waashk/dblp huggingface dataset:
borboleta: a mobile telehealth system for primary homecare. public homecare programs such as the brazilian family health program, initiated in the late 1990s, have proven to be a very effective tool for preventive medicine. the goal of these programs is to bring physicians, nurses, and social workers to the homes of the lower income population in lesser-attended regions within multi-million people metropolis. however, there is practically no it support for the operation of these programs, leading to inefficiencies. for example, in a particular primary homecare program our group is involved with, nurses visit the homes of their patients carrying a pencil and a piece of paper and, during their visits, found themselves isolated from the primary healthcare center, the university hospital, and the physicians who could provide them with important information to improve the quality of the services they provide. each visit associated with the program results in a three-page report, which is handwritten and stored in cabinets, with no possibility for information summarization, statistical analysis, or data mining. in this paper, we describe the architectural design, the prototype implementation, and our preliminary experiences with the borboleta system, whose goal is to use mobile computing technologies to promote digital inclusion as well as to improve the quality of preventive healthcare services offered by the public sector. we focus primarily in developing software that runs on pdas used by health professionals while providing home healthcare. currently, nurses of the primary healthcare center are testing the system and starting to use it on medical visits.
spem on test: the soda case study. in the software engineering (se) research field, several efforts are underway aimed at developing appropriate meta-models for se methodologies. meta-models are meant to check and verify both the software development process and the completeness and expressiveness of methodologies. in this context, in order to provide a uniform way to represent, compare and reuse methodologies, software process engineering meta-model (spem) -- an omg object-oriented standard -- is a natural candidate. in order to put the spem meta-modelling power to test, and emphasise its benefits and limitations, in this paper we apply spem to a more articulated context than the object-oriented one where it was initially conceived -- that is, agent-oriented software engineering (aose) methodologies. in particular, we take the soda methodology as a significant case study in order to assess strengths and limitations of spem, given the peculiar soda focus on the modelling and engineering of (i) social issues and (ii) application environment -- essential aspects in the engineering of complex software systems.
the volume in focus: hardware-assisted focus and context effects for volume visualization. in many volume visualization applications there is some region of specific interest where we wish to see fine detail - yet we do not want to lose an impression of the overall picture. in this research we apply the notion of focus and context to texture-based volume rendering. a framework has been developed that enables users to achieve fast volumetric distortion and other effects of practical use. the framework has been implemented through direct programming of the graphics processor and integrated into a volume rendering system. our driving application is the effective visualization of aneurysms, an important issue in neurosurgery. we have developed and evaluated an easy-to-use system that allows a neurosurgical team to explore the nature of cerebral aneurysms, visualizing the aneurysm itself in fine detail while still retaining a view of the surrounding vasculature.
an approach for supporting system-level test scenarios generation from textual use cases. this paper presents an approach for system-level test scenarios generation from use cases in text form. test scenarios are linear sequences of events used as intermediate representations toward complete test cases. a restricted form of natural language is used for use cases description. we start by generating control flow-based state machines from each use case. these state machines are then connected in a global system-level state machine according to derived sequencing relations between use cases. we infer sequencing relations based on a comparison of use cases pre-conditions and post-conditions. test scenarios are generated using depth-first traversal of the generated control flow-based state machines according to criteria inspired from traditional white-box code coverage.
vhdl vs. bluespec system verilog: a case study on a java embedded architecture. this paper compares two hardware design flows, based on the classic vhdl on one side and the relatively new blue-spec system verilog (bsv) on the other side. the comparison is based on a case study of a java embedded architecture, comprising a java native processor and a memory management unit. the processor is a micro-programmed, pipelined, java-optimized processor (jop), initially written in vhdl, and its bsv re-designed match bluejep. its memory management unit implements the bytecodes dealing with memory allocation, along with a mark-compact garbage collector. the two design flows are examined from several points of view, including both quantitative and qualitative measures. based on this design experience, we conclude that the new high-abstraction level languages, such as bsv, offer in comparison to register-transfer (rt) level classic approaches roughly the same trade-offs that c++ offers vs. assembly language in the software world.
