14721307
Specifying Interaction Constraints of Software Components for Better Understandability and Interoperability
A vital issue in the correct use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components is the proper understanding of their functionality, quality attributes and ways of operation. Traditionally, COTS component vendors provide some of this information in accompanying documentation. However, the documentation is often informal and likely contains ambiguous and inconsistent statements. Even equipped with interface descriptions clearly defining the basic aspects of component use, such as operation signatures and operating platforms, this documentation does not provide a mathematically sound means for addressing the behavioural interoperability issues in component-based system design. In this paper, we propose a formal but user-friendly component specification approach which augments commercial IDLs with the capability of capturing component interoperability requirements. This approach uses unambiguous temporal operators to define sequencing and concurrency constraints between component operation invocations. Accordingly, it enables precise specifications of how a component provides its services and the correct way in which its services should be used.
1659291
A Software Engineering Perspective for Services Security
Services are usually developed and deployed independently; and systems can be formed by composing relevant services to achieve set goals. In such an open and dynamic environment, security is of paramount importance. We have seen much work in the traditional area of information and network security, focusing on developing various security techniques. More recently, there have been efforts in integrating the security techniques into languages and infrastructural support that are used for developing services and systems. In fact, the development of services and the composition of service-based systems are software engineering activities. As such, they need to be viewed from a software engineering perspective. In this paper, we introduce an approach to services security engineering, to answer the questions like what the security properties of services and service-based systems are and how they meet the user’s security requirements. It deals with the issues of (1) security property characterisation for services, (2) compositional security analysis for service-based systems, and (3) certification of services.
635214
Security Properties of Software Components
This paper classifies security properties of software components into two broad categories: (1) non-functional security (NFS) properties, and (2) properties as security function (SF). Non-functional security properties are codified and embedded with the component functionality, whereas, properties as security functions are employed as external protection to the component. In most cases, users may add additional external protection to the binary form of the component. This classification could be used to determine how much the overall security of the component is dependent on the non-functional security properties of the component and to what extent the additional external protections are required in order to use the component in their specific application environment.
686092
Consistency and interoperability checking for component interaction rules
In component-based software development, it is important to ensure interoperability between components based on their unambiguous semantic descriptions, in order to obtain a viable system. A body of recent work has explored the use of formal languages in specifying component interaction protocols for interoperability checking, but lacks the practicality required by software practitioners for daily use. Faced with this, we have developed a lightweight specification approach to component interaction rules, which has the necessary expressiveness and employs event patterns in rule specification for easy adoption by practitioners. In this paper, we present a FSA-based semantic model for such rules and novel studies of rule consistency and system-wide protocol interoperability for components annotated with interaction rules. We also develop incremental approaches and tools to check these properties, which provide an effective means to discover errors in the design of component interaction rules and component-based system architectures.
52184467
International workshop on service oriented software engineering (IW-SOSE'06)
International workshop on service oriented software engineering (IW-SOSE'06) : In Proceeding of the 28th international Conference on Software Engineering (Shanghai, China, May 20 - 28, 2006). ICSE '06.
9210320
Deriving systems level security properties of component based composite systems
This paper proposes an approach of defining systems-level security properties of component-based composite systems. It argues that the security properties of a composite system can be viewed either from the end-users' point of view, or from the software integrators' point of view. End users look more for the ultimate security goals achieved in the composite system, whereas software integrators are more interested in the compositional security properties of the system in terms of the required and ensured properties. Software integrators need to know how a composite system could be assembled further as a coarse-grained component with other applications. It is equally important for the end user of the system to know the actual security objectives achieved at the systems-level.
101070
Mining coherent dense subgraphs across massive biological networks for functional discovery
MOTIVATION
The rapid accumulation of biological network data translates into an urgent need for computational methods for graph pattern mining. One important problem is to identify recurrent patterns across multiple networks to discover biological modules. However, existing algorithms for frequent pattern mining become very costly in time and space as the pattern sizes and network numbers increase. Currently, no efficient algorithm is available for mining recurrent patterns across large collections of genome-wide networks.


