Arturo I. Concepcion

Using an object-oriented software life-cycle model in the software engineering course

An object-oriented software life-cycle model, the Modified Spiral Model, was successfully used as the software process in the software engineering course in the Department of Computer Science, California State University, San Bernardino. The model lends itself quite naturally to the object-oriented approach of producing software systems in the iterative and incremental manner. The software engineering class is run like a virtual software company which is composed of teams and team leaders where performance is measured on being able to submit the software deliverables and the success of the task(s) assigned to the team. The paper reports on the implementation of the software project, Algorithma (Algorithm Animation), in the virtual software company using the Modified Spiral Model.

Algorithma 99: an experiment in reusability & component based software engineering

This paper reports on our experience in achieving reusability and using component-based software engineering in the Algorithma 99 (Algorithm Animation) Project. We show how we extended and reused Algorithma 98 [2] into Algorithma 99 and how we prepared Algorithma 99 to be reused in Algorithma 2000 (to be implemented in Winter 2000). Component-based software engineering is not only confined to binary components, such as COM and CORBA, but is also applicable to software processes, architectures and design, and object-oriented libraries.

Algorithma 98: an algorithm animation project

This paper describes Algorithma 98 which has three fundamental features: walkthroughs, animations, and availability of source code and documentation. The first two features allow the user to exercise the algorithm in a step-by-step manner while viewing its animation. The third feature makes Algorithma 98 an open system that can be improved and extended by another developer. This paper also describes the object-oriented software process that was used in developing Algorithma 98 to support its extensibility and reusability.This paper describes Algorithma 98 which has three fundamental features: walkthroughs, animations, and availability of source code and documentation. The first two features allow the user to exercise the algorithm in a step-by-step manner while viewing its animation. The third feature makes Algorithma 98 an open system that can be improved and extended by another developer. This paper also describes the object-oriented software process that was used in developing Algorithma 98 to support its extensibility and reusability.

AlgorithmA project: the ten-week mock software company

It is difficult to teach students proper software engineering methodology in a classroom setting. Without hands-on experience, students may not understand why the software engineering process exists. By teaching students via a mock company experience, teaching software engineering can become a rewarding experience while showing the students how simple it is to follow the correct process. Here we show how in the microcosm of a mock software company it is possible to teach very real lessons about software engineering, unfamiliar technologies, teamwork and the realization that when a project ends, the code does not disappear.

A Security Evaluation Model for Multi-Agent Distributed Systems

A new phase of the development of distributed system is now under way in which mobile software agent can be sent among supporting platforms. A mobile agent [6] is a program that represents a user in a computer network, and is capable of migrating autonomously from node to node, to perform computation on behalf of the user. Its tasks can range from online shopping to real-time device control to distributed scientific computing. By using agent technology, we can move the code to the remote data. We can also send out the agent to access the remote resources without keeping the network connection alive all the time. Despite its many practical benefits, mobile agent technology results in significant new security threats due to the increased mobility. A malicious agent can corrupt information on its host and in other agents. It is even more difficult to prevent a host from changing an agent’s states or even killing it. Therefore, solving the security problems of multi-agent distributed systems is crucial. It would be especially ideal if we can have a method to evaluate how secure an agent or a host is. Currently there is not much work done in this area. [1] and [2] are the few attempts to quantitatively measure the security of the mobile agent distributed systems. In this paper, we develop the security risk graph to model the system’s vulnerabilities. Based on the analysis of the different security threat situations in a mobile agent system, we derive a mathematical security model for quantitatively evaluating the security of an agent-based distributed system. This chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 gives the taxonomy of security threats for an agent-based system and describes other related works. In section 3, we will present a mathematical model for security assessment of an agent-based distributed system, followed by an example to explain how this model works. The section 4 provides the conclusions and future directions.

Incorporating video in platform-independent video games using open-source software

In a video game, it is common to embed a prerecorded video and play it at various times during the game for the purposes of narrative, tutorials, hints, or any other goal that the developer sees fit in the game. It is a challenging task to play the embedded video in a cross-platform video game at multiple locations of the screen simultaneously and on an arbitrary surface. This paper describes the use of open-source resources to accomplish such a task. The open-source FFmpeg library is employed to decode video saved in commonly-used video formats such as MPEG-4, AVI or MOV. The platform-independent Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library is used to render video and audio and to handle threading features. The producer-consumer paradigm is employed to separate the tasks of data decoding from data rendering which are run in different threads.

Performance Comparison of ADRS and PCA as a Preprocessor to ANN for Data Mining

In this paper we compared the performance of the automatic data reduction system (ADRS) and principal component analysis (PCA) as a preprocessor to artificial neural networks (ANN). ADRS is based on a Bayesian probabilistic classifier that is used with a quantization process that results in a simplification of the feature space, including elimination of irrelevant features. ADRS has the advantage of retaining the original names of the features even though the feature space has been modified. Thus, results are easier to interpret than those of PCA and ANN, which transform the feature space in a way that obscures the original meanings of the features. The comparison showed that ADRS performs better than PCA as a preprocessor to ANN when data mining the datasets of the UCI machine learning repository.

Developing the VLSI laboratory for the computer architecture course

The paper presents an alternative way of having a hardware laboratory for the computer architecture course that is taught in every computer science curricula. For institutions like CSUSB, with no College of Engineering, having an actual hardware laboratory will be cost prohibitive. An alternative way is to have a set of computer-aided design (CAD) tools where students can design hardware and then test their designs using simulation. This has been done at CSUSB. By using MAGIC (a VLSI layout design tool) and IRSIM (a functional logic simulator) the VLSI Design Laboratory was developed for the computer architecture course in the Department of Computer Science. The VLSI Design Laboratory was implemented using the machines obtained from a matching equipment grant from IBM which consists of five IBM RS/6000s and 15 XStations. The paper presents how the laboratory complements the lecture and how the students learn the hierarchical design methodology of VLSI circuits. Future directions of the VLSI Design Laboratory are also presented.

Artificial Intelligence Design in a Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game

In this paper, we describe our experiences and lessons learned utilizing a rule-based system for implementing the AI in a multi-player online role playing game called Mythic. We explain how we organize AI rules, how those rules are assembled from a database, how sets of rules are assigned to game entities, the different sets of inference rules, the different phases of inference rules, and how we manage facts used by the inference engine. We also review some of the history behind the Mythic project, where it is headed, what a rule-based system is and why we chose to use one for our project. The result of our project is a design that allows us to have diverse AIbehavior and flexibility to reuse code to create new behaviors, but may prove to be inefficient if implemented on systems with a large number of players or many AI controlled game entities.

Performance comparison of the automatic data reduction system (ADRS)

In this paper, real data sets from the UCI Repository are mined and quantized to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space for best classification performance. The approach utilized to mine the data is based on the Bayesian Data Reduction Algorithm (BDRA), which has been recently developed into a windows based system by California State University (see http://wiki.csci.csusb.edu/bdra/Main_Page) called the Automatic Data Reduction System (ADRS). The primary contribution of this work will be to demonstrate and compare different approaches to the feature search (e.g., forward versus backward searching), and show how performance is impacted for each data set. Additionally, the performance of the ADRS with the UCI data will be compared to an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). In this case, results are shown for the ANN both with and without the utilization of Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimension of the feature data. Overall, it is shown that the BDRAs performance with the UCI data is superior to that of the ANN.