13206707
A runtime monitoring and validation framework for Web service interactions
Web services are designed for composition and use by third parties through dynamic discovery. As such, the issue of interoperability between services is of great importance to ensure that the services can work together towards the overall application goals. In particular, the interaction protocols of a service need to be implemented and used properly so that the service composition can conduct itself in an orderly fashion. In our previous work, we have proposed a lightweight, pattern/constraint-based approach to specifying service interaction protocols. It has been incorporated into OWL-S for service developers to describe service interaction constraints. In this paper, we present a framework for monitoring the run-time interaction behaviour of Web services and validating the behaviour against their pre-defined interaction constraints. The framework involves interception of service interactions/messages, representation of interaction constraints using finite state automata, and conformance checking of service interactions against interaction constraints. As such, the framework provides a useful tool for validating the implementation and use of services regarding their interaction behaviour
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.
17910560
Providing configuration management support in software engineering environments
Software configuration management (CM) is a key element of any software development project. A software engineering environment should not only provide support for software products and software processes in general, but also pay attention to high-level software engineering concepts like CM. In this paper, we present an overview of our approach to software engineering environments and demonstrate how CM can be achieved in such environments with minimal effort by codifying a CM model. Issues addressed include the structures and consistency of CM components and their relationships, the definition and activation of CM operations, and the definition of presentation views that facilitate CM activities.
3251598
TRAM: a tool for requirements and architecture management
Management of system requirements and system architectures is part of any software engineering project. But it is usually very tedious and error prone. In particular, managing the traceability between system requirements and system architectures is critical but difficult. The article introduces a tool, TRAM, for managing system requirements, system architectures and more importantly the traceability between them. Its primary design objective is "being practical" and ready for practitioners to use without much overhead. The issues discussed in the paper include an information model that underlies the capture of requirements, architectures and their traceability, a set of document templates implementing the information model, and the support tool.
1745958
Industrial Perspective on the Usefulness of Design Rationale for Software Maintenance: A Survey
Software maintenance is widely known as a problematic area that may consume up to 80% of a software project's resources. It has been claimed that providing an effective mechanism to access design rationale (DR) has great potential to improve software maintenance processes. However, we postulate that the first step towards exploring the potential of DR for improving software maintenance should be to gain a better understanding of what DR means to practitioners, how valuable they consider DR to be and how they use DR. To determine the perceived usefulness of DR, we surveyed a large number of software designers. This exploratory study has discovered that practitioners recognize the importance of DR to understand existing designs and frequently use it to reason about proposed modifications. The results of this study establish that DR is perceived by practitioners to be useful and the efforts required to capture DR for the purpose of maintenance are worthwhile. The findings allow us to identify areas of further research on DR support that have the potential to improve the maintenance process
629310
Semantic and Usage Packaging for Software Components
Current models for software components have made component-based software engineering practical. However, these models are limited in the sense that their support for the specification of software components primarily deals with syntactic issues. To facilitate interoperability and proper use of software components, more comprehensive specification of these components is required. In this paper, we present an approach to software component packaging aimed at comprehensive component specification, especially its support for semantic and usage specification.
43402198
Mining Closed Relational Graphs with Connectivity Constraints
Relational graphs are widely used in modeling large scale networks such as biological networks and social networks. In a relational graph, each node represents a distinct entity while each edge represents a relationship between entities. Various algorithms were developed to discover interesting patterns from a single relational graph (Z. Wu et al., 1993). However, little attention has been paid to the patterns that are hidden in multiple relational graphs. One interesting pattern in relational graphs is frequent highly connected subgraph which can identify recurrent groups and clusters. In social networks, this kind of pattern corresponds to communities where people are strongly associated. For example, if several researchers co-author some papers, attend the same conferences, and refer their works from each other, it strongly indicates that they are studying the same research theme.
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/
2286606
Scene-Level Analysis for Tennis Sports Video using Weighted Linear Combination of Visual Cues
We present a scene-level analysis system that takes TV broadcasted tennis footage as input and produces a behavior analysis of the moving-players in the scene. To achieve this functionality, our algorithm relies on two modular blocks. The first one detects and tracks a number of key objects in the image domain, like moving-players and the playing-field. Afterwards, a camera-calibration algorithm is applied that uses the lines of the court as a reference and transforms image coordinates to physical positions to compute the camera parameters. The second block firstly models several important events of a tennis game, such as service and net-approach, based on four real-world visual features provided by the first block. This paper proposes a new improved model, since it weights the importance of each visual cue to different events, rather than providing a simple combination of these four visual cues as was done in previous work. Based on the new model, we can accurately determine what kind of event the current input frame belongs to. Furthermore, we detect the start time and end time of each event using a simple but efficient temporal filter. Our proposed system is capable of classifying each tennis play into three semantic categories, which are popular and familiar to most viewers. This paper presents details of the system, together with results on a number of tennis video sequences.
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.
14694684
A mutual anonymous peer-to-peer protocol design
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has become a popular application model because of its easy resource sharing pattern and powerful query search scheme. However, decentralized P2P architecture is scarcely seen to deploy the anonymity on its peers. In this paper, we propose a mutual anonymity protocol, called Secret-sharing-based Mutual Anonymity Protocol (SSMP), for decentralized P2P systems. SSMP employs Shamirs' secret sharing scheme to allow peers to issue queries and responders to deliver requested files anonymously. Compared with previous designs, SSMP achieves mutual anonymity in P2P systems with a high degree of anonymity and a low cryptography processing overhead. We evaluate SSMP by comprehensive simulations.