automatic test data generation using particle systems. the simulated repulsion algorithm, which is based on particle systems, is used for the automatic generation of diversity oriented test sets (dots). these test sets are generated by taking randomly generated test sets and iteratively improving their diversity (the level of variability among values for the test data) towards dots. the results of a simulation performed to evaluate characteristics of dots indicate improvement, with respect to fault detection, of these test sets over the standard random test sets.
percolation analyses in a swarm based algorithm for shortest-path finding. in this paper we show that the convergence in the ant colony optimization (aco) algorithm can be described as a "phase- transition" phenomenon. the analysis of the aco with the percolation theory approach includes: the pheromone evaporation and the number of agents parameters, so, for a given routing environment, it is possible to select these parameters in order to ensure convergence and to avoid overhead in the algorithm. the objective of this work is to present some experiments that support our hypothesis and to show the methodology used to correlate some algorithm parameters and how they influence in its general performance.
context distribution for supporting composition of applications in ubiquitous computing. devices and applications reacting to each other and to the environment in which they reside is a very important part of ambient intelligent systems. such context-aware systems require mechanisms to react to changes in their surrounding environment.
a detectability analysis of fault classes for boolean specifications. the detectability hierarchies of fault classes for specification-based testing have been established to prioritize test cases so as to achieve earlier detection of more faults. this paper extends and complements the existing studies by analyzing detectability of fault classes for boolean specifications in general form. the monotonicity of detectability is discovered that a fault occurs at literal is more difficult to detect than the corresponding one occurs at other positions. furthermore, a strong detectability relationship is introduced to overcome the flaw of traditional approach. it can help identify stronger faults and skip weaker faults during testing. as a result, two detectability hierarchies are established on the detection conditions of fault classes.
modeling and verifying bpel using synchronized net. web service composition, which is an application of the service-oriented architecture, refers to combining existing web services to a new one. bpel (business process execution language) is a language describing the composition of web services. the process of composition is error-prone. in order to guarantee the correctness of service composition, the idea of modeling and verifying bpel in different levels, the logic level and the semantic level, is put forward. this can not only assure modeling the processes properly, but also lower the complexity of models and verifications. in the logic level, some elements of bpel, according to the mapping rules, are mapped to wsl_net, which is a special synchronized net. properties such as sound and efficient guarantee the correctness of the basic control flows in bpel process and avoid unnecessary resource consuming. the construction and verification of the model of the semantic level, in which more elements of bpel will be introduced, will be given in later papers.
a cost-driven approach to role engineering. in recent years role-based access control (rbac) has been spreading within organizations. however, companies still have considerable difficulty migrating to this model, due to the complexity involved in identifying a set of roles fitting the real needs of the company. all the various role engineering methods proposed thus far lack a metric for measuring the "quality" of candidate roles produced. this paper proposes a new approach guided by a cost-based metric, where "cost" represents the effort to administer the resulting rbac. further, we propose ream (role-based association-rule mining), an algorithm leveraging the cost metric to find candidate role-sets with the lowest possible administration cost. for a specific parameter set, rbam behaves as already existing role mining algorithms and is, worst case, np-complete. yet, we will provide several examples showing the sensibility of assumptions made by the algorithm. further, application of the algorithm to real data will highlight the improvements over current solutions. finally, we comment on the direction of future research.
a group management scheme for an efficient location-based service. this paper proposes and evaluates the performance of a cooperative position fix scheme built on top of a group management mechanism supported typically in the embedded operating system. the main goal is to enhance the accuracy of map matching and thus the quality of diverse lbss without an extra equipment. designed on the telematics network consist of many in-vehicle telematics devices moving on the road network, the proposed scheme enables each device to collect the gps readings from its neighbors through the air interface when necessary. with at least 3 affirmative points having a unique segment to match, the gps deviation can be calculated from a system of indeterminate equations, and then used to improve positioning accuracy. the performance measurement result shows that the proposed scheme can reduce ambiguous points from 32.0 % to 20.6 %, while the number of points having affirmity larger than 3.0 was also increased from 61.0 % to 71.2 %, sharpening the gap between the best two matches.
