adPerf: Characterizing the Performance of Third-party Ads

Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises several privacy and security concerns that are actively studied in recent years. On the other hand, given the ability of today's browsers to load dynamic web pages with complex animations and Javascript, online advertising has also transformed and can have a significant impact on webpage performance. The performance cost of online ads is critical since it eventually impacts user satisfaction as well as their Internet bill and device energy consumption. In this paper, we apply an in-depth and first-of-a-kind performance evaluation of web ads. Unlike prior efforts that rely primarily on adblockers, we perform a fine-grained analysis on the web browser's page loading process to demystify the performance cost of web ads. We aim to characterize the cost by every component of an ad, so the publisher, ad syndicate, and advertiser can improve the ad's performance with detailed guidance. For this purpose, we develop an infrastructure, adPerf, for the Chrome browser that classifies page loading workloads into ad-related and main-content at the granularity of browser activities (such as Javascript and Layout). Our evaluations show that online advertising entails more than 15% of browser page loading workload and approximately 88% of that is spent on JavaScript. We also track the sources and delivery chain of web ads and analyze performance considering the origin of the ad contents. We observe that 2 of the well-known third-party ad domains contribute to 35% of the ads performance cost and surprisingly, top news websites implicitly include unknown third-party ads which in some cases build up to more than 37% of the ads performance cost

Unveiling the importance and evolution of design components through the “Tree of Blockchain”

This study covers the evolutionary development of blockchain technologies over the last 11 years (2009–2019) and sheds lights on potential areas of innovation in heretofore unexplored sub-components. For this purpose, we collected and analyzed detailed data on 107 different blockchain technologies and studied their component-wise technological evolution. The diversity of their designs was captured by deconstructing the blockchains using the Tasca-Tessone taxonomy to build what we call the “tree of blockchain” composed of blockchain main and sub-components. With the support of information theory and phylogenetics, we found that most design explorations have been conducted within the components in the areas of consensus mechanisms and cryptographic primitives. We also show that some sub-components like Consensus Immutability and Failure Tolerance, Access and Control layer, and Access Supply Management have predictive power over other sub-components. We finally found that few dominant design models—the genetic driving clusters of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP—influenced the evolutionary paths of most of the succeeding blockchains

On Semantic Word Cloud Representation

We study the problem of computing semantic-preserving word clouds in which semantically related words are close to each other. While several heuristic approaches have been described in the literature, we formalize the underlying geometric algorithm problem: Word Rectangle Adjacency Contact (WRAC). In this model each word is associated with rectangle with fixed dimensions, and the goal is to represent semantically related words by ensuring that the two corresponding rectangles touch. We design and analyze efficient polynomial-time algorithms for some variants of the WRAC problem, show that several general variants are NP-hard, and describe a number of approximation algorithms. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that our theoretically-sound algorithms outperform the early heuristics

Testing Responsive Web Pages Using the Consistency of Automated Web Pages

The introduction of mobile devices with smaller screens motivates the need for web pages that work correctly across many different devices—referred to as responsive web design. Mobile access is a key feature for companies: both to reach new customers, and also to provide an enhanced service to existing customers. Testing the correct appearance of a responsive web page on different devices is not a trivial task because there are no standard rules for responsiveness, and the layout may need to be significantly rearranged in order to fit on smaller screens. This dissertation describes an investigation into the automated test case generation for responsive web pages. The aim of the project is to develop a novel approach to test responsive web pages for the consistency of their appearance. This thesis develops the idea of consistent web pages which are not identical but provide essentially the same interface to the user. The goal of this project is to develop approach on how to do automated test case generation of the appearance of responsive web page and to evaluate this approach by building a test tool that automate the testing of consistency of responsive web pages against the master copy of the page. Several rules were implemented for comparing web pages displayed on different screens. The results show that the approach taken is an effective way of automating testing for consistency. This dissertation also identifies a number of unanswered research issues to be addressed by future work

Testing Responsive Web Pages Using the Consistency of Automated Web Pages

The introduction of mobile devices with smaller screens motivates the need for web pages that work correctly across many different devices—referred to as responsive web design. Mobile access is a key feature for companies: both to reach new customers, and also to provide an enhanced service to existing customers. Testing the correct appearance of a responsive web page on different devices is not a trivial task because there are no standard rules for responsiveness, and the layout may need to be significantly rearranged in order to fit on smaller screens. This dissertation describes an investigation into the automated test case generation for responsive web pages. The aim of the project is to develop a novel approach to test responsive web pages for the consistency of their appearance. This thesis develops the idea of consistent web pages which are not identical but provide essentially the same interface to the user. The goal of this project is to develop approach on how to do automated test case generation of the appearance of responsive web page and to evaluate this approach by building a test tool that automate the testing of consistency of responsive web pages against the master copy of the page. Several rules were implemented for comparing web pages displayed on different screens. The results show that the approach taken is an effective way of automating testing for consistency. This dissertation also identifies a number of unanswered research issues to be addressed by future work

