demystifying And Extracting Fault-Indicating Information From Logs For Failure Diagnosis, Junjie Huang, Zhihan Jiang, Jinyang Liu, Yintong Huo, Jiazhen Gu, Zhuangbin Chen, Cong Feng, Hui Dong, Zengyin Yang, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Logs are imperative in the maintenance of online service systems, which often encompass important information for effective failure mitigation. While existing anomaly detection methodologies facilitate the identification of anomalous logs within extensive runtime data, manual investigation of log messages by engineers remains essential to comprehend faults, which is labor-intensive and error-prone. Upon examining the log-based troubleshooting practices at CloudA 1, we find that engineers typically prioritize two categories of log information for diagnosis. These include fault-indicating descriptions, which record abnormal system events, and fault-indicating parameters, which specify the associated entities. Motivated by this finding, we propose an approach to automatically …

Ocapo: Fine-Grained Occupancy-Aware, Empirically-Driven Pdc Control In Open-Plan, Shared Workspaces, Ravi Anuradha, Dulaj Sanjaya Weerakoon, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Passive Displacement Cooling (PDC) is a relatively recent technology gaining attention as a means of significantly reducing building energy consumption overheads, especially in tropical climates. PDC eliminates the use of mechanical fans, instead using chilled-water heat exchangers to perform convective cooling. In this paper, we identify and characterize the impact of several key parameters affecting occupant comfort in a 1000m2 open-floor area (consisting of multiple zones) of a ZEB (Zero Energy Building) deployed with PDC units and tackle the problem of setting the temperature setpoint of the PDC units to assure occupant thermal comfort and yet conserve energy. We tackle …

Predicting The Limits: Tailoring Unnoticeable Hand Redirection Offsets In Virtual Reality To Individuals' Perceptual Boundaries, Martin Feick, Kora Persephone Regitz, Lukas Gehrke, André Zenner, Anthony Tang, Tobias Patrick Jungbluth, Maurice Rekrut, Antonio Krüger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many illusion and interaction techniques in Virtual Reality (VR) rely on Hand Redirection (HR), which has proved to be effective as long as the introduced offsets between the position of the real and virtual hand do not noticeably disturb the user experience. Yet calibrating HR offsets is a tedious and time-consuming process involving psychophysical experimentation, and the resulting thresholds are known to be affected by many variables—limiting HR’s practical utility. As a result, there is a clear need for alternative methods that allow tailoring HR to the perceptual boundaries of individual users. We conducted an experiment with 18 participants combining …

Audio Description Customization, Rosiana Natalie, Ruei-Che Chang, Sheshadri Smitha, Anhong Guo, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Blind and low-vision (BLV) people use audio descriptions (ADs) to access videos. However, current ADs are unalterable by end users, thus are incapable of supporting BLV individuals’ potentially diverse needs and preferences. This research investigates if customizing AD could improve how BLV individuals consume videos. We conducted an interview study (Study 1) with fifteen BLV participants, which revealed desires for customizing properties like length, emphasis, speed, voice, format, tone, and language. At the same time, concerns like interruptions and increased interaction load due to customization emerged. To examine AD customization’s effectiveness and tradeoffs, we designed CustomAD, a prototype that enables …