a pull-based e-mail architecture. conventional e-mail systems are prone to problems that impact their scalability and dependability. e-mail systems operate following a "push-based" approach: the sender side server pushes the e-mails it wants to send to the corresponding receivers' servers. this approach can impose processing and storage overhead on the receiver side. this paper presents an e-mail architecture in which messages are sent directly from senders to receivers using a "pull-based" approach. the sender stores locally all e-mails it intends to send, and notify their receivers using a global, distributed notification service. receivers can then retrieve such notifications and decide if they want to receive the corresponding e-mails. if so, e-mails can be retrieved directly from their senders. this proposal is inspired from file sharing peer-to-peer systems, in which users locate and retrieve the contents they are looking for. a prototype was built to show the feasibility of the proposal.
software frameworks for information systems integration based on web services. in this work, we discuss the development of software frameworks to support information systems integration based on web services. as our main contribution, we introduce a set of requirements that these frameworks should address and present some relevant aspects of a framework called business application support through software services (bass) that was developed considering these requirements.
agent and ontology based information gathering on restricted web domains with agathe. due to web size and diversity of information, relevant information gathering on the web is a very complex task. the main problem with most information retrieval approaches is neglecting the context of the pages, mainly because search engines are based on keyword indexing. considering restricted domain, the policy of taking into account context may lead to more relevant information gathering in this paper, a specific cooperative information gathering approach based on the use of software agents and ontologies is proposed. to implement this approach, a generic software architecture, named agathe system, based on early prototype, the master-web system, permitting development of specific restricted-domain information gathering systems is presented in detail, with a focus on the extraction subsystem.
a statistical approach for prediction of projects based on simulation. the definition of imprecise estimates is one of the crucial problems of software industry. in this context, this work presents an approach for prediction of stated periods of projects based on simulation, using statistical methods. the simulation is used to provide more confidence to the estimates defined by the project manager, so that they can reflect the organization's reality. based on the estimates provided by the simulator, statistical methods are used to predict an interval, to which the end of the project, in practice, will have chances to belong to. a case study was performed in the end of the research attesting, statistically, the potential of the approach defined in this work.
a continuous facility location problem and its application to a clustering problem. we consider a new problem, which we denote by continuous facility location (confl), and its application to the k-means problem. problem confl is a natural extension of the uncapacitated facility location problem where a facility can be any point in rq. the proposed algorithms are based on a primal-dual technique for spaces with constant dimensions. for the confl problem, we present algorithms with approximation factors 3 + &epsilon; and 1.861 + &epsilon; for euclidean distances and 9 + &epsilon; for squared euclidean distances. for the k-means problem (that is restricted to squared euclidean distance), we present an algorithm with approximation factor 54+ &epsilon;. all algorithms have good practical behaviour in small dimensions. comparisons with known algorithms show that the proposed algorithms have good practical behaviour.
online detection of malicious data access using dbms auditing. this paper proposes a mechanism that allows concurrent detection of malicious data access through the online analysis of the database management systems (dbms) audit trail. the proposed mechanism uses a directed graph representing the profile of valid transactions to detect illegal accesses to data, which are seen as unauthorized sequences of structured query language (sql) commands. the paper proposes a generic algorithm that learns the graph representing the profile of the transactions executed by the users. this mechanism can be used to protect traditional database applications from data attacks as well as web based applications from sql injection types of attacks. the proposed mechanism is generic and can be used in most commercial dbms, adding concurrent detection of malicious data access to classical database security mechanisms. the paper presents a practical example of the implementation of the proposed mechanism using oracle 10g. the transaction processing performance council benchmark c (tpc-c) and a real database installation were used to assess the detection mechanism and learning algorithm.
adding background knowledge to formal concept analysis via attribute dependency formulas. we present a way to add user's background knowledge to formal concept analysis. the type of background knowledge we deal with relates to relative importance of attributes in the input data. we introduce ad-formulas which represent this type of background knowledge. the background knowledge serves as a constraint. the main aim is to make extraction of clusters from the input data more focused by taking into account the background knowledge. particularly, only clusters which are compatible with the background knowledge are extracted from data. as a result, the number of extracted clusters becomes smaller, leaving out non-interesting clusters. we present illustrative examples and results on entailment of background knowledge such as efficient testing of entailment and a complete systems of deduction rules.
