SpreadCluster: Recovering Versioned Spreadsheets through Similarity-Based Clustering

Version information plays an important role in spreadsheet understanding, maintaining and quality improving. However, end users rarely use version control tools to document spreadsheet version information. Thus, the spreadsheet version information is missing, and different versions of a spreadsheet coexist as individual and similar spreadsheets. Existing approaches try to recover spreadsheet version information through clustering these similar spreadsheets based on spreadsheet filenames or related email conversation. However, the applicability and accuracy of existing clustering approaches are limited due to the necessary information (e.g., filenames and email conversation) is usually missing. We inspected the versioned spreadsheets in VEnron, which is extracted from the Enron Corporation. In VEnron, the different versions of a spreadsheet are clustered into an evolution group. We observed that the versioned spreadsheets in each evolution group exhibit certain common features (e.g., similar table headers and worksheet names). Based on this observation, we proposed an automatic clustering algorithm, SpreadCluster. SpreadCluster learns the criteria of features from the versioned spreadsheets in VEnron, and then automatically clusters spreadsheets with the similar features into the same evolution group. We applied SpreadCluster on all spreadsheets in the Enron corpus. The evaluation result shows that SpreadCluster could cluster spreadsheets with higher precision and recall rate than the filename-based approach used by VEnron. Based on the clustering result by SpreadCluster, we further created a new versioned spreadsheet corpus VEnron2, which is much bigger than VEnron. We also applied SpreadCluster on the other two spreadsheet corpora FUSE and EUSES. The results show that SpreadCluster can cluster the versioned spreadsheets in these two corpora with high precision.Comment: 12 pages, MSR 201

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

checking compatibility of context-aware service protocols

Service based business applications are built through the interaction of Web services. The behaviours of these Web services can be described by service protocols representing acceptable sequences of message exchanges. In order to guarantee the correct interaction between Web services, one can check the compatibility of their service protocols. Recent research efforts address the impact of non-functional requirements of service coordination on the analysis of service protocols. The introducing of context-awareness into Web services makes the invocation of Web services adaptable and the service protocol analysis different. In this paper, we use an extended service protocol model in which context-aware behaviours are made explicit. Based on this model, we define the notion of compatibility with respect to the context-awareness and provide the approach for checking compatibility of context-aware Web services. © 2011 IEEE.IEEE Computer SocietyService based business applications are built through the interaction of Web services. The behaviours of these Web services can be described by service protocols representing acceptable sequences of message exchanges. In order to guarantee the correct interaction between Web services, one can check the compatibility of their service protocols. Recent research efforts address the impact of non-functional requirements of service coordination on the analysis of service protocols. The introducing of context-awareness into Web services makes the invocation of Web services adaptable and the service protocol analysis different. In this paper, we use an extended service protocol model in which context-aware behaviours are made explicit. Based on this model, we define the notion of compatibility with respect to the context-awareness and provide the approach for checking compatibility of context-aware Web services. © 2011 IEEE

generating open api usage rule from error descriptions

Open API platform is a trend for many leading social networks and e-business internet enterprises to publish services. The third-party developers can build their own applications interacting with Open platform via the Open API. The APIs have rules on the acceptable value of parameters. However, these rules are often not documented formally or explicitly. Developers may not realize these rules until error is exposed in the runtime. The application will experience robustness problem due to these unhandled errors. Developers using Open API can only handle these errors in a trial-anderror manner when API invocation returning error messages. In this paper, we present an approach to generate Open API usage rules from the error description. It can generate useful API usage rules related to the parameters if the Open API platforms have detailed error descriptions in their documentations. These rules help developers to be aware of the potential error-leading API usage in the development stage of the Open API based applications. © 2012 IEEE.Open API platform is a trend for many leading social networks and e-business internet enterprises to publish services. The third-party developers can build their own applications interacting with Open platform via the Open API. The APIs have rules on the acceptable value of parameters. However, these rules are often not documented formally or explicitly. Developers may not realize these rules until error is exposed in the runtime. The application will experience robustness problem due to these unhandled errors. Developers using Open API can only handle these errors in a trial-anderror manner when API invocation returning error messages. In this paper, we present an approach to generate Open API usage rules from the error description. It can generate useful API usage rules related to the parameters if the Open API platforms have detailed error descriptions in their documentations. These rules help developers to be aware of the potential error-leading API usage in the development stage of the Open API based applications. © 2012 IEEE

a highly concurrent process virtual machine based on event-driven process execution model

Existing orchestration and choreography process engines only serve for dedicate process languages and majority of them show rough performance under even moderate workloads which cause them incapable for practical use. To solve the problems, the Event-driven Process Execution Model (EPEM) is presented as the common process model and the formalization of EPEM is presented to guarantee the correctness and efficiency for process transformation. A Process Virtual Machine - Once PVM is implemented based on EPEM and extended to support execution of WS-BPEL. For evaluation, the performance of Once PVM is compared with existing orchestration engines including Active BPEL, Apache ODE and Oracle BPEL Process Manager. The experimental results indicate that Once PVM shows better scalability than other tested platforms especially under high workloads. © 2012 IEEE.IEEE Comput. Soc. Tech. Comm. Electron. Commer. (TCEC)Existing orchestration and choreography process engines only serve for dedicate process languages and majority of them show rough performance under even moderate workloads which cause them incapable for practical use. To solve the problems, the Event-driven Process Execution Model (EPEM) is presented as the common process model and the formalization of EPEM is presented to guarantee the correctness and efficiency for process transformation. A Process Virtual Machine - Once PVM is implemented based on EPEM and extended to support execution of WS-BPEL. For evaluation, the performance of Once PVM is compared with existing orchestration engines including Active BPEL, Apache ODE and Oracle BPEL Process Manager. The experimental results indicate that Once PVM shows better scalability than other tested platforms especially under high workloads. © 2012 IEEE

Sequential Event Pattern Based Design of Context-Aware Adaptive Application

Recent pervasive systems are designed to be context-aware so that they are able to adapt to continual changes of their environments. Rule-based adaptation, which is commonly adopted by these applications, introduces new challenges in software design and verification. Recent research results have identified some faulty or unwanted adaptations caused by factors such as asynchronous context updating, and missing or faulty context reading. In addition, adaptation rules based on simple event models and propositional logic are not expressive enough to address these factors and to satisfy users' expectation in the design. We tackle these challenges at the design stage by introducing sequential event patterns in adaptation rules to eliminate faulty and unwanted adaptations with features provided in the event pattern query language. We illustrate our approach using the recent published examples of adaptive applications, and show that it is promising in designing more reliable context-aware adaptive applications. We also introduce adaptive rule specification patterns to guide the design of adaptation rules