Design of instrumentation for metabolic monitoring of the Adélie penguin : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Physics at Massey University

The motivating question for the work described in this thesis was "How does the Adélie penguin cope with cold?" It was reasoned that the time-scale of temperature changes in Antarctica precluded all but metabolic and physiological responses. To determine these, a system capable of measuring and recording these biological variables in the penguins natural environment, was designed. A device, based on the principles of near infrared spectroscopy, was developed that could measure the relative oxygen saturation of haemoglobin and the reduction state of cytochrome oxidase as well as heart rate and blood volume. The completed device was housed in a black, waterproof, plastic container, measuring 65mm x 92mm x 25mm and weighing 132.7g. Co-ordination of measurements was achieved with operating system-like control software implemented in Motorola HC11 assembly code. Synchronous detection was used for signal acquisition and a pulse algorithm, implemented in assembly code, allowed real time pulse measurement from the input signals. Programs were written in Matlab and C++ to investigate the characteristics and limits of these techniques. Preliminary testing of the device on human subjects successfully showed changes in metabolic state as a result of physical activity. The results of field testing on Adélie penguins were unable to answer the original question due to a number of physical factors. However, the success of human trials suggests that, with modification and improvement, the device has potential as a valuable research instrument, applicable to a variety of other species

Requirements for a software maintenance support environment

This thesis surveys the field of software maintenance, and addresses the maintenance requirements of the Aerospace Industry, which is developing inige projects, running over many years, and sometimes safety critical in nature (e.g. ARIANE 5, HERMES, COLUMBUS). Some projects are collaborative between distributed European partners. The industry will have to cope in the near and far future with the maintenance of these products and it will be essential to improve the software maintenance process and the environments for maintenance. Cost effective software maintenance needs an efficient, high quality and homogeneous environment or Integrated Project Support Environment (IPSE). Most IPSE work has addressed software development, and lias not fully considered the requirements of software maintenance. The aim of this project is to draw up a set of priorities and requirements for a Maintenance IPSE. An IPSE, however can only support a software maintenance method. The first stage of this project is to deline 'software maintenance best practice' addressing the organisational, managerial and technical aspects, along with an evaluation of software maintenance tools for Aerospace systems. From this and an evaluation of current IPSEs, the requirements for a Software Maintenance Support Environment are presented for maintenance of Aerospace software

Teaching by Practice: Shaping Secure Coding Mentalities through Cybersecurity CTFs

The use of the Capture the Flag (CTF)-style competitions has grown popular in a variety of environments as a method to improve or reinforce cybersecurity techniques. However, while these competitions have shown promise in student engagement, enjoyment, and the teaching of essential workforce cybersecurity concepts, many of these CTF challenges have largely focused on cybersecurity as a general topic. Further, most in-school CTF challenges are designed with technical institutes in mind, prepping only experienced or upper-level students in cybersecurity studies for real-world challenges. Our paper aims to focus on the setting of a liberal arts institute, emphasizing secure coding as the focus of CTF-engaged learning for beginner to upper-level undergraduate students. We propose a survey system to evaluate the secure coding mentality of our students before and after taking these challenges, as well as an easily-hosted, low-resource CTF platform that students can access either in or outside of the classroom. We have found this system to be moderately effective at framing and improving the secure coding mentalities of our students