RESULTS
We developed a novel algorithm, CODENSE, to efficiently mine frequent coherent dense subgraphs across large numbers of massive graphs. Compared with previous methods, our approach is scalable in the number and size of the input graphs and adjustable in terms of exact or approximate pattern mining. Applying CODENSE to 39 co-expression networks derived from microarray datasets, we discovered a large number of functionally homogeneous clusters and made functional predictions for 169 uncharacterized yeast genes.


AVAILABILITY
http://zhoulab.usc.edu/CODENSE/
5983751
Fusion of color and infrared video for moving human detection
We approach the task of human silhouette extraction from color and thermal image sequences using automatic image registration. Image registration between color and thermal images is a challenging problem due to the difficulties associated with finding correspondence. However, the moving people in a static scene provide cues to address this problem. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical scheme to automatically find the correspondence between the preliminary human silhouettes extracted from synchronous color and thermal image sequences for image registration. Next, we discuss strategies for probabilistically combining cues from registered color and thermal images for improved human silhouette detection. It is shown that the proposed approach achieves good results for image registration and human silhouette extraction. Experimental results also show a comparison of various sensor fusion strategies and demonstrate the improvement in performance over non-fused cases for human silhouette extraction.
15256739
Performance prediction for individual recognition by gait
Existing gait recognition approaches do not give their theoretical or experimental performance predictions. Therefore, the discriminating power of gait as a feature for human recognition cannot be evaluated. In this paper, we first propose a kinematic-based approach to recognize human by gait. The proposed approach estimates 3D human walking parameters by performing a least squares fit of the 3D kinematic model to the 2D silhouette extracted from a monocular image sequence. Next, a Bayesian-based statistical analysis is performed to evaluate the discriminating power of extracted stationary gait features. Through probabilistic simulation, we not only predict the probability of correct recognition (PCR) with regard to different within-class feature variance, but also obtain the upper bound on PCR with regard to different human silhouette resolution. In addition, the maximum number of people in a database is obtained given the allowable error rate. This is extremely important for gait recognition in large databases.
21192
Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation: A Frequent-Pattern Tree Approach
Mining frequent patterns in transaction databases, time-series databases, and many other kinds of databases has been studied popularly in data mining research. Most of the previous studies adopt an Apriori-like candidate set generation-and-test approach. However, candidate set generation is still costly, especially when there exist a large number of patterns and/or long patterns.In this study, we propose a novel frequent-pattern tree (FP-tree) structure, which is an extended prefix-tree structure for storing compressed, crucial information about frequent patterns, and develop an efficient FP-tree-based mining method, FP-growth, for mining the complete set of frequent patterns by pattern fragment growth. Efficiency of mining is achieved with three techniques: (1) a large database is compressed into a condensed, smaller data structure, FP-tree which avoids costly, repeated database scans, (2) our FP-tree-based mining adopts a pattern-fragment growth method to avoid the costly generation of a large number of candidate sets, and (3) a partitioning-based, divide-and-conquer method is used to decompose the mining task into a set of smaller tasks for mining confined patterns in conditional databases, which dramatically reduces the search space. Our performance study shows that the FP-growth method is efficient and scalable for mining both long and short frequent patterns, and is about an order of magnitude faster than the Apriori algorithm and also faster than some recently reported new frequent-pattern mining methods.
15978422
TruGrid: a self-sustaining trustworthy grid
In typical distributed environments, there are two parties: consumers and providers. Consumers have computational jobs while may lack of computational resources. Providers have relatively underutilized resources. With the rapid advancement in high-speed networks, how to enable the effective and secure interaction between consumers and providers has become increasingly important. Because of the distributed ownership of resources, however, it is a very challenging problem. We propose the TruGrid, a self-sustaining trustworthy grid, to solve it. The TruGrid is a novel loosely connected grid system, which guarantees the incentive of every participant and therefore it is a self-sustaining system. We also identify two security challenges arising in the TruGrid, i.e., free-rider and boaster. The proposed trustworthiness management and the penalty model successfully overcome the challenges. Simulation results demonstrate that the TruGrid is a promising actuator to enable the interaction between autonomous consumers and providers.