Zachary Kurmas

Improving student performance using automated testing of simulated digital logic circuits

JLSCircuitTester helps automate the testing and grading of circuits built using digital logic simulators. With many simulators, the testing and grading of circuits is tedious and time consuming enough that students do not test their circuits thoroughly. JLSCircuitTester addresses this problem by simplifying the means by which users specify sets of input and expected output values. In addition, it automatically verifies that the circuit under test produces the correct output. The projects submitted during the pilot semester contained approximately half as many errors as the previous semesters projects. The automatic evaluation has also simplified the grading of those projects.

Zawilinski: a library for studying grammar in Wiktionary

We present Zawilinski, a Java library that supports the extraction and analysis of grammatical data in Wiktionary. Zawilinski can efficiently (1) filter Wiktionary for content pertaining to a specified language, and (2) extract a words inflections from its Wiktionary entry. We have thus far used Zawilinski to (1) measure the correctness of the inflections for a subset of the Polish words in the English Wiktionary and to (2) show that this grammatical data is very stable. (Only 131 out of 4748 Polish words have had their inflection data corrected.) We also explain Zawilinskis key features and discuss how it can be used to simplify the development of additional grammar-based analyses.

Using the Distiller to direct the development of self-configuration software

Many storage systems have become so complex that that the system administrators salary represents almost half of the total cost of ownership. One approach to reducing this cost is to develop storage systems that can configure and manage themselves. Unfortunately, our ability to develop such software has been hindered by a limited understanding of how workloads and storage systems interact. In earlier work we presented the design of the Distiller - our tool that automates the process of finding a workloads key performance-affecting attributes. In this paper, we distill three production workloads and show that the values of the chosen attributes contain information that will help self-configuring disk array to choose a reasonable prefetch length and RAID stripe unit size. We also discuss how the chosen attributes may help direct the development of algorithms that compute near-optimal prefetch lengths and stripe unit sizes.

Enumerating Communities for a Deeper Understanding of Community Finding

Often new insights and advancements are made by a detailed study of the problem and the solution space. The area of community finding has had many algorithms proposed recently, but to our knowledge there have not been any detailed studies of the solution space. In this paper, we present two algorithms for enumerating and unranking the possible valid community assignments for a network. To demonstrate the value of our algorithms, we also present some interesting insights gained by examining the solution space of some small networks.

JLS: a pedagogically targeted logic design and simulation tool

JLS is a GUI-based digital logic simulation tool specifically designed for use in a wide range of digital logic and computer organization courses. It is comparable in features and functionality to commercial products, but includes many student and instructor-friendly aspects not found in those products such as state-machine and truth table editors, extensive error checking, and multiple simulation result views. Students quickly become proficient in its use, enabling them to concentrate on circuit design and debugging issues. The circuit drawing interface is convenient enough to allow instructors to use it for classroom presentations, and circuits can be modified and tested so quickly that it promotes exploring alternatives not prepared for in advance.

Board game project ideas for CS 1 and CS 2 (abstract only)

Participants will have fun learning and playing relatively unknown board games that are especially suitable for programming projects. We will present games where (1) all players can view the same screen, (2) the board is reasonably simple to program, and (3) there are several elements of the game that relate strongly to a common CS 1, CS 2, or discrete math topic. After we explain the rules and highlight the CS-related elements of the games, participants will have the opportunity to play the games, ask questions, and suggest rule variations that will improve the resulting programming project. See http://www.cis.gvsu.edu/~kurmasz/GamesWorkshop/ for more details and a list of games that may be presented. Laptop Optional.

The difference between optimal and germane communities

Networks often exhibit community structure and there are many algorithms that have been proposed to detect the communities. Different sets of communities have different characteristics. Community finding algorithms that are designed to optimize a single statistic tend to detect communities with a narrow set of characteristics. In this paper, we present evidence for the differences in community characteristics. In addition, we present two new community finding algorithms that allow analysts to find community sets that are not only high quality but also germane to the characteristics that are desired.

MIPSUnit: A Unit Testing Framework for MIPS Assembly

We present MIPSUnit, a unit test framework for MIPS assembly. MIPSUnits primary benefit is that it reduces the time needed to grade assembly language assignments. It also provides a time-efficient means for giving students additional testing experience; therefore, it can serve as one component of a curriculum-wide emphasis on testing. MIPSUnit is a suite of two tools: MUnit, which allows users to test their assembly code with JUnit tests, and MSpec, which uses RSpec-style unit tests.

Exhaustive Community Enumeration in Parallel

An algorithm to evaluate/count all the possible communities of a graph is presented. An associated unrank function is described. An implementation of an existing algorithm to evaluate all the possible partitions of a graph, based on an unrank function, is presented as well. Performance results of the parallelizations of these algorithms obtained on a shared memory machine, a cluster of workstations and a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) are included.

MIPSUnit: A Unit Testing Framework for MIPS Assembly (Abstract Only)

We present MIPSUnit, a unit test framework for MIPS assembly. MIPSUnits primary benefit is that it reduces the time needed to grade assembly language assignments. It also provides a time-efficient means for providing students additional testing experience. (We believe that students should be exposed to testing throughout the curriculum --- including their Computer Organization and/or Assembly Language courses.) MIPSUnit is a suite of two tools: MUnit, which allows users to test their assembly code with JUnit tests, and MSpec, which uses RSpec-style unit tests