Jose I. Benedetto

Improving software engineering education through an empirical approach: lessons learned from capstone teaching experiences

Software Engineering is an important area within industry and academia. Empirical software engineering has grown in importance in the software engineering research and education community. This means that it has become very relevant to include empirical studies or practices into computer science and software engineering curricula. This paper shows the results of applying an empirical approach to teaching software engineering through real-life projects. The computer science capstone experience is designed to bridge the gap from university expectations to those of industry.

MobiCOP: A Scalable and Reliable Mobile Code Offloading Solution

Code offloading is a popular technique for extending the natural capabilities of mobile devices by migrating processor-intensive tasks to resource-rich surrogates. Despite multiple platforms for offloading being available in academia, these frameworks have yet to permeate the industry. One of the primary reasons for this is limited experimentation in practical settings and lack of reliability, scalability, and options for distribution. This paper introduces MobiCOP, a new code offloading framework designed from the ground up with these requirements in mind. It features a novel design fully self-contained in a library and offers compatibility with most stock Android devices available today. Compared to local task executions, MobiCOP offers performance improvements of up to 17x and increased battery efficiency of up to 25x, shows minimum performance degradation in environments with unstable networks, and features an autoscaling module that allows its server counterpart to scale to an arbitrary number of offloading requests. It is compatible with the most relevant Android technologies optimized for heavy computation (NDK and Renderscript) and has so far been well received by fellow mobile developers. We hope MobiCOP will help bring mobile code offloading closer to the industry realm.

Rethinking the mobile code offloading paradigm: from concept to practice

Mobile code offloading is a relatively well known proposal for enhancing the capabilities of mobile platforms by migrating resource intensive tasks to resource rich surrogates hosted in the cloud. Yet, most of the research in the area has been focused on theoretical gains achieved through custom OS versions in ideal scenarios. This paper presents MobiCOP, a new code offloading platform that seeks to address the reproducibility issues of other offloading solutions by encapsulating all offloading logic in a library and offering compatibility with major IaaS providers. MobiCOP achieves comparable performance and battery improvements with gains of up to a factor of 11 in both areas. Moreover, MobiCOP has also been tested in scenarios with unreliable connectivity, as is usually the case in actual mobile networks, where it has shown that it still manages to outperform local task executions by a fair margin.

Towards native code offloading platforms for image processing in mobile applications: a case study

In this paper, we present a real-life case study to show the advantages of a new code offloading solution focused on improving both performance and energy consumption for image processing mobile applications. From our experiments, we found that offloading an image processing task would allow up to 5.7x speedup and 85% of reduction in energy consumption for low-end devices, and 1.7x speedup and 64.3% of reduction in energy consumption for high-end devices.

A Cloud-Based Mobile System for Improving Vital Signs Monitoring During Hospital Transfers

As the number of patients in hospitals constantly grows, the need for hospital transfers is directly affected. Hospital transfers can be required for several reasons but they are most commonly made when the diagnostic and therapeutic facilities required for a patient are not available locally. Transferring a critical patient between hospitals is commonly associated with risk of death and complications. At the same time, advances in wearable technologies and health applications offer new possibilities to support healthcare. This raises the question: How can we improve the monitoring of vital signs of transported patients through use of information technology and communication services? This paper presents a cloud-based mobile system to support decision-making in the transportation of patients in critical condition. The Rapid Emergency Medicine Score (REMS) scale was used as an outcome variable, being a useful scale to assess the risk profile of critical patients requiring transfers between hospitals. The platform is the result of research and development work performed during the last two years.

Code offloading solutions for audio processing in mobile healthcare applications: a case study

In this paper, we present a real-life case study of a mobile healthcare application that leverages code offloading techniques to accelerate the execution of a complex deep neural network algorithm for analyzing audio samples. Resource-intensive machine learning tasks take a significant time to complete on high-end devices, while lower-end devices may outright crash when attempting to run them. In our experiments, offloading granted the former a 3.6x performance improvement, and up to 80% reduction in energy consumption; while the latter gained the capability of running a process they originally could not.

A Cloud-Based Mobile System to Improve Project Management Skills in Software Engineering Capstone Courses

Capstone project-based courses offer a favorable environment for the development of student skills through an approach incorporating theoretical and practical components. However, it is often difficult to successfully coordinate between students, stakeholders, and the academic team. The absence of suitable tools for addressing this issue, along with time constraints, often prevents students from attaining the expected course outcomes. This raises the question “How can we improve project management skills in computing majors through the use of technology-enhanced learning environments?” This paper presents a Cloud-based mobile system for supporting project management under a framework of best practices in software engineering capstone courses. The Kanban approach was used as a core of the proposed system. Kanban boards are very popular in the software industry today. It has been empirically shown that they provide increased motivation and project activity control due to their inherent simplicity. This helps the students and academic team be aware of the project context as it aids in preventing ambiguities, flaws, or uncertainties in the development of software artifacts.

Towards a practical framework for code offloading in the Internet of Things

Abstract Mobile code offloading is a popular technique for enhancing the apparent capabilities of resource constrained devices. It is of particular interest for developers trying to push ever more complex algorithms into embedded devices that belong to the Internet of Things (IoT). Although there is much research into this area in the realm of smartphones and tablets, the same cannot be said for IoT devices, for which very few code offloading frameworks exist. This paper presents MobiCOP-IoT, an extension of the MobiCOP mobile code offloading solution for the smartphone and tablet ecosystem, that supports embedded devices and Google’s newest IoT initiative, Android Things. MobiCOP-IoT allows developers to deploy surrogates on both distant clouds and proximate nodes located on the edge. As such, MobiCOP-IoT enabled applications can take advantage of the benefits of mobile edge computing to further enhance their capabilities. We tested MobiCOP-IoT in a variety of scenarios and we found improvements of up to 9 times in terms of performance and energy for centralized cloud deployments, and up to 16 times in the case of edge scenarios. Moreover, we show the platform is capable of automatic horizontal scaling, which allows it to adapt to varying network traffic conditions; and multitenancy, wherein a single server instance is capable of attending multiple clients’ requests with minimal loss in performance.

Improving Healthcare Team Collaboration in Hospital Transfers through Cloud-Based Mobile Systems

It is a clinical fact that better patient flow management in and between hospitals improves quality of care, resource utilization, and cost efficiency. As the number of patients in hospitals constantly grows, the need for hospital transfers is directly affected. Interhospital transfers can be required for several reasons but they are most commonly made when the diagnostic and therapeutic facilities required for a patient are not available locally. Transferring a critical patient between hospitals is commonly associated with risk of death and complications. This raises the question: How can we improve healthcare team collaboration in hospital transfers through the use of emerging information technology and communication services? This paper presents a cloud-based mobile system for supporting team collaboration and decision-making in the transportation of patients in critical condition. The Rapid Emergency Medicine Score (REMS) scale was used as an outcome variable, being a useful scale to assess the risk profile of critical patients requiring transfers between hospitals. This helps medical staff to adopt proper risk-prevention measures when handling a transfer and to react on time if any complications arise in transit.