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Publications

Publications by CSE

2016

Software Readability Practices and the Importance of their Teaching

Authors
Sampaio, IB; Barbosa, L;

Publication
2016 7TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS (ICICS)

Abstract
It is known that code readability has an impact on software quality. This paper introduces a preliminary list of 33 good practices for code readability that could be taught in object oriented programming courses of informatics programs. In this set are included practices with both positive and negative impact, the latter mainly from bad smells. A survey was made with OOP teachers in order to assess the significance of teaching a set of good practices. The results showed that teachers consider it important to teach the defined set. Such result was statistically significant. Still, the same level of significance was not awarded to all practices. Some additional results are presented.

2016

Efficient SQL Adaptive Query Processing in Cloud Databases Systems

Authors
Costa, CM; Maia Leite, CRM; Sousa, AL;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2016 IEEE CONFERENCE ON EVOLVING AND ADAPTIVE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS (EAIS)

Abstract
Nowadays, many companies have migrated their applications and data to the cloud. Among other benefits of this technology, the ability to answer quickly business requirements has been one of the main motivations. Thereby, in cloud environments, resources should be acquired and released automatically and quickly at runtime. This way, to ensure QoS, the major cloud providers emphasize ensuring of availability, CPU instance and cost measure in their SLAs (Service Level Agreements). However, the QoS performance are not completely handled or inappropriately treated in SLAs. Although from the user's point of view, it is considered one of the main QoS parameters. Therefore, the aim of this work consists in development of a solution to efficient query processing on large databases available in the cloud environments. It integrates adaptive re-optimization at query runtime and their costs are based on the SRT (Service Response Time) QoS performance parameter of SLA. Finally, the solution was evaluated in Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure and the TPC-DS like benchmark was used for generating a database.

2016

Incremental Modular Testing for AOP

Authors
Restivo, A; Aguiar, A; Moreira, A;

Publication
ICSOFT-PT: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 11TH INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGIES - VOL. 2

Abstract
By designing systems as sets of modules that can be composed into larger applications, developers unleash a multitude of advantages. The promise of AOP (Aspect-Oriented Programming) is to enable developers to organize crosscutting concerns into separate units of modularity making it easier to accomplish this vision. However, AOP does not allow unit tests to be untangled, which impairs the development of properly tested independent modules. This paper presents a technique that enables developers to encapsulate crosscutting concerns using AOP and still be able to develop reusable unit tests. Our approach uses incremental testing and invasive aspects to modify and adapt tests. The approach was evaluated in a medium scale project with promising results. Without using the proposed technique, due to the presence of invasive aspects, some unit tests would have to be discarded or modified to accommodate the changes made by them. This would have a profound impact on the overall modularity and, in particular, on the reusability of those modules. We will show that this technique enables proper unit tests that can be reused even when coupled with aspect-oriented code.

2016

Presence in Virtual Environments: Objective Metrics vs. Subjective Metrics - A Pilot Study

Authors
Melo, M; Rocha, T; Barbosa, L; Bessa, M;

Publication
2016 23RD PORTUGUESE MEETING ON COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND INTERACTION (EPCGI)

Abstract
The sense of presence and cybersickness are keyfactors to have into account when referring to Virtual Environments (VE). To achieve high levels of presence and minimize cybersickness, it is important to ensure that the user's stimulation is coherent with the contents that are being delivered. In this paper, it is presented a pilot study addressing the usage of both objective and subjective metrics to measure the sense of presence and cybersickness in VE in order to study possible correlations between these two evaluation approaches. On top of that, the pilot study includes two body positions to allow evaluating if the stimulation of the vestibular study has impact on the sense of presence and cybersickness. To evaluate presence and cybersickness, it was developed a VE that consists in a hill where participants ride a bicycle. To broaden the scope of the study, there were studied two body positions: standing and sitting on the bicycle. The equipment EMOTIV epoc+ was used to register the objective metrics. The subjective metrics were registered using the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) and the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ). To complement the collected data, the levels of fatigue and stress before and after the experience were also registered through self-evaluation. Results show that objective metrics Interest and Stress and the subjective metrics Realism, Fatigue and Stress have a positive interaction regarding the sense of presence. Results further suggest that there is a positive interaction between the objective metric Focus and the subjective metric Involvement.

2016

SafeRegions: Performance evaluation of multi-party protocols on HBase

Authors
Pontes, R; Maia, F; Paulo, J; Vilaca, R;

Publication
2016 IEEE 35TH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON RELIABLE DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS WORKSHOPS (SRDSW)

Abstract
On-line applications and services are now a critical part of our everyday life. Using these services typically requires us to trust our personal or company's information to a large number of third-party entities. These entities enforce several security measures to avoid unauthorized accesses but data is still stored on common database systems that are designed without data privacy concerns in mind. As a result, data is vulnerable against anyone with direct access to the database, which may be external attackers, malicious insiders, spies or even subpoenas. Building strong data privacy mechanisms on top of common database systems is possible but has a significant impact on the system's resources, computational capabilities and performance. Notably, the amount of useful computation that may be done over strongly encrypted data is close to none, which defeats the purpose of offloading computation to third-party services. In this paper, we propose to shift the need to trust in the honesty and security of service providers to simply trust that they will not collude. This is reasonable as cloud providers, being competitors, do not share data among themselves. We focus on NoSQL databases and present SafeRegions, a novel prototype of a distributed and secure NoSQL database that is built on top of HBase and that guarantees strong data privacy while still providing most of HBase's query capabilities. SafeRegions relies on secret sharing and multiparty computation techniques to provide a NoSQL database built on top of multiple, non-colluding service providers that appear as a single one to the user. Strikingly, service providers, individually, cannot disclose any of the user's data but, together, are able to offer data storage and processing capabilities. Additionally, we evaluate SafeRegions exposing performance trade-offs imposed by security mechanisms and provide useful insights for future research on performance optimization.

2016

A Bot Spooler Architecture to Integrate Virtual Worlds with E-learning Management Systems for Corporate Training

Authors
Morgado, L; Paredes, H; Fonseca, B; Martins, P; Almeida, A; Vilela, A; Peixinho, F; Santos, A;

Publication
JOURNAL OF UNIVERSAL COMPUTER SCIENCE

Abstract
Joining efforts of academic and corporate teams, we developed an integration architecture - MULTIS - that enables corporate e-learning managers to use a Learning Management System (LMS) for management of educational activities in virtual worlds. This architecture was then implemented for the Formare LMS. In this paper we present this architecture and concretizations of its implementation for the Second Life Grid/OpenSimulator virtual world platforms. Current systems are focused on activities managed by individual trainers, rather than groups of trainers and large numbers of trainees: they focus on providing the LMS with information about educational activities taking place in a virtual world and/or being able to access within the virtual world some of the information stored in the LMS, and disregard the streamlining of activity setup and data collection in multi-trainer contexts, among other administrative issues. This architecture aims to overcome the limitations of existing systems for organizational management of corporate e-learning activities.

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