8,098 research outputs found
Appendix for "Properties and Styles of Software Technology Tutorials"
No full text<p>This artifact contains details of the resource collection, analysis scripts, and data analyzed in the paper "Properties and Styles of Software Technology Tutorials" by Deeksha M. Arya, Jin L.C. Guo, and Martin P. Robillard.</p>
Data from: Understanding Test Convention Consistency as a Dimension of Test Quality
No full text<div>
<div>This archive provides additional data for the article "Understanding Test Convention Consistency</div>
<div>as a Dimension of Test Quality" by Martin P. Robillard, Mathieu Nassif, and Muhammad Sohail,</div>
<div>published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.</div>
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Experiences Using Large Scale Video Walls for Distance Education
No full textWe describe our experiences building and using the Rutgers Videowall, a low-cost telepresence system that has been used teaching 15 courses and colloquia. By relaxing typical spatial telepresence features, such as background continuity, we greatly reduced costs and gained flexibility in the rooms it could be deployed in. The lower costs and room flexibility enabled academic departments to use the wall, in contrast to traditional telepresence systems which remained inaccessible. We found that the Videowall’s spatial distortions did not have a significant impact on useability, as our initial survey results show that students had an overall positive experience.Technical report DCS-tr-72
Benchmarking: A Methodology for Ensuring the Relative Quality of Recommendation Systems in Software Engineering
No full textUnderstanding Wikipedia as a Resource for Opportunistic Learning of Computing Concepts
No full textPosts on on-line forums where programmers look for information often include links to Wikipedia when it can be assumed the reader will not be familiar with the linked terms. A Wikipedia article will thus often be the first exposure to a new computing concept for a novice programmer. We conducted an exploratory study with 18 novice programmers by asking them to read a Wikipedia article on a common computing concept that was new to them, while using the think-aloud protocol.We performed a qualitative analysis of the session transcripts to better understand the experience of the novice programmer learning a new computing concept using Wikipedia. We elicited five themes that capture this experience: Concept Confusion, Need for Examples, New Terminology, Trivia Clutter, and Unfamiliar Notation. We conclude that Wikipedia is not well suited as a resource for the opportunistic learning of new computing concepts, and we recommend adapting information sharing practices in on-line programmer communities to better account for the learning needs of the users.Martin P. Robillard, Christoph Treud
Extracting development tasks to navigate software documentation
No full textKnowledge management plays a central role in many software development organizations. While much of the important technical knowledge can be captured in documentation, there often exists a gap between the information needs of software developers and the documentation structure. To help developers navigate documentation, we developed a technique for automatically extracting tasks from software documentation by conceptualizing tasks as specific programming actions that have been described in the documentation. More than 70 percent of the tasks we extracted from the documentation of two projects were judged meaningful by at least one of two developers. We present TaskNavigator, a user interface for search queries that suggests tasks extracted with our technique in an auto-complete list along with concepts, code elements, and section headers. We conducted a field study in which six professional developers used TaskNavigator for two weeks as part of their ongoing work. We found search results identified through extracted tasks to be more helpful to developers than those found through concepts, code elements, and section headers. The results indicate that task descriptions can be effectively extracted from software documentation, and that they help bridge the gap between documentation structure and the information needs of software developers.Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard, and Barthélémy Dagenai
England Calling: A Narratological Exploration of Martin Amis’s 'London Fields'
No full textThis paper will explore connections between fictional narrative methodology and contemporary conceptions of Englishness by applying aspects of Gerald Prince’s (2005) conceptions of a ‘postcolonial narratology’ to Martin Amis’s “London Fields” (1989). Amis has commented that ‘it’s almost an act of will on my part trying not to be an English writer’. However, this paper will suggest that the novel under consideration here exhibits methodological tendencies which have their roots in a protracted engagement with problematic notions of English identity (principally, instability and disengagement) and that postcolonial approaches to narrative technique can lead to very interesting results, even when applied to the work of writers not typically identified with such constituencies. The central point of investigation will be the novel’s exhibition of metafictional tendencies. In “London Fields”, Amis narrates via an authorial surrogate, Samson Young, who purports to be the author of the text, yet becomes implicated in the events of the novel to the point where his actions, rather than his imagination, determine its outcome. It is interesting also in this connection that the novel is voiced by an ‘outsider’ to England, an American.
Prince is intrigued by the possibility that a postcolonial narrative discourse might emerge ‘free of any narratorial introduction, mediation, or patronage.’ He also points to the significance of narratological features such as hybridity, migrancy, otherness, fragmentation, diversity and power relations. Amis’s novel exhibits all of these features, and takes the ambition of authorial invisibility to a paradoxical extreme. Voices, characters, reliability and even actantial events are brusquely ‘disowned’ by the author, resulting in a textual instability and uncertainty which, it will be demonstrated through close textual analysis, is intimately linked to England’s postcolonial condition
Pervasive Computing for the 99%
No full textA key limiting factor for the pervasive community has been the difficulty developing and deploying general purpose systems. Such systems should make application development easy, support a wide range of devices and sensors, and allow users to share these resources. Designing a multi-user middleware system that allows novice users to add arbitrary hardware and software raises several challenges, such as resolution between conflicting and stale data, managing data dependencies as software and hardware is changed, and tradeoffs between complexity and expressiveness in the API of such a system. We will discuss the feature set that could solve these problem, and test these features through a software implementation. We then evaluate the system after a year long deployment supporting smart office applications.Technical report DCS-TR-69
GRAIL: A General Purpose Real Time Localization System: Version 1.0
No full textThis paper describes a general purpose Real Time Location System (RTLS), GRAIL, version 1.0. GRAIL provides real-time, adaptable, indoor localization for wireless devices. Because GRAIL’s focus is to localize as diverse a set of devices as possible, it utilizes a centralized, anchor based approach. GRAIL defines an abstract data model for various system components to support different physical modalities and various localization algorithms. We show through real deployments that GRAIL functions over a variety of physical modalities, networks, and algorithms. Further, we found that a centralized solution has critical advantages over distributed implementations for handling privacy concerns. A contribution of this system is its universal approach: it can integrate different hardware and software capabilities within a single localization framework. The deployment of such a system in academic and research environments allows researchers to explore issues beyond algorithms and investigate effects in real deployments.
A Geometric Approach to Device-Free Motion Localization Using Signal Strength
No full textIn this work we describe and evaluate an approach to accurately infer the position in a building where human motion occurs. Our approach does not require the humans to wear any type of device. Such passive mobility localization is applicable in a wide variety of application domains, including those in security, human workflows, and systems management. We position human motion using the change in standard deviation of the received signal strength between stationary transmitters and receivers at known locations. Using a modest transmission rate of once per second, we localize the motion at 2-5 second timescales using a lines-intersecting-tiles method where each line is a straight path between a transmitter and receiver. Our algorithm returns a set of rectangular tiles where the motion has occurred. We experimentally validate our scheme in two different building environments, one containing a cluttered space and a second with a more open arrangement. We show good results for basic mobility detection, with a low number of false positives and negatives. We show that we can localize human motion with a median error of less than 20 ft. We can achieve these results with a modest density of inexpensive active RFID tags, one per 500 ft.2. We also explored how our results degrade with reduced density of transmitters and receivers, and show our mobility detection rates remain good although the geometric precision of the results degrades in line with the density of transmitters.Technical report DCS-TR-67
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