Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development

Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18

Greenway Medical Technologies: Challenging the Goliaths in Electronic Medical Records

This case examines the business development and strategic expansion of Greenway Medical Technologies, a software company delivering electronic healthcare solutions to physicians operating small practices. Over a period of seven years and with an investment of $70 million, Greenway built a best-in-class software application. The case also describes the electronic medical record systems industry and the key drivers impacting the growth of this industry and healthcare delivery in the United States

Information Systems and Healthcare XXXVII: When Your Employer Provides Your Personal Health Record—Exploring Employee Perceptions of an Employer-Sponsored PHR System

A growing number of employers provide electronic personal health records (PHRs) as a service to employees as part of a health benefit program. However, a variety of unique issues related to attitudes and adoption arise when a PHR is hosted by the employer, and little research has addressed this relationship. This article reports the findings from an exploratory study of factors that influence employee perceptions, concerns, and expectations related to an employer—sponsored PHR service, with data from 132 employees of a large U.S. corporation. Attitudes toward PHR systems and employee perceptions and concerns identified in prior research are evaluated. Despite studies suggesting significant demand for PHR products across the general public, especially those that are offered at no cost to the user, responses indicated unique barriers to use, as well as opportunities, for employer-sponsored PHRs. The future role of employers as sponsors of PHRs is discussed in light of obstacles and strategies to improve system use, and the need to help employees realize the potential value of employer-sponsored PHRs

Developing and Securing Software for Small Space Systems

The space systems industry is moving towards smaller multi-vendor satellites, known as Small Space. This shift is driven by economic and technological factors that necessitate hardware and software components that are modular, reusable, and secure. This research addresses two problems associated with the development of modular, reusable, and secure space systems: developing software for space systems (the Development Problem) and securing space systems (the Security Problem). These two problems are interrelated and this research addresses them together. The Development Problem encompasses challenges that space systems developers face as they try to address the constraints induced by reduced budgets, design and development lifecycles, maintenance allowances, multi-vendor component integration and testing timelines. In order to satisfy these constraints a single small satellite might incorporate hardware and software components from dozens of organizations with independent workforces and schedules. The Security Problem deals with growing need to ensure that each one of these software or hardware components behaves according to policy or system design as well as the typical cybersecurity concerns that face any information system. This research addresses the Development Problem by exploring the needs and barriers of Small Space to find the best path forward for the space systems industry to catch up with the methodology advancements already being widely used in other software fields. To do this exploration a series of five surveys, referred to as SISDPA, was conducted to assess current attitudes and state of practice among space system developers. This crystallized a need in space system development — modular reusable open networks can help Small Space realize its potential, but there is still need to address certain security threats. This research addresses the Security Problem by augmenting a modular reusable open-network software development framework, called SSM, by adding policy enforcement in the form of authentication, access control, and encryption provisions, to create a new development framework, SSSM. This design and implementation adds security provisions while minimizing the impact on developers using the framework. SSSM is evaluated in terms of developer and system resource burden and shows that SSSM does not significantly increase developer burden and preserves the ease-of-use of SSM

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Social Computing: An Overview

A collection of technologies termed social computing is driving a dramatic evolution of the Web, matching the dot-com era in growth, excitement, and investment. All of these share high degree of community formation, user level content creation, and computing, and a variety of other characteristics. We provide an overview of social computing and identify salient characteristics. We argue that social computing holds tremendous disruptive potential in the business world and can significantly impact society, and outline possible changes in organized human action that could be brought about. Social computing can also have deleterious effects associated with it, including security issues. We suggest that social computing should be a priority for researchers and business leaders and illustrate the fundamental shifts in communication, computing, collaboration, and commerce brought about by this trend

Research options and imperatives in computerized conferencing

This is the report resulting from a computerized conferencing workshop held on the subject of potential research opportunities and requirements in the area of utilizing a computer to aid human communications. It was sponsored by the Division of Mathematical and Computer Sciences of the National Science Foundation (grant # MCS76-80514). The views expressed in this report are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect NSF views or policy. The workshop utilized the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology

AdaNET research project

The components necessary for the success of the commercialization of an Ada Technology Transition Network are reported in detail. The organizational plan presents the planned structure for services development and technical transition of AdaNET services to potential user communities. The Business Plan is the operational plan for the AdaNET service as a commercial venture. The Technical Plan is the plan from which the AdaNET can be designed including detailed requirements analysis. Also contained is an analysis of user fees and charges, and a proposed user fee schedule

A Framework for Preserving Privacy and Cybersecurity in Brain-Computer Interfacing Applications

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) comprise a rapidly evolving field of technology with the potential of far-reaching impact in domains ranging from medical over industrial to artistic, gaming, and military. Today, these emerging BCI applications are typically still at early technology readiness levels, but because BCIs create novel, technical communication channels for the human brain, they have raised privacy and security concerns. To mitigate such risks, a large body of countermeasures has been proposed in the literature, but a general framework is lacking which would describe how privacy and security of BCI applications can be protected by design, i.e., already as an integral part of the early BCI design process, in a systematic manner, and allowing suitable depth of analysis for different contexts such as commercial BCI product development vs. academic research and lab prototypes. Here we propose the adoption of recent systems-engineering methodologies for privacy threat modeling, risk assessment, and privacy engineering to the BCI field. These methodologies address privacy and security concerns in a more systematic and holistic way than previous approaches, and provide reusable patterns on how to move from principles to actions. We apply these methodologies to BCI and data flows and derive a generic, extensible, and actionable framework for brain-privacy-preserving cybersecurity in BCI applications. This framework is designed for flexible application to the wide range of current and future BCI applications. We also propose a range of novel privacy-by-design features for BCIs, with an emphasis on features promoting BCI transparency as a prerequisite for informational self-determination of BCI users, as well as design features for ensuring BCI user autonomy. We anticipate that our framework will contribute to the development of privacy-respecting, trustworthy BCI technologies