Bimlesh Wadhwa

XOO7: applying OO7 benchmark to XML query processing tool

If XML is to play the critical role of the lingua franca for Internet data interchange that many predict, it is necessary to start designing and adopting benchmarks allowing the comparative performance analysis of the tools being developed and proposed. The effectiveness of existing XML query languages has been studied by many, with a focus on the comparison of linguistic features, implicitly reflecting the fact that most XML tools exist only on paper. In this paper, with a focus on efficiency and concreteness, we propose a pragmatic first step toward the systematic benchmarking of XML query processing platforms with an initial focus on the data (versus document) point of view. We propose XOO7, an XML version of the OO7 benchmark. We discuss the applicability of XOO7, its strengths, limitations and the extensions we are considering. We illustrate its use by presenting and discussing the performance comparison against XOO7 of three different query processing platforms for XML.

Teacher Perceptions of Games in Singapore Schools

With the proliferation of entertainment games, supported by heavy investment in the underlying technologies, educators are now examining the educational values of gaming and attempting to incorporate games into their teaching. In Singapore, the game sector is worth many million Singapore dollars (SGDs), and gaming is an engaging activity of the young. Using a survey, this study examined the use of games and simulations in schools. The study was designed to shed light on the use of gaming activities in learning, perception of adoption and use, and problems encountered in teachers’ attempts to adopt games. Factors related to teaching level, experience, and subject were also analyzed for possible influence on teachers’ perceptions of game-related learning.

A Formal Semantics for Complete UML State Machines with Communications

UML is a widely used notation, and formalizing its semantics is an important issue. Here, we concentrate on formalizing UML state machines, used to express the dynamic behaviour of software systems. We propose a formal operational semantics covering all features of the latest version (2.4.1) of UML state machines specification. We use labelled transition systems as the semantic model, so as to use automatic verification techniques like model checking. Furthermore, our proposed semantics includes synchronous and asynchronous communications between state machines. We implement our approach in USM2C, a model checker supporting editing, simulation and automatic verification of UML state machines. Experiments show the effectiveness of our approach.

Cloud Service Brokers: An Emerging Trend in Cloud Adoption and Migration

With the advent of cloud, a large number of cloud providers have surfaced in the market. Cloud Consumers are rapidly using cloud services(IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) to meet their business needs while cloud providers are rapidly developing much needed tools and environments. This rapid growth however is creating a significant need to develop fast and controlled mechanisms for managing costs, capacity and resources at agreed service levels in order to have a smooth adoption, management and maintenance of cloud for both consumers and providers. Cloud Services Brokerages (CSBs), an intermediary between the consumer and providers, emerges as a solution to address above need. In this paper we focus on reviewing the significance, role and services of a CSB, followed by a categorization of CSBs on the basis of the services they provide, and a method to select a CSB from a pool of CSBs.

A comparative study of maintainability of web applications on J2EE, .NET and Ruby on Rails

With Web services predicted to become distributed computing architecture in near future, maintainability of the Web applications (WAs) will rank high on selection criteria while choosing a platform for development of a WA. The goal of this paper is to evaluate maintainability of small-scale WAs built on J2EE, .NET and Ruby On Rails (RoR). The maintainability criteria considered comprised of modifiability, testability, understandability and portability. We found that the RoR implementation fared better on modifiability, testability, and understandability, while J2EE implementation was the most portable. The results led us to comment on the maintainability of small WAs with respect to underlying architecture and development environments the three platforms provide. We believe that results are expected to vary for medium and large-size WAs. The work included here is part of an effort to build a decision framework for platform selection for WAs.

USMMC: a self-contained model checker for UML state machines

UML diagrams are gaining increasing usage in Object-Oriented system designs. UML state machines are specifically used in modeling dynamic behaviors of classes. It has been widely agreed that verification of system designs at an early stage will dramatically reduce the development cost. Tool support for verification UML designs can also encourage consistent usage of UML diagrams throughout the software development procedure. In this work, we present a tool, named USMMC, which turns model checking of UML state machines into practice. USMMC is a self-contained toolkit, which provides editing, interactive simulation as well as powerful model checking support for UML state machines. The evaluation results show the effectiveness and scalability of our tool.

