A Programming Environment Evaluation Methodology for Object-Oriented Systems

The object-oriented design strategy as both a problem decomposition and system development paradigm has made impressive inroads into the various areas of the computing sciences. Substantial development productivity improvements have been demonstrated in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to user interface design. However, there has been very little progress in the formal characterization of these productivity improvements and in the identification of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. The development and validation of models and metrics of this sort require large amounts of systematically-gathered structural and productivity data. There has, however, been a notable lack of systematically-gathered information on these development environments. A large part of this problem is attributable to the lack of a systematic programming environment evaluation methodology that is appropriate to the evaluation of object-oriented systems

The development of a program analysis environment for Ada

A unit level, Ada software module testing system, called Query Utility Environment for Software Testing of Ada (QUEST/Ada), is described. The project calls for the design and development of a prototype system. QUEST/Ada design began with a definition of the overall system structure and a description of component dependencies. The project team was divided into three groups to resolve the preliminary designs of the parser/scanner: the test data generator, and the test coverage analyzer. The Phase 1 report is a working document from which the system documentation will evolve. It provides history, a guide to report sections, a literature review, the definition of the system structure and high level interfaces, descriptions of the prototype scope, the three major components, and the plan for the remainder of the project. The appendices include specifications, statistics, two papers derived from the current research, a preliminary users' manual, and the proposal and work plan for Phase 2

Concept-based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool (CIQUEST)

This report describes a three-year project (2000-03) undertaken in the Information Studies Department at The University of Sheffield and funded by Resource, The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries. The overall aim of the research was to provide user support for query formulation and reformulation in searching large-scale textual resources including those of the World Wide Web. More specifically the objectives were: to investigate and evaluate methods for the automatic generation and organisation of concepts derived from retrieved document sets, based on statistical methods for term weighting; and to conduct user-based evaluations on the understanding, presentation and retrieval effectiveness of concept structures in selecting candidate terms for interactive query expansion. The TREC test collection formed the basis for the seven evaluative experiments conducted in the course of the project. These formed four distinct phases in the project plan. In the first phase, a series of experiments was conducted to investigate further techniques for concept derivation and hierarchical organisation and structure. The second phase was concerned with user-based validation of the concept structures. Results of phases 1 and 2 informed on the design of the test system and the user interface was developed in phase 3. The final phase entailed a user-based summative evaluation of the CiQuest system. The main findings demonstrate that concept hierarchies can effectively be generated from sets of retrieved documents and displayed to searchers in a meaningful way. The approach provides the searcher with an overview of the contents of the retrieved documents, which in turn facilitates the viewing of documents and selection of the most relevant ones. Concept hierarchies are a good source of terms for query expansion and can improve precision. The extraction of descriptive phrases as an alternative source of terms was also effective. With respect to presentation, cascading menus were easy to browse for selecting terms and for viewing documents. In conclusion the project dissemination programme and future work are outlined

Flight control system design factors for applying automated testing techniques

Automated validation of flight-critical embedded systems is being done at ARC Dryden Flight Research Facility. The automated testing techniques are being used to perform closed-loop validation of man-rated flight control systems. The principal design features and operational experiences of the X-29 forward-swept-wing aircraft and F-18 High Alpha Research Vehicle (HARV) automated test systems are discussed. Operationally applying automated testing techniques has accentuated flight control system features that either help or hinder the application of these techniques. The paper also discusses flight control system features which foster the use of automated testing techniques

A robust digital image watermarking using repetition codes against common attacks

Digital watermarking is hiding the information inside a digital media to protect for such documents against malicious intentions to change such documents or even claim the rights of such documents. Currently the capability of repetition codes on various attacks in not sufficiently studied. In this project, a robust frequency domain watermarking scheme has been implemented using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). The idea of this scheme is to embed an encoded watermark using repetition code (3, 1) inside the cover image pixels based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) embedding technique. The proposed methods have undergone several simulation attacks tests in order to check up and compare their robustness against various attacks, like salt and pepper, speckle, compress, Gaussian, image contrast, resizing and cropping attack. The robustness of the watermarking scheme has been calculated using Peak Signal-To-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Normalized Correlations (NC). In our experiments, the results show that the robustness of a watermark with repetition codes is much better than without repetition code

Assessing the effectiveness of direct gesture interaction for a safety critical maritime application

Multi-touch interaction, in particular multi-touch gesture interaction, is widely believed to give a more natural interaction style. We investigated the utility of multi-touch interaction in the safety critical domain of maritime dynamic positioning (DP) vessels. We conducted initial paper prototyping with domain experts to gain an insight into natural gestures; we then conducted observational studies aboard a DP vessel during operational duties and two rounds of formal evaluation of prototypes - the second on a motion platform ship simulator. Despite following a careful user-centred design process, the final results show that traditional touch-screen button and menu interaction was quicker and less erroneous than gestures. Furthermore, the moving environment accentuated this difference and we observed initial use problems and handedness asymmetries on some multi-touch gestures. On the positive side, our results showed that users were able to suspend gestural interaction more naturally, thus improving situational awareness

A Study of User's Performance and Satisfaction on the Web Based Photo Annotation with Speech Interaction

This paper reports on empirical evaluation study of users' performance and satisfaction with prototype of Web Based speech photo annotation with speech interaction. Participants involved consist of Johor Bahru citizens from various background. They have completed two parts of annotation task; part A involving PhotoASys; photo annotation system with proposed speech interaction and part B involving Microsoft Microsoft Vista Speech Interaction style. They have completed eight tasks for each part including system login and selection of album and photos. Users' performance was recorded using computer screen recording software. Data were captured on the task completion time and subjective satisfaction. Participants need to complete a questionnaire on the subjective satisfaction when the task was completed. The performance data show the comparison between proposed speech interaction and Microsoft Vista Speech interaction applied in photo annotation system, PhotoASys. On average, the reduction in annotation performance time due to using proposed speech interaction style was 64.72% rather than using speech interaction Microsoft Vista style. Data analysis were showed in different statistical significant in annotation performance and subjective satisfaction for both styles of interaction. These results could be used for the next design in related software which involves personal belonging management.Comment: IEEE Publication Format, https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing