Software Engineering Commons^™

The Impact Of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment On Player Experience In Video Games, Chineng Vang

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) is a process by which a video game adjusts its level of challenge to match a player’s skill level. Its popularity in the video game industry continues to grow as it has the ability to keep players continuously engaged in a game, a concept referred to as Flow. However, the influence of DDA on games has received mixed responses, specifically that it can enhance player experience as well as hinder it. This paper explores DDA through the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm and Reinforcement Learning, gathering feedback from players seeking to understand what about DDA is …

Design And Development Of Software With A Graphical User Interface To Display And Convert Multiple Microscopic Histology Images, Sayed Ahmadreza Razian, Majid Jadidi, Alexey Kamenskiy

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Histological images are widely used to assess the microscopic anatomy of biological tissues. Recent advancements in image analysis allow the identification of structural features on histological sections that can help advance medical device development, brain and cancer research, drug discovery, vascular mechanobiology, and many other fields. Histological slide scanners create images in SVS and TIFF formats that were designed to archive image blocks and high-resolution textual information. Because these formats were primarily intended for storage, they are often not compatible with conventional image analysis software and require conversion before they can be used in research. We have developed a user-friendly …

Digital Discrimination In The Sharing Economy: Evidence, Policy, And Feature Analysis, Miroslav Tushev

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Applications (apps) of the Digital Sharing Economy (DSE), such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit, have become a main facilitator of economic growth and shared prosperity in modern-day societies. However, recent research has revealed that the participation of minority groups in DSE activities is often hindered by different forms of bias and discrimination. Evidence of such behavior has been documented across almost all domains of DSE, including ridesharing, lodging, and freelancing. However, little is known about the under- lying design decisions of DSE systems which allow certain demographics of the market to gain unfair advantage over others. To bridge this knowledge …

Ad-Corre: Adaptive Correlation-Based Loss For Facial Expression Recognition In The Wild, Ali Pourramezan Fard, Mohammad H. Mahoor

Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Scholarship

Automated Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild using deep neural networks is still challenging due to intra-class variations and inter-class similarities in facial images. Deep Metric Learning (DML) is among the widely used methods to deal with these issues by improving the discriminative power of the learned embedded features. This paper proposes an Adaptive Correlation (Ad-Corre) Loss to guide the network towards generating embedded feature vectors with high correlation for within-class samples and less correlation for between-class samples. Ad-Corre consists of 3 components called Feature Discriminator, Mean Discriminator, and Embedding Discriminator. We design the Feature Discriminator component to guide …

Improving Adversarial Attacks Against Malconv, Justin Burr

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation proposes several improvements to existing adversarial attacks against MalConv, a raw-byte malware classifier for Windows PE files. The included contributions greatly improve the success rates and performance of gradient-based file overlay attacks. All improvements are included in a new open-source attack utility called BitCamo.

Several new payload initialization strategies for use with gradient-based attacks are proposed and evaluated as potential replacements for the randomized initialization method used by current attacks. An algorithm for determining the optimal payload size is also proposed. The resulting improvements achieve a 100% evasion rate against eligible target executables using an average payload size …

An Entity-Component System Based, Ieee Dis Interoperability Interface, Noah W. Scott

Theses and Dissertations

In practice, there are several different methods of organizing data within a given software to fulfil its function. The method known as the Entity-Component System (ECS) is a software architecture where data components define entities. These components are stored as organized lists which are operated upon by systems to inject the system's desired behavior. Data is sent across the networks to communicate between simulation nodes as Protocol Data Units (PDUs). When sending PDUs across a network protocol, each simulation represents a common understanding of the world at the desired level of detail. DIS-compliant simulations are commonly written using an Object-Oriented …

Mrim: Enabling Mixed-Resolution Imaging For Low-Power Pervasive Vision Tasks, Jiyan Wu, Vithurson Subasharan, Tuan Tran, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While many pervasive computing applications increasingly utilize real-time context extracted from a vision sensing infrastructure, the high energy overhead of DNN-based vision sensing pipelines remains a challenge for sustainable in-the-wild deployment. One common approach to reducing such energy overheads is the capture and transmission of lower-resolution images to an edge node (where the DNN inferencing task is executed), but this results in an accuracy-vs-energy tradeoff, as the DNN inference accuracy typically degrades with a drop in resolution. In this work, we introduce MRIM, a simple but effective framework to tackle this tradeoff. Under MRIM, the vision sensor platform first executes …

Formal Spark Verification Of Various Resampling Methods In Particle Filters, Osiris J. Terry

Theses and Dissertations

The software verification in this thesis concentrates on verifying a particle filter for use in tracking and estimation, a key application area for the Air Force. The development and verification process described in this thesis is a demonstration of the power, limitation, and compromises involved in applying automated software verification tools to critical embedded software applications.

Classifying Dead Code In Software Development, Arman Alavizadeh

University Honors Theses

Dead code pervades as an issue in the world of software development as a source of many famous software disasters such as the ARIANE 5 rocket failure and chemical bank withdrawal error. Defining dead code on narrow levels of granularity has not been fully explored, yet is crucial to better our understanding of dead code. Here we will be starting a discussion on how to approach classifying dead code via comparing dead code research specific to an industry segment. Research will be compared primarily by methodology and limitations. Dead code subtype classifications are gleaned from research comparisons and can serve …

An Investigation Of Data Storage In Entity-Component Systems, Bailey V. Compton

Theses and Dissertations

Entity-Component Systems (ECS) have grown vastly in application since their introduction more than 20 years ago. Providing the ability to efficiently manage data and optimize program execution, ECSs, as well as the wider field of data-oriented design, have attained popularity in the realms of modeling, simulation, and gaming. This manuscript aims to elucidate and document the storage frameworks commonly found in ECSs, as well as suggesting conceptual connections between ECSs and relational databases. This formal documentation of the in-memory storage formats of entity-component systems affords the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the software engineering community a …

Bug Triage Automation Approaches: A Comparative Study, Dr Khaled Nagaty, Madonna Mayez, Khaled Ahmed Nagay Dr.

Computer Science

Bug triage is an essential task in the software maintenance phase. It is the process of assigning a developer (fixer) to bug report. Triaging process is performed by the triager, who has to analyze developers’ profiles and bug reports for the purpose of making a suitable assignment. Manual assignment consumes time, financial resources and human resources; to get a high-quality software with minimum cost, automating this process is necessary. Previous researchers tackled this problem as a classification problem from different perspectives, either information retrieval approach or machine learning algorithms, some researchers handled it as an optimization problem using optimization and …

Revisiting Neuron Coverage Metrics And Quality Of Deep Neural Networks, Zhou Yang, Jieke Shi, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep neural networks (DNN) have been widely applied in modern life, including critical domains like autonomous driving, making it essential to ensure the reliability and robustness of DNN-powered systems. As an analogy to code coverage metrics for testing conventional software, researchers have proposed neuron coverage metrics and coverage-driven methods to generate DNN test cases. However, Yan et al. doubt the usefulness of existing coverage criteria in DNN testing. They show that a coverage-driven method is less effective than a gradient-based method in terms of both uncovering defects and improving model robustness. In this paper, we conduct a replication study of …

Hermes: Using Commit-Issue Linking To Detect Vulnerability-Fixing Commits, Truong Giang Nguyen, Hong Jin Kang, David Lo, Abhishek Sharma, Andrew E. Santosa, Asankhaya Sharma, Ming Yi Ang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software projects today rely on many third-party libraries, and therefore, are exposed to vulnerabilities in these libraries. When a library vulnerability is fixed, users are notified and advised to upgrade to a new version of the library. However, not all vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed, and users may not be aware of vulnerabilities that may affect their applications. Due to the above challenges, there is a need for techniques which can identify and alert users to silent fixes in libraries; commits that fix bugs with security implications that are not officially disclosed. We propose a machine learning approach to automatically identify …

Gender Influence On Communication Initiated Within Student Teams, Rita Garcia, Chieh-Ju Trinity Liao, Ariane Pearce, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaboration is important during software development, but related work has found gender differences can influence the collaboration process, creating inequality in the team’s dynamics. In this paper, we present a gender analysis study that involved 39 students, examining their teams’ online collaborations while contributing to a large open-source software project. Eight teams of 4-6 Software Engineering (SE) students communicated over an online messaging platform, Slack, to complete an eight-week project. The goal of this study is to identify gender differences emerging from team collaboration. A mixed-methods approach was used to collect students’ teamwork experiences and analyse their collaboration. Our research …