Investigating the Transfer of Metacognition to Domains Distinct From Mathematics

The purpose of the present research was to investigate the transfer of metacognition from mathematics to other domains for a post-secondary population. A systematic literature review revealed potential transferability for metacognitive strategic knowledge, metacognitive planning, monitoring, and debugging. Mevarech and Kramarksi’s (1997) IMPROVE model was modified to incorporate the explicit instruction of transfer and then used as the metacognitive intervention for a beginner-level calculus course at the University of Windsor. This occurred over a period of five weeks with n = 90 participants for each of the experimental and control groups. A concurrent, triangulated mixed-method research design was employed to assess metacognition and self-regulated learning: metacognition was assessed quantitatively using Schraw and Dennison’s (1994) Metacognitive Awareness Inventory; recordings of participants’ conversations (i.e., “in-course data”) and recordings of post-intervention interviews with select participants (i.e., “interview data”) constituted the qualitative data. In-course data employed the use of quantitative (i.e., frequency-counting and graphical presentation of the data) and qualitative (i.e., thematic) analyses; interview data employed the use of thematic analysis. Data were collected and analysed separately before being integrated during the interpretation of data. Transfer of metacognitive strategic knowledge, self-regulation, general learning, and metacognitive regulation (i.e., planning, monitoring, and debugging) into near, far, immediate, and some delayed contexts was affirmed. Analysis of the evidence identified the necessity of novel, difficult contexts to facilitate advanced metacognitive behaviours. The necessary incorporation of metacognition into routine learning experiences was affirmed to facilitate transfer into delayed contexts. The interview, intended as an instrument of metacognition, also operated as an intervention itself. Recommendations for future study are included

Software test and evaluation study phase I and II : survey and analysis

Issued as Final report, Project no. G-36-661 (continues G-36-636; includes A-2568

Operating system profiling via latency analysis

Operating systems are complex and their behavior depends on many factors. Source code, if available, does not directly help one to understand the OS’s behavior, as the behavior depends on actual workloads and external inputs. Runtime profiling is a key technique to prove new concepts, debug problems, and optimize performance. Unfortunately, existing profiling methods are lacking in important areas—they do not provide enough information about the OS’s behavior, they require OS modification and therefore are not portable, or they incur high overheads thus perturbing the profiled OS. We developed OSprof: a versatile, portable, and efficient OS profiling method based on latency distributions analysis. OSprof automatically selects important profiles for subsequent visual analysis. We have demonstrated that a suitable workload can be used to profile virtually any OS component. OSprof is portable because it can intercept operations and measure OS behavior from user-level or from inside the kernel without requiring source code. OSprof has typical CPU time overheads below 4%. In this paper we describe our techniques and demonstrate their usefulness through a series of profiles conducted on Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows, including client/server scenarios. We discovered and investigated a number of interesting interactions, including scheduler behavior, multi-modal I/O distributions, and a previously unknown lock contention, which we fixed.

Tuning Parallel Applications in Parallel

Auto-tuning has recently received significant attention from the High Performance Computing community. Most auto-tuning approaches are specialized to work either on specific domains such as dense linear algebra and stencil computations, or only at certain stages of program execution such as compile time and runtime. Real scientific applications, however, demand a cohesive environment that can efficiently provide auto-tuning solutions at all stages of application development and deployment. Towards that end, we describe a unified end-to-end approach to auto-tuning scientific applications. Our system, Active Harmony, takes a search-based collaborative approach to auto-tuning. Application programmers, library writers and compilers collaborate to describe and export a set of performance related tunable parameters to the Active Harmony system. These parameters define a tuning search-space. The auto-tuner monitors the program performance and suggests adaptation decisions. The decisions are made by a central controller using a parallel search algorithm. The algorithm leverages parallel architectures to search across a set of optimization parameter values. Different nodes of a parallel system evaluate different configurations at each timestep. Active Harmony supports runtime adaptive code-generation and tuning for parameters that require new code (e.g. unroll factors). Effectively, we merge traditional feedback directed optimization and just-in-time compilation. This feature also enables application developers to write applications once and have the auto-tuner adjust the application behavior automatically when run on new systems. We evaluated our system on multiple large-scale parallel applications and showed that our system can improve the execution time by up to 46% compared to the original version of the program. Finally, we believe that the success of any auto-tuning research depends on how effectively application developers, domain-experts and auto-tuners communicate and work together. To that end, we have developed and released a simple and extensible language that standardizes the parameter space representation. Using this language, developers and researchers can collaborate to export tunable parameters to the tuning frameworks. Relationships (e.g. ordering, dependencies, constraints, ranking) between tunable parameters and search-hints can also be expressed