Software Engineering Commons^™

Lidar Buoy Detection For Autonomous Marine Vessel Using Pointnet Classification, Christopher Adolphi, Dorothy Dorie Parry, Yaohang Li, Masha Sosonkina, Ahmet Saglam, Yiannis E. Papelis

Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference

Maritime autonomy, specifically the use of autonomous and semi-autonomous maritime vessels, is a key enabling technology supporting a set of diverse and critical research areas, including coastal and environmental resilience, assessment of waterway health, ecosystem/asset monitoring and maritime port security. Critical to the safe, efficient and reliable operation of an autonomous maritime vessel is its ability to perceive on-the-fly the external environment through onboard sensors. In this paper, buoy detection for LiDAR images is explored by using several tools and techniques: machine learning methods, Unity Game Engine (herein referred to as Unity) simulation, and traditional image processing. The Unity Game …

Designing An Equity-Centered Framework And Crosswalk For Integrated Elementary Computer Science Curriculum And Instruction, Carla Strickland, Andrea Ramírez-Salgado, Lauren Weisberg, Latoya Chandler, Jeanne Di Domenico, Elizabeth M. Lehman, Maya Israel

Journal of Computer Science Integration

As computer science (CS) education becomes more prevalent in K-12 instruction, it is critical for educators, researchers, and curriculum developers to identify culturally responsive and pedagogically inclusive approaches that can increase participation, access, and feelings of belonging for students from historically marginalized communities. In response, we developed an equity-centered curricular framework and illustrative crosswalk that synchronizes three distinct pedagogical approaches: culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and project-based learning (PBL). We describe the framework’s theoretical underpinnings and explain how this framework informed the development of an integrated elementary science+CS curricular unit and provide examples of its implementation. …

Domain Specific Analysis Of Privacy Practices And Concerns In The Mobile Application Market, Fahimeh Ebrahimi Meymand

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Mobile applications (apps) constantly demand access to sensitive user information in exchange for more personalized services. These-mostly unjustified-data collection tactics have raised major privacy concerns among mobile app users. Existing research on mobile app privacy aims to identify these concerns, expose apps with malicious data collection practices, assess the quality of apps' privacy policies, and propose automated solutions for privacy leak detection and prevention. However, existing solutions are generic, frequently missing the contextual characteristics of different application domains. To address these limitations, in this dissertation, we study privacy in the app store at a domain level. Our objective is to …

Automatic Assessment Of Oral Reading Fluency From Children's Read Speech In The Filipino Language, Francis Dimzon

Software Technology Dissertations

With the end view of helping the Philippine education system in its literacy initiatives, this study aims to develop methods for automatic assessment of oral reading fluency from children's read speech in the Filipino language. Thus, this study seeks to design methods of automatically extracting and analyzing prosodic features of children's read speech in Filipino. To achieve this, the four-fold set of research activities was conducted to describe an automated oral reading fluency assessment system. It consisted of 1) building a children's Filipino speech corpus, 2) designing methods of extracting and analyzing prosodic features, 3) developing methods of automatically assessing …

Investigating The Use Of Recurrent Neural Networks In Modeling Guitar Distortion Effects, Caleb Koch, Scott Hawley, Andrew Fyfe

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

Guitar players have been modifying their guitar tone with audio effects ever since the mid-20th century. Traditionally, these effects have been achieved by passing a guitar signal through a series of electronic circuits which modify the signal to produce the desired audio effect. With advances in computer technology, audio “plugins” have been created to produce audio effects digitally through programming algorithms. More recently, machine learning researchers have been exploring the use of neural networks to replicate and produce audio effects initially created by analog and digital effects units. Recurrent Neural Networks have proven to be exceptional at modeling audio effects …

How To Find Actionable Static Analysis Warnings: A Case Study With Findbugs, Rahul Yedida, Hong Jin Kang, Huy Tu, Xueqi Yang, David Lo, Tim Menzies

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatically generated static code warnings suffer from a large number of false alarms. Hence, developers only take action on a small percent of those warnings. To better predict which static code warnings should ot be ignored, we suggest that analysts need to look deeper into their algorithms to find choices that better improve the particulars of their specific problem. Specifically, we show here that effective predictors of such warnings can be created by methods that ocally adjust the decision boundary (between actionable warnings and others). These methods yield a new high water-mark for recognizing actionable static code warnings. For eight …

Defining Safe Training Datasets For Machine Learning Models Using Ontologies, Lynn C. Vonder Haar