Exploring Nuanced Gender Perspectives within the HCI Community

With the increasing spread and pervasiveness of technologies, the role of gender in the design of these technologies is a topic of growing importance. Several conference panels and journal issues have focused on the contributions feminism, gender theory, and queer theory can make to HCI. This paper discusses the key developments in the sub-field of Gender HCI over the past five years. We discuss, in particular, how recent approaches to gender in HCI move past questions of how men and women interact differently with technologies. Scholars are focusing on activist, intersectional, and reflexive approaches to gender and identity in design that focus on inclusion and accountability in terms of who technologies are designed for and in what ways. This scholarship draws on a wide variety of theoretical approaches to gender not integrated or well-known in the general literature or education in HCI or computing. We recommend the implementation of a Gender 101 general education module for all computing students to provide fluency in gender theory as a way to promote discussion, inclusivity, and accountability in interaction design and computing practices and organizations.

Cloud Service Brokers: Addressing the New Cloud Phenomenon

The concept of cloud computing with on-demand provisioning of a shared pool of configurable computing resources of unprecedented size, elastic scalability, and ubiquitous network service accessibility has gained huge momentum in the IT industry and is high on the agenda of the industry and research community from developer as well as from end-user perspective. However, there are many issues faced in migrating existing systems into the cloud and between providers that have led to its slow adoption. Cloud service brokers (CSBs) have emerged as a solution to address this growing need and provide services that facilitate smooth cloud adoption, management, migration, and maintenance for cloud users and providers. This chapter addresses this new cloud phenomenon by reflecting on cloud adoption and migration challenges and presenting an overview of CSB utilities and the proposed concept of CSB registry.

Automatic early defects detection in use case documents

Use cases, as the primary techniques in the user requirement analysis, have been widely adopted in the requirement engineering practice. As developed early, use cases also serve as the basis for function requirement development, system design and testing. Errors in the use cases could potentially lead to problems in the system design or implementation. It is thus highly desirable to detect errors in use cases. Automatically analyzing use case documents is challenging primarily because they are written in natural languages. In this work, we aim to achieve automatic defect detection in use case documents by leveraging on advanced parsing techniques. In our approach, we first parse the use case document using dependency parsing techniques. The parsing results of each use case are further processed to form an activity diagram. Lastly, we perform defect detection on the activity diagrams. To evaluate our approach, we have conducted experiments on 200+ real-world as well as academic use cases. The results show the effectiveness of our method.

BOWL: augmenting the Semantic Web with beliefs

As the Semantic Web is an open, complex and constantly evolving medium, it is the norm, but not exception that information at different sites is incomplete or inconsistent. This poses challenges for the engineering and development of agent systems on the Semantic Web, since autonomous software agents need to understand, process and aggregate this information. Ontology language OWL provides core language constructs to semantically markup resources on the Semantic Web, on which software agents interact and cooperate to accomplish complex tasks. However, as OWL was designed on top of (a subset of) classic predicate logic, it lacks the ability to reason about inconsistent or incomplete information. Belief-augmented Frames (BAF) is a frame-based logic system that associates with each frame a supporting and a refuting belief value. In this paper, we propose a new ontology language Belief-augmented OWL (BOWL) by integrating OWL DL and BAF to incorporate the notion of confidence. BOWL is paraconsistent, hence it can perform useful reasoning services in the presence of inconsistencies and incompleteness. We define the abstract syntax and semantics of BOWL by extending those of OWL. We have proposed reasoning algorithms for various reasoning tasks in the BOWL framework and we have implemented the algorithms using the constraint logic programming framework. One example in the sensor fusion domain is presented to demonstrate the application of BOWL.