Implementation of an experimental platform for the social internet of things

The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies with the social networking concepts has led to a new paradigm called the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), where the objects mimic the human behavior and create their own relationships based on the rules set by their owner. This is aimed at simplifying the complexity in handling the communications between billions of objects to the benefits of the humans. Whereas several IoT platforms are already available, the SIoT paradigm has represented only a field for pure research and simulations, until now. The aim of this paper is to present our implementation of a SIoT platform. We begin by analyzing the major IoT implementations, pointing out their common characteristics that could be re-used for our goal. We then discuss the major extensions we had to introduce on the existing platforms to introduce the functionalities of the SIoT. We also present the major functionalities of the proposed system: how to register a new social object to the platform, how the system manages the creation of new relationships, and how the devices create groups of members with similar characteristics. We conclude with the description of possible simple application scenarios

Teaching Tip: Hackalytics: Using Computer Hacking to Engage Students in Analytics

The demand for qualified analytics professionals remains high with forecasts showing a continued need over the next few years. While this demand necessitates instruction in analytics in the classroom, many students find analytics concepts to be complicated and boring. This teaching brief describes a novel approach to teaching analytics through computer hacking. Students are exposed to the entire data lifecycle by first collecting intrusion detection data through the hacking of other student machines and then utilizing simple analytics procedures to analyze this data. Qualitative results show that the students enjoy the activity both in terms of the fun of hacking their fellow classmates as well as analyzing this data in an area less utilized in analytics instruction – security analytics. Three levels of the exercise are provided as well as how-to materials for students to run the exercise

A Computer Learning Environment for Novice Java Programmers That Supports Cognitive Load Reducing Adaptations and Dynamic Visualizations of Computer Memory

Learning to program a computer is difficult for many. The Learning Edge Momentum hypothesis suggests that the difficulty may be due to the tightly integrated nature of programming concepts and adapting the way curriculum is offered may have a significant influence on the outcomes. We investigate applying cognitive load reducing methods to instruction of the introductory programming concepts of declaration, assignment and sequence, using a new learning environment that an instructor can adapt for a specific example or that a student can personalize for amount and modality of content provided. Our study has three learning surveys. Each learning survey has short instructional videos designed using cognitive load reducing methods and then asks participants to solve novel problems using the presented materials. Our first learning survey was completed by 123 participants recruited on Amazon\u27s Mechanical Turk (AMT). We found that 23% that watched the instructional video without computer memory (n=61) answered the three code tracing questions correctly. Our second learning survey included instructional videos prepared after analyzing the results of the previous survey and emphasized cognitive load reducing methods in preparing the new instruction. This second survey was completed by 220 participants also recruited via AMT. We found that 57% of the participants that watched the instructional video without computer memory (n=72) answered the three tracing questions correctly. Our third learning survey with 322 participants recruited via AMT confirmed that the difference between the two videos was statistically significant with medium effect size. In the third survey, 29% of the participants watching the first survey instructional video without computer memory and 45% of those that watched the second survey instructional video without computer memory answered all three tracing questions correctly. In the third learning survey, the gain from 29% from our first short video that we thought was a reasonable presentation to 45% in the second short video seems to lend strong support to the hypothesis that our typical methods of instruction for introductory programming simply overwhelm the cognitive capabilities of many of the students. Our results suggest that cognitive load reducing methods may be very helpful for teaching introductory programming concepts