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Machine Learning (ML) models have been gaining popularity in recent years in a wide variety of domains, including safety-critical domains. While ML models have shown high accuracy in their predictions, they are still considered black boxes, meaning that developers and users do not know how the models make their decisions. While this is simply a nuisance in some domains, in safetycritical domains, this makes ML models difficult to trust. To fully utilize ML models in safetycritical domains, there needs to be a method to improve trust in their safety and accuracy without human experts checking each decision. This research proposes …

Graphsearchnet: Enhancing Gnns Via Capturing Global Dependencies For Semantic Code Search, Shangqing Liu, Xiaofei Xie, Jjingkai Siow, Lei Ma, Guozhu Meng, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code search aims to retrieve accurate code snippets based on a natural language query to improve software productivity and quality. With the massive amount of available programs such as (on GitHub or Stack Overflow), identifying and localizing the precise code is critical for the software developers. In addition, Deep learning has recently been widely applied to different code-related scenarios, ., vulnerability detection, source code summarization. However, automated deep code search is still challenging since it requires a high-level semantic mapping between code and natural language queries. Most existing deep learning-based approaches for code search rely on the sequential text ., …

Design, Development, And Evaluation Of An Interactive Personalized Social Robot To Monitor And Coach Post-Stroke Rehabilitation Exercises, Min Hun Lee, Daniel P. Siewiorek, Asim Smailagic, Alexandre Bernardino, Sergi Bermudez I Badia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Socially assistive robots are increasingly being explored to improve the engagement of older adults and people with disability in health and well-being-related exercises. However, even if people have various physical conditions, most prior work on social robot exercise coaching systems has utilized generic, predefined feedback. The deployment of these systems still remains a challenge. In this paper, we present our work of iteratively engaging therapists and post-stroke survivors to design, develop, and evaluate a social robot exercise coaching system for personalized rehabilitation. Through interviews with therapists, we designed how this system interacts with the user and then developed an interactive …

Dsdnet: Toward Single Image Deraining With Self-Paced Curricular Dual Stimulations, Yong Du, Junjie Deng, Yulong Zheng, Junyu Dong, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A crucial challenge regarding the single image deraining task is to completely remove rain streaks while still preserving explicit image details. Due to the inherent overlapping between rain streaks and background scenes, the texture details could be inevitably lost when clearing rain away from the degraded image, making the two purposes contradictory. Existing deep learning based approaches endeavor to resolve the two issues successively in a cascaded framework or to treat them as independent tasks in a parallel structure. However, none of the models explores a proper interaction between rain distributions and hidden feature responses, which intuitively would provide more …

Making Music Social: Creating A Spotify-Based Social Media Platform, Dalton J. Craven

Senior Theses

DKMS is a new type of social media platform for music lovers and groups of friends. It integrates tightly with Spotify, one of the largest music streaming services in the world. Users of DKMS can see what their friends are listening to, receive recommendations of new songs to listen to, and analyze their several key numerical metrics (happiness, danceability, loudness, and energy) of their top songs.

DKMS was built as part of the year-long Capstone senior design course at the University of South Carolina. A deployed app is visible at https://dkms.vercel.app, and the open-source code is visible at https://github.com/SCCapstone/DKMS.

Bubbleu: Exploring Augmented Reality Game Design With Uncertain Ai-Based Interaction, Minji Kim, Kyungjin Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Object detection, while being an attractive interaction method for Augmented Reality (AR), is fundamentally error-prone due to the probabilistic nature of the underlying AI models, resulting in sub-optimal user experiences. In this paper, we explore the effect of three game design concepts, Ambiguity, Transparency, and Controllability, to provide better gameplay experiences in AR games that use error-prone object detection-based interaction modalities. First, we developed a base AR pet breeding game, called Bubbleu that uses object detection as a key interaction method. We then implemented three different variants, each according to the three concepts, to investigate the impact of each design …

Does Deep Learning Improve The Performance Of Duplicate Bug Report Detection? An Empirical Study, Yuan Jiang, Xiaohong Su, Christoph Treude, Chao Shang, Tiantian Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Do Deep Learning (DL) techniques actually help to improve the performance of duplicate bug report detection? Prior studies suggest that they do, if the duplicate bug report detection task is treated as a binary classification problem. However, in realistic scenarios, the task is often viewed as a ranking problem, which predicts potential duplicate bug reports by ranking based on similarities with existing historical bug reports. There is little empirical evidence to support that DL can be effectively applied to detect duplicate bug reports in the ranking scenario. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate whether well-known DL-based methods outperform classic information …