Investigating Collaboration In Software Reverse Engineering, Allison M. Wong

Theses and Dissertations

Reverse engineering (RE) is a rigorous process of exploration and analysis to support software design recovery and exploit development. The process is often conducted in teams to divide the workload and take full advantage of engineers' individual expertise and strengths. Collaboration in RE requires versatile and reliable tools that can match the environment's unpredictable and fluid nature. While studies on collaborative software development have indicated common best practices and implementations, similar standards have not been explored in reverse engineering. This research conducts semi-structured interviews with reverse engineering experts to understand their needs and solutions while working in a team. The …

Patterns Of Academic Help-Seeking In Undergraduate Computing Students, Augie Doebling

Master's Theses

Knowing when and how to seek academic help is crucial to the success of undergraduate computing students. While individual help-seeking resources have been studied, little is understood about the factors influencing students to use or avoid certain re- sources. Understanding students’ patterns of help-seeking can help identify factors contributing to utilization or avoidance of help resources by different groups, an important step toward improving the quality and accessibility of resources. We present a mixed-methods study investigating the help-seeking behavior of undergraduate computing students. We collected survey data (n = 138) about students’ frequency of using several resources followed by one-on-one …

Strangan: Adversarially-Learnt Spatial Transformer For Scalable Human Activity Recognition, Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Avijoy Chakma, Archan Misra, Nirmalya Roy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We tackle the problem of domain adaptation for inertial sensing-based human activity recognition (HAR) applications -i.e., in developing mechanisms that allow a classifier trained on sensor samples collected under a certain narrow context to continue to achieve high activity recognition accuracy even when applied to other contexts. This is a problem of high practical importance as the current requirement of labeled training data for adapting such classifiers to every new individual, device, or on-body location is a major roadblock to community-scale adoption of HAR-based applications. We particularly investigate the possibility of ensuring robust classifier operation, without requiring any new labeled …

Jscsp: A Novel Policy-Based Xss Defense Mechanism For Browsers, Guangquan Xu, Xiaofei Xie, Shuhan Huang, Jun Zhang, Lei Pan, Wei Lou, Kaitai Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To mitigate cross-site scripting attacks (XSS), the W3C group recommends web service providers to employ a computer security standard called Content Security Policy (CSP). However, less than 3.7 percent of real-world websites are equipped with CSP according to Google’s survey. The low scalability of CSP is incurred by the difficulty of deployment and non-compatibility for state-of-art browsers. To explore the scalability of CSP, in this article, we propose JavaScript based CSP (JSCSP), which is able to support most of real-world browsers but also to generate security policies automatically. Specifically, JSCSP offers a novel self-defined security policy which enforces essential confinements …

Coders Assembly: Peer Assisted Learning Model For Freshman Programming Courses, Kyong Jin Shim, Gottipati Swapna, Shankararaman, Venky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Today, computing graduates see a bright outlook thanks to the high demand for skills driven by the increasing importance of technology as the main driving force behind business transformation. As technology continues to grow exponentially over recent years, computing graduates have some of the highest starting salaries in the market. Even though universities have increased production of computing degree graduates in recent years, it is insufficient to fill the jobs available in the market. Therefore, going forward, the demand is likely to further increase. The continued demand for computing programs in universities has led to an increased intake size, thus …

Analyzing The Impact Of Digital Payment On Efficiency And Productivity Of Commercial Banks: A Case Study In China, Haopeng Wang, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Digital payment has become one of the most popular payment methods all around the world, especially in countries that witnessed the rapid development of internet. As a traditional financial institution, commercial banks have been impacted by newly developed payment technology since third payment platforms have attracted customers to use the digital payment for daily consumption, transferring, and even investment. This paper focuses on analyzing whether and how the commercial banks in China have been affected by digital payment by using empirical methods. Systematic Generalized Method of Moments (SYS-GMM) is used to test the relationship between the productivity of commercial banks …