Firewall Rule Set Analysis and Visualization

abstract: A firewall is a necessary component for network security and just like any regular equipment it requires maintenance. To keep up with changing cyber security trends and threats, firewall rules are modified frequently. Over time such modifications increase the complexity, size and verbosity of firewall rules. As the rule set grows in size, adding and modifying rule becomes a tedious task. This discourages network administrators to review the work done by previous administrators before and after applying any changes. As a result the quality and efficiency of the firewall goes down. Modification and addition of rules without knowledge of previous rules creates anomalies like shadowing and rule redundancy. Anomalous rule sets not only limit the efficiency of the firewall but in some cases create a hole in the perimeter security. Detection of anomalies has been studied for a long time and some well established procedures have been implemented and tested. But they all have a common problem of visualizing the results. When it comes to visualization of firewall anomalies, the results do not fit in traditional matrix, tree or sunburst representations. This research targets the anomaly detection and visualization problem. It analyzes and represents firewall rule anomalies in innovative ways such as hive plots and dynamic slices. Such graphical representations of rule anomalies are useful in understanding the state of a firewall. It also helps network administrators in finding and fixing the anomalous rules.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Computer Science 201

Measuring the understandability of WSDL specifications, web service understanding degree approach and system

Web Services (WS) are fundamental software artifacts for building service oriented applications and they are usually reused by others. Therefore they must be analyzed and comprehended for maintenance tasks: identification of critical parts, bug fixing, adaptation and improvement. In this article, WSDLUD a method aimed at measuring a priori the understanding degree (UD) of WSDL (Web Service Description Language) descriptions is presented. In order to compute UD several criteria useful to measure the understanding’s complexity of WSDL descriptions must be defined. These criteria are used by LSP (Logic Scoring of Preference), a multicriteria evaluation method, for producing a Global Preference value that indicates the satisfaction level of the WSDL description regarding the evaluation focus, in this case, the understanding degree. All the criteria information required by LSP is extracted from WSDL descriptions by using static analysis techniques and processed by specific algorithms which allow gathering semantic information. This process allows to obtain a priori information about the comprehension difficulty which proves our research hypotheses that states that it is possible to compute the understanding degree of a WSDL description.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Proceedings of the Second Program Visualization Workshop, 2002

The Program Visualization Workshops aim to bring together researchers who design and construct program visualizations and, above all, educators who use and evaluate visualizations in their teaching. The first workshop took place in July 2000 at Porvoo, Finland. The second workshop was held in cooperation with ACM SIGCSE and took place at HornstrupCentret, Denmark in June 2002, immediately following the ITiCSE 2002 Conference in Aarhus, Denmark

A Runtime Software Visualization Environment

As software systems become more complex, so does the task of understanding them. To modify even a simple component of a complex system, at least a rudimentary understanding of the structure and behavior of the whole system is necessary. Although currently available development tools can provide a static representation of a complex system, these utilities are severely limited and prohibitively expensive. As a result, most programmers working on large software systems today resort to classic debuggers and time-consuming plain-text searches through hundreds or thousands of source files. This proposal describes a software development environment that uses static representations of hierarchically structured source code side by side with dynamic visualizations of software systems as they run. This environment provides an intuitive, visual means of easily comprehending complex systems, and has been provided as an open-source development tool for both professionals and students of software engineering

Realtime Feedback in Coding Games

Visual feedback in the space of interactive media can give users more insight into the execution of a program. This paper discusses the implications and results of incorporating visual annotations into both programming environments and computer games and how it affects the user experience. We combined both of these spaces and developed a coding-based resource-management game and used playtesting feedback to analyze the impact of the visuals on a user\u27s performance in the game. The collected data shows that in general, the introduction of visuals assists players in making more well-informed decisions within a time limit. Based on these gathered results, there is clearly a lot of undiscovered potential for visual annotations in both coding and gaming to provide more informative experiences

Secure Coding in Five Steps

Software vulnerabilities have become a severe cybersecurity issue. There are numerous resources of industry best practices available, but it is still challenging to effectively teach secure coding practices. The resources are not designed for classroom usage because the amount of information is overwhelming for students. There are efforts in academia to introduce secure coding components into computer science curriculum, but a big gap between industry best practices and workforce skills still exists. Unlike many existing efforts, we focus on both the big picture of secure coding and hands-on projects. To achieve these two goals, we present five learning steps that we have been revising over the last four years. Our evaluation shows that the approach reduces complexity and encourages students to use secure coding practice in their future projects