Giving Back: Contributions Congruent To Library Dependency Changes In A Software Ecosystem, Supatsara Wattanakriengkrai, Dong Wang, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Christoph Treude, Patanamon Thongtanunam, Takashi Ishio, Kenichi Matsumoto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread adoption of third-party libraries for contemporary software development has led to the creation of large inter-dependency networks, where sustainability issues of a single library can have widespread network effects. Maintainers of these libraries are often overworked, relying on the contributions of volunteers to sustain these libraries. To understand these contributions, in this work, we leverage socio-technical techniques to introduce and formalise dependency-contribution congruence (DC congruence) at both ecosystem and library level, i.e., to understand the degree and origins of contributions congruent to dependency changes, analyze whether they contribute to library dormancy (i.e., a lack of activity), and investigate …

Code Will Tell: Visual Identification Of Ponzi Schemes On Ethereum, Xiaolin Wen, Kim Siang Yeo, Yong Wang, Ling Cheng, Feida Zhu, Min Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ethereum has become a popular blockchain with smart contracts for investors nowadays. Due to the decentralization and anonymity of Ethereum, Ponzi schemes have been easily deployed and caused significant losses to investors. However, there are still no explainable and effective methods to help investors easily identify Ponzi schemes and validate whether a smart contract is actually a Ponzi scheme. To fill the research gap, we propose PonziLens, a novel visualization approach to help investors achieve early identification of Ponzi schemes by investigating the operation codes of smart contracts. Specifically, we conduct symbolic execution of opcode and extract the control flow …

Interactive Emirate Sign Language E-Dictionary Based On Deep Learning Recognition Models, Ahmed Abdelhadi Abdelhadi

Theses

According to the ministry of community development database in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) about 3065 people with disabilities are hearing disabled (Emirates News Agency - Ministry of Community Development). Hearing-impaired people find it difficult to communicate with the rest of society. They usually need Sign Language (SL) interpreters but as the number of hearing-impaired individuals grows the number of Sign Language interpreters can almost be non-existent. In addition, specialized schools lack a unified Sign Language (SL) dictionary, which can be linked to the Arabic language being of a diglossia nature, hence many dialects of the language co-exist. Moreover, there …

Data-Driven Modeling Of Student Performance In The Time Of Distance Learning, Iman Saad Megdadi

Theses

One of the important aspects that all academic institutions work towards improving is Student Performance. It is obviously the primary indicator of success or failure of institutions. Student performance predictions are vital to instructors and educational decision makers to help, across all levels, tailor learning according to the students’ needs. Therefore, it is essential for Higher Education Institutions to predict student performance in distance learning which has been, and remains, the primary method of learning in some countries due to Corona Virus pandemic. For this reason, this research is going to predetermine a fitting definition of student performance in time …

Ureca – The Research Ethics And Data Protection Online Review Platform Used By The University Of Malta, Joel Azzopardi

The Journal of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, research ethics and data protection are given very high importance, and research organizations, including universities, need to safeguard their level of professionalism and integrity by providing the necessary guidelines. Moreover, they need to ensure that these guidelines are being adhered to by their affiliated researchers, including students. This is needed for protection of the research subjects, researchers, and the organization (university) itself. However, care must be taken so that the research ethics review process is streamlined as much as possible to minimize bureaucracy, as such guidelines would then be viewed as a research barrier. This study describes URECA, the …

A Data Augmented Method For Plant Disease Leaf Image Recognition Based On Enhanced Gan Model Network, Mingyuan Xin, Ling Weay Ang, Sellappan Palaniappan

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

The identification of plant disease leaves based on deep learning is the key to control the development and spread of plant diseases. In this paper, the existing problems of traditional classification and recognition of plant disease leaves and the limitations of deep learning-based plant disease leaf training are analysed. An enhanced GAN model network based on the Wasserstein GAN loss function has been developed to address the limited training images of plant disease leaves. The self-attention layer is added into the self-encoding structure of the generating network. The effectiveness of data generated by the encoder is increased after the self-attention …

Elderly And Smartphone Apps: Case Study With Lightweight Mysejahtera, Ciu Yung Seek, Shih Yin Ooi, Ying Han Pang, Sook Ling Lew, Xin Yun Heng

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

The outbreak of Covid-19 in the past 2 years has made the usage of contact-tracing app almost mandatory in Malaysia. Though the usage is seeming to be simple, but one interesting phenomenon can be observed in Malaysia is that most of the senior citizen are found not using smartphones regularly. While check-in through MySejahtera (the primary contract-tracing app used in Malaysia) for business, premises, and transports has made compulsory, it does bring a lot of inconveniences to the elderly. Many elderlies start to learn how to use smartphone and government has also taking initiative by providing free or low-cost smartphone …