Maja Štula

Agent based data collecting in a forest fire monitoring system

In forest fire protection systems 24 hour surveillance is of most importance. Real time data must be acquired to react fast enough to suppress fire occurrence or to minimize damage made by forest fires. In forest fire monitoring systems, usually a large area must be controlled. Real time data has to be collected and processed in time. When the amount of data reaches critical volume, modern software techniques have to be implemented in order to accomplish system goals. In this work we have implemented agent technology on data retrieval and processing. A multi-agent system for real-time data collection and processing is described. This work is a part of a more complex integral project of forest fire protection in Split-Dalmatia County. The integral forest fire protection system will be based on the information system for integration of all activities connected with early fire detection by 24 hours video and meteorological monitoring, management of forest-fire fighting and post-fire recuperation of burned landscape

Identifying Code of Individual Features in Client-Side Web Applications

Web applications are one of todays fastest growing software systems. Structurally, they are composed of two parts: the server side, used for data access and business logic, and the client side, used as a user interface. In recent years, with developers building complex interfaces, the client side is playing an increasingly important role. Unfortunately, the techniques and tools used to support development are not as advanced as in other disciplines. From the users perspective, the client side offers a number of features that are relatively easy to distinguish. However, the same cannot be said for their implementation details. This makes the understanding, maintenance, and reuse of code difficult. The goal of the work presented in this paper is to improve reusability, maintainability, and performance of client-side web applications by identifying the code that implements a particular feature. We have evaluated the approach based on three different experiments: extracting features, extracting library functionalities, and page optimization. The evaluation shows that the method is able to identify the implementation details of individual features, and that by extracting the identified code, a considerable reduction in code size and increase in performance can be achieved.

Generating feature usage scenarios in client-side web applications

Client-side web applications are highly-dynamic event-driven GUI applications where the majority of code is executed as a response to user-generated events. Many software engineering activities (e.g. testing) require sequences of actions (i.e. usage scenarios) that execute the application code with high coverage. Specifying these usage scenarios is a difficult and time-consuming activity. This is especially true when generating usage scenarios for a particular feature because it requires in-depth knowledge of application behavior and understanding of the underlying implementation. In this paper we present a method for automatic generation of feature usage scenarios. The method is based on dynamic analysis and systematic exploration of the applications event and value space. We have evaluated the approach in a case study, and the evaluation shows that the method is capable of identifying usage scenarios for a particular feature. We have also performed the evaluation on a suite of web applications, and the results show that an increase in coverage can be achieved, when compared to the initial coverage obtained by loading the page and executing registered events.

Reusing web application user-interface controls

Highly interactive web applications that offer user experience and responsiveness of desktop applications are becoming increasingly popular. They are often composed out of visually distinctive user-interface (UI) elements that encapsulate a certain behavior - the so called UI controls. Similar controls are often used in a large number of web pages, and facilitating their reuse could offer considerable benefits. Unfortunately, because of a very short time-to-market, and a fast pace of technology development, preparing controls for reuse is usually not a primary concern. In this paper we present a semi-automatic method, and the accompanying tool, for extracting and reusing web controls. The developer selects the control and performs a series of interactions that represent the behavior he/she wishes to reuse. In the background, the execution is analyzed and all code and resources necessary for the stand-alone functioning of the control are extracted. Optionally, the user can immediately reuse the extracted control by automatically embedding it in an already existing page.

Intelligent forest fire monitoring system

This paper presents iForestFire, an Environmental Monitoring Information System for forest fire protection. The system is composed of several components, each having a particular function. Automatic fire detection is a crucial component of the system. It is based on various complex image processing algorithms. Complexity of the system also emerges from integration, based on multi agent technology, of different environment information. The presented system contributes to the environment protection and is in use in Croatia for several years.

A Recursive TF-ISF Based Sentence Retrieval Method with Local Context

Sentence retrieval consists of retrieving relevant sentences from a document base in response to a query. Question answering, novelty detection, summarization, opinion mining and information provenance make use of sentence retrieval. Most of the sentence retrieval methods are trivial adaptations of document retrieval methods. However some newer sentence retrieval methods based on the language modeling framework successfully use some kind of context of sentences. Unlike that there is no successful improvement of the TF-ISF method that takes into account the context of sentences. In this paper we propose a recursive TF-ISF based method that takes into account the local context of a sentence. The context is considered the previous and next sentence of current sentence. We compared the new method to the TF-ISF baseline and to an earlier unsuccessful method that also incorporates a similar context into TF-ISF. We got statistically significant improvements of the results in comparison to both of the methods. Additional benefit of our method is the clear explicit model of the context that will allow us to automatically generate a document representation with context suitable for sentence retrieval which is important for our future work.

Vision based wildfire and natural risk observers

Wildfires are natural risk phenomena that cause significant economic and environmental damage. In wildfire fighting strategy it is important to detect the wildfire in its initial stage and to apply, as soon as possible, the most appropriate fire fighting action. In both cases wildfire monitoring and surveillance systems are of great importance, so in the last decade the interest for various wildfire monitoring and surveillance systems has increased, both on the research and the implementation level. This paper describes one such system named iForestFire. It is an example of advanced terrestrial vision based wildfire monitoring and surveillance system, today widely used in various Croatian National and Nature Parks and regions, but it is also a system in constant development and improvement, both on theoretical and practical level. This paper describes its last improvements in video detection part that are based on notation of observer, cogent confabulation theory and mechanism of thought. Inclusion of cogent confabulation theory allows us to expend the use of existing wildfire observers to more general natural risk observers.

Extracting client-side web user interface controls

Web applications that are highly dynamic and interactive on the client side are becoming increasingly popular. As with any other type of applications, reuse offers considerable benefits. In this paper we present our first results on extracting easily reusable web user-interface controls. We have developed a tool called Firecrow that facilitates the extraction of reusable client side controls by dynamically analyzing a series of interactions, carried out by the developer, in order to extract the source code and the resources necessary for the reuse of the desired web user-interface control.

Engineering of holonic multi agent intelligent forest fire monitoring system

In this paper we describe holonic multi agent architecture of iForestFire Intelligent Forest Fire Monitoring System through phases and activities of the holonic software engineering process. iForestFire is a web-based information system used in all aspects of forest fire management. Its central part is an artificial perception system, observer network, whose aim is early detection of forest fires. Although the agents that the system consists of are inseparably connected, they can be clustered in several independent systems that can be used separately. Independent holons are built from agents that are part of the observer network, as well as other agents with auxiliary functionalities.

Multi-Agent systems in distributed computation

The paper investigates the possibility of multi-agent systems application in distributed computation illustrated by an example of generic distributed computation multi-agent system. The system is defined upon finite state machine architecture with agent internal and external behavior. For testing purpose, the model was implemented in Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM). FCM is qualitative modeling and simulation technique that is based on discrete distributed computation. Our proposed multi-agent system has shown expected characteristics so the conclusion is that the proposed generic model could be used as a foundation for building distributed computation multi-agent systems.