dynamically tuning the population size in particle swarm optimization. in this paper, we investigate the benefits of dynamically varying the population size in the particle swarm optimization (pso) model. for this purpose, two well-known population resizing techniques, originally developed for genetic algorithms (gas), were adapted to the pso context, giving birth to the appso and profipso variants. contrary to some previous work that has indicated that the pso model is not sensitive to the population dimension, the simulation results we have obtained over some benchmark numerical optimization problems suggest that the dynamic variation of the number of particles may be instrumental for bringing about performance improvements in long-term runs, mainly when considering high-dimensional problem instances. in general, the novel pso variants have compared more favorably to their ga counterparts in targeting the optimal solutions. however, regarding profipso specifically, the price to be paid in terms of resources used to reach the optimum point is as a rule very high.
towards verification and testing of java programs. testing object-oriented programs is still a hard task, despite many studies on criteria to better cover the test space. test criteria establish requirements one want to achieve in testing programs to help in finding software defects. on the other hand, program verification guarantees that a program preserves its specification but it is not very straightforwardly applicable in many cases. both program testing and verification are expensive tasks and could be used to complement each other. this paper presents a study on using formal verification to reduce the space of program testing. as properties are checked using program model checkers, programs are traced. information from these traces can be used to realize how much testing criteria have been satisfied, reducing the further program test space. the present work is a study on how much the test space of concurrent java programs can be reduced if deadlockfreedom is checked prior to testing.
logical and physical data collection of windows ce based portable devices. nowadays, small-scale embedded devices are becoming more and more pervasive, reaching levels of diffusion not previously seen for other hardware platforms. these kinds of devices are able to contain plenty of information, which can be really precious in an investigative scenario. from a digital forensics perspective it is necessary to have a framework of best practices which can be used for collecting all the observable memory within such devices. in this paper we will pinpoint how to collect such digital data from a logical and physical perspective, by portraying the peculiarities of embedded devices which use the windows ce operating system (os). moreover, we will outline the implications related to data hiding at the firmware level, giving also some guidelines which can be used by forensics practitioners in an investigative field.
data stream mining for market-neutral algorithmic trading. in algorithmic trading applications, a large number of co-evolving financial data streams are observed and analyzed. a recurrent and important task is to determine how a given stream depends on others, over time, accounting for dynamic dependence patterns and without imposing any probabilistic law governing this dependence. we demonstrate how flexible least squares (fls), a penalized version of ordinary least squares that accommodates for dynamic regression coefficients, can be deployed successfully in this context. we describe a market-neutral algorithmic trading system based on a combined use of on-line feature extraction and recursive regression. the system has been proved to perform successfully when trading the s&p 500 futures index.
special track on engineering large-scale distributed systems: editorial message. social phenomena like youtube and flickr are incontrovertible evidence of users' migration to a new web overwhelmed by multimedia. in fact, images, videos, music, and other kinds of multimedia objects today constitute about 99% of the web. nonetheless, users' chances of a successful search in such a large portion of information are not proportionally supported. web search is dominated by giants like google, yahoo! and microsoft that exploit centralized text-only indices enriched by an endless toolbox of smart ranking algorithms. their interest in riding this new tide is witnessed by the acquisition of both flickr and youtube. on the other hand, content-based search for image, music and videos has been deeply studied in the last years but it is not yet adopted by the industry because of its cost.
attaining soft real-time constraint and energy-efficiency in web servers. m/m/1 queues have been traditionally used to model several systems like phone calls at a call center, banking services and so on. however, recent studies showed that it does not model properly a web server system. in this paper we investigate the impact of this assumption in providing timeliness constraint in an energy-efficient web server. although energy efficiency is a key issue, it should not be attained at the expense of a poor quality of service. the work proposed here describes a technique that uses queueing theory results to balance energy consumption and adequate application response times in heterogeneous cpu-intensive server clusters. moreover, we investigate the i/o impact on a purely cpu-oriented energy saving strategy. this proposal shows that the assumption of a poisson process is a good approximation to model a web server.
managing data quality in a terabyte-scale sensor archive. sensor networks collect vast amounts of real-time information about the environment, business processes, and systems. archived sensor data is valuable for long-term analysis and decision making, which requires it be suitably archived, indexed, and validated. in this paper, we describe a general approach to managing and improving data quality by the generation and validation of metadata and the logging of workflow events. the approach has been implemented within a system archiving terabytes of u.s. weather radar data. the data quality system has resulted in the detection of data errors while simplifying the administration of the complex archive system.