The tree of blockchain

This study covers the evolutionary development of blockchain technologies over the last 11 years (2009 – 2019) and sheds lights on potential areas of innovation in heretofore unexplored subcomponents. For this purpose, we collected and analysed detailed data on 107 different blockchain technologies and studied their component-wise technological evolution. The diversity of their designs was captured by deconstructing the blockchains using the Tasca-Tessone taxonomy (2019) to build what we call the "tree of blockchain" composed of blockchain main and sub-components. With the support of information theory and phylogenetics, we found that most design explorations have been conducted within the components in the areas of consensus mechanisms and cryptographic primitives. We also show that some sub-components like Consensus Immutability and Failure Tolerance, Access and Control layer and Access Supply Management have predictive power over other sub-components. We finally found that few dominant design models - the genetic driving clusters of Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP - influenced the evolutionary paths of most of the succeeding blockchains

Exploiting Multi-Category Characteristics and Unified Framework to Extract Web Content

Abstract Extracting web content is to obtain the required data embedded in web pages, usually including structured records, such as product information, and text content, such as news. Web pages use a large number of HTML tags to organize and to present various information. Both knowing little about the structures of web pages and mixing kinds of information in web pages are making the extraction process very challenging to guarantee extraction performance and extraction adaptability. This study proposes a unified web content extraction framework that can be applied in various web environments to extract both structured records and text content. First, we construct a characteristic container to hold kinds of characteristics related with extraction objectives, including visual text information, content semantics(instead of HTML tag semantics), web page structures, etc. Second, the above characteristics are integrated into an extraction framework for extraction decisions on different web sites. Especially, we put forward different strategies, path aggregation for extracting text content and HMM model for structured records, to locate the extraction area by exploiting both those extraction characteristics. Comparative experiments on multiple web sites with popular extraction methods, including CETR, CETD and CNBE, show that our proposed extraction method can provide better extraction precision and extraction adaptability

EVALUATION OF RECOMMENDED MODULAR EMAIL BUILDING APPROACHES

Customer relationship management acts as the backbone of marketing. For any company marketing is the most important sector to promote a company and attract customers. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of digital marketing. However, the cost of design and development is time consuming and redundant. Marketers and project managers are frequently unassertive about how to solve these issues. Although there are blogs, articles and services available for marketing email development, the lack of research in the effectiveness of email building architecture bolsters the need for this study. The project presents an architecture that modularizes the way email architecture is built. The architecture is demonstrated using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Further the project explains how the same architecture can be implemented using the salesforce marketing cloud. With the help of a case study the project establishes the importance of modularizing email development which supports proposed architecture. The result of the case study proves that modularizing email creation as proposed reduces time required for email development on a large scale. Suggested areas for further study include testing in large scale organizational settings and doing a quantitative analysis. Another area of improvement is porting this architecture to other customer relationship platforms

Cognitive Case Studies of Chinese in Discourse Analysis and Classroom Teaching

In the first case study, a piece of recent BBC news reported on Chinese netizens leaving random but funny comments on a Western website attracted people’s attention. A closer look at those comments reveals that understanding the Chinese netizens’ comments requires metaphorical and cultural knowledge. This study starts with theoretical explanations on metaphor from different perspectives and then presents cultural variations in Western and Eastern metaphors. With theories and cultures grounded, a detailed analysis was done to show people without Chinese cultural background how to understand the Chinese Internet metaphors that drew people’s attention. The second case study takes a critical discourse analysis approach to investigate metaphors in political discourses in Chinese. Five pieces of Chinese government reports were studied. Metaphor, revealing how we think about the world, encompasses cultural and social factors. It functions differently for different communication purpose. The current study proves the persuasive role of metaphor in political discourse which can evoke people’s emotional response, for the governing group to have an ideological influence on how people conceptualize things. The third case study applies word recognition as part of the classroom instruction in the form of meaning, character and pronunciation, to investigate whether training on either two of the three constituents can improve students’ vocabulary acquisition. The results showed that, for new learners, the bond between characters and either pronunciation or meaning is weak. Training in either character with meaning or character with pronunciation has positive effects and training to enhance the relation between character and pronunciation also retrieve meaning, which brings a three-way benefit