Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2019

This Research Report presents the FY19 research statistics and contributions of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management (EN) at AFIT. AFIT research interests and faculty expertise cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to USAF needs, as reflected by the range of topics addressed in the faculty and student publications listed in this report. In most cases, the research work reported herein is directly sponsored by one or more USAF or DOD agencies. AFIT welcomes the opportunity to conduct research on additional topics of interest to the USAF, DOD, and other federal organizations when adequate manpower and financial resources are available and/or provided by a sponsor. In addition, AFIT provides research collaboration and technology transfer benefits to the public through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). Interested individuals may discuss ideas for new research collaborations, potential CRADAs, or research proposals with individual faculty using the contact information in this document

Mining Unstructured Financial News to Forecast Intraday Stock Price Movements

In this thesis, we develop a system that analyzes unstructured financial news using text classification in order to forecast stock price trends. We review similar systems to build on successful ideas and combine them with novel approaches. We discuss the different types of news that are potentially relevant to the stock prices and choose news sources for the system accordingly. To eliminate irrelevant news, we present suitable filtering approaches such as the implementation of a rule-based thesaurus. We develop an automatic labeling approach and compare it to a manual labeling approach. We evaluate the influence of different automatic labeling approaches on the prediction performance. In a data training phase, we introduce a set of features novel with respect to the price forecasting task. We compare different text mining techniques such as the feature vector dimensionality reduction and different classifiers. Finally, we investigate the influence of trading costs on potential profits and run a market simulation that is able to support or reject the practical profitability of the system

Model-Driven Development of Interactive Multimedia Applications

The development of highly interactive multimedia applications is still a challenging and complex task. In addition to the application logic, multimedia applications typically provide a sophisticated user interface with integrated media objects. As a consequence, the development process involves different experts for software design, user interface design, and media design. There is still a lack of concepts for a systematic development which integrates these aspects. This thesis provides a model-driven development approach addressing this problem. Therefore it introduces the Multimedia Modeling Language (MML), a visual modeling language supporting a design phase in multimedia application development. The language is oriented on well-established software engineering concepts, like UML 2, and integrates concepts from the areas of multimedia development and model-based user interface development. MML allows the generation of code skeletons from the models. Thereby, the core idea is to generate code skeletons which can be directly processed in multimedia authoring tools. In this way, the strengths of both are combined: Authoring tools are used to perform the creative development tasks while models are used to design the overall application structure and to enable a well-coordinated development process. This is demonstrated using the professional authoring tool Adobe Flash. MML is supported by modeling and code generation tools which have been used to validate the approach over several years in various student projects and teaching courses. Additional prototypes have been developed to demonstrate, e.g., the ability to generate code for different target platforms. Finally, it is discussed how models can contribute in general to a better integration of well-structured software development and creative visual design

A Framework for Model-Driven Development of Mobile Applications with Context Support

Model-driven development (MDD) of software systems has been a serious trend in different application domains over the last 15 years. While technologies, platforms, and architectural paradigms have changed several times since model-driven development processes were first introduced, their applicability and usefulness are discussed every time a new technological trend appears. Looking at the rapid market penetration of smartphones, software engineers are curious about how model-driven development technologies can deal with this novel and emergent domain of software engineering (SE). Indeed, software engineering of mobile applications provides many challenges that model-driven development can address. Model-driven development uses a platform independent model as a crucial artifact. Such a model usually follows a domain-specific modeling language and separates the business concerns from the technical concerns. These platform-independent models can be reused for generating native program code for several mobile software platforms. However, a major drawback of model-driven development is that infrastructure developers must provide a fairly sophisticated model-driven development infrastructure before mobile application developers can create mobile applications in a model-driven way. Hence, the first part of this thesis deals with designing a model-driven development infrastructure for mobile applications. We will follow a rigorous design process comprising a domain analysis, the design of a domain-specific modeling language, and the development of the corresponding model editors. To ensure that the code generators produce high-quality application code and the resulting mobile applications follow a proper architectural design, we will analyze several representative reference applications beforehand. Thus, the reader will get an insight into both the features of mobile applications and the steps that are required to design and implement a model-driven development infrastructure. As a result of the domain analysis and the analysis of the reference applications, we identified context-awareness as a further important feature of mobile applications. Current software engineering tools do not sufficiently support designing and implementing of context-aware mobile applications. Although these tools (e.g., middleware approaches) support the definition and the collection of contextual information, the adaptation of the mobile application must often be implemented by hand at a low abstraction level by the mobile application developers. Thus, the second part of this thesis demonstrates how context-aware mobile applications can be designed more easily by using a model-driven development approach. Techniques such as model transformation and model interpretation are used to adapt mobile applications to different contexts at design time or runtime. Moreover, model analysis and model-based simulation help mobile application developers to evaluate a designed mobile application (i.e., app model) prior to its generation and deployment with respected to certain contexts. We demonstrate the usefulness and applicability of the model-driven development infrastructure we developed by seven case examples. These showcases demonstrate the designing of mobile applications in different domains. We demonstrate the scalability of our model-driven development infrastructure with several performance tests, focusing on the generation time of mobile applications, as well as their runtime performance. Moreover, the usability was successfully evaluated during several hands-on training sessions by real mobile application developers with different skill levels

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

Usability analysis of contending electronic health record systems

In this paper, we report measured usability of two leading EHR systems during procurement. A total of 18 users participated in paired-usability testing of three scenarios: ordering and managing medications by an outpatient physician, medicine administration by an inpatient nurse and scheduling of appointments by nursing staff. Data for audio, screen capture, satisfaction rating, task success and errors made was collected during testing. We found a clear difference between the systems for percentage of successfully completed tasks, two different satisfaction measures and perceived learnability when looking at the results over all scenarios. We conclude that usability should be evaluated during procurement and the difference in usability between systems could be revealed even with fewer measures than were used in our study. © 2019 American Psychological Association Inc. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Machine Learning in Tribology

Tribology has been and continues to be one of the most relevant fields, being present in almost all aspects of our lives. The understanding of tribology provides us with solutions for future technical challenges. At the root of all advances made so far are multitudes of precise experiments and an increasing number of advanced computer simulations across different scales and multiple physical disciplines. Based upon this sound and data-rich foundation, advanced data handling, analysis and learning methods can be developed and employed to expand existing knowledge. Therefore, modern machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) methods provide opportunities to explore the complex processes in tribological systems and to classify or quantify their behavior in an efficient or even real-time way. Thus, their potential also goes beyond purely academic aspects into actual industrial applications. To help pave the way, this article collection aimed to present the latest research on ML or AI approaches for solving tribology-related issues generating true added value beyond just buzzwords. In this sense, this Special Issue can support researchers in identifying initial selections and best practice solutions for ML in tribology

Linking the knowledge economy, urban intensity and transport in post-industrial cities with a case study of Perth, Western Australia

Cities in post-industrial economies are characterised by a multi-layered intensification of knowledge. This intensification occurs through: • agglomeration of knowledge economic activity; • human capital knowledge; and • the means of knowledge exchange i.e. ICT and transport. This thesis proposes an intensification of key walkable urban centres, particularly universities. Knowledge urban intensification is heavily reliant on rail and walking transport intensification