Advances in Software Engineering, Education, and e-Learning

There is an increasing demand for information and communication technology (ICT) graduates to sustain the growth of the rapidly evolving ICT industry. This demand for ICT graduates challenges higher education to be more effective with ICT curriculum design. The purpose of this study is to apply various strategies to amend student misconceptions and improve student perceptions, motivation, engagement, and academic success within an ICT curriculum with the intent to increase the number of ICT graduates without reducing graduate competency. This empirical analysis using data collected over a significant time period has evaluated the collective changes to course commencement and attrition rates and found there was significant evidence of improvement.

In this short research paper, we describe the outcome of our integration of computer simulations and elementary visual programming interactions with an experiential mathematics curriculum that has resulted in a system that allows students to explore conceptual and procedural knowledge within mathematics content through the interactive and exploratory nature of a particular type of simulation using mobile applications. The simulations are managed by the students using a visual programming language that we developed as a stripped-down version of MIT App Inventor. In particular, our project focused on students who were in the lower quartile of mathematics achievement, and we show how useful they found this approach in helping them better engage and explore abstract mathematics content through reflective engagement with the material. In this report, we detail the three-dimensional approach we used to adapt an existing mathematics curricular process to a process that integrates visual programming and simulations as a type of applied mathematics. We also show how the resulting pedagogical process has the potential for helping students move beyond simply mechanically and mindlessly manipulating math symbols when solving linear equations to applying visual reasoning and representational logic as the basis for problem-solving in mathematics.

Facing the ever-increasing cyberattacks from hackers, some of whom are sponsored by nations/states, the USA is in desperate need of improving cybersecurity education to develop strengthened defense against current and future cyber threats. In particular, colleges/universities throughout the nation are being called upon to modernize computing programs in order to produce well-rounded professionals that are aware of and capable of mitigating cyber threats. The purpose of this mixed methods case study was to examine the influence of participating in the Cyber Defense Track (CDT) on students’ cybersecurity knowledge, awareness, and career choices. A purposeful sample of undergraduate students enrolled in the CDT was administered pre-/post-surveys and assessments and participated in focus groups. Results indicated an increased level of (a) cybersecurity knowledge, (b) awareness of cybersecurity-related practices, and (c) interest in a cybersecurity-related career field.

Given the context of many institutions moving to online instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we share our experiences of an online team-based multidisciplinary education program on big data + high performance computing (HPC) + atmospheric sciences ( cybertraining.umbc.edu ). This program focuses on how to apply big data and high-performance computing techniques to atmospheric sciences. The program uses both an instructional phase with lectures and team-based homework in all three areas and a multidisciplinary research experience culminating in a technical report and oral presentation. The paper discusses how our online education program can achieve the same learning objectives as face-to-face instruction via pedagogy and communication methods including flipped classroom, online synchronous meetings, and online asynchronous discussion forum.

The necessity to design a curriculum that improved the professional competency of graduates was a response to the growing concern that information and communication technology (ICT) graduates, while being strong in technical ICT skills, were weak in their professional skills, particularly in relation to communication and collaboration skills. To enhance the employability of graduates, an ICT curriculum was designed that integrated the development of professional skills, including communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking, alongside the development of ICT technical skills. This chapter reports on a longitudinal study from 2012 to 2018 that provided strong evidence that integrating professional skill development across an entire ICT curriculum significantly improved a graduate’s competency with professional skills without having a detrimental impact on their competency with ICT technical skills. This integrated curriculum can act as an exemplar to other ICT curriculum designers that the approach can lead to professionally competent employable ICT graduates.

This chapter documents research which investigated how relevant the content of the Computing courses offered within undergraduate programs of the Computing Department at the National University of Samoa (NUS) were to meet the needs of the industry and the workforce. The study, which was conducted in 2018–2019, surveyed 16 institutions and 20 graduates from the Computing programs. Findings from the survey indicated that the current course offerings within the Computing Department are to a large extent relevant to the needs of the industry and the workplace. Most of the recommendations from the current survey were similar to those in the 2008 and 2013 survey and had already been incorporated into the current curriculum. The main recommendations for improving the curriculum are an improved emphasis on operating systems, cybersecurity, strategic planning, and problem-solving skills and introduction of other database platforms such as Oracle as well as more web-based languages. Recommendations for improvement of the survey are (i) increasing the scope to include an evaluation of the postgraduate diploma, (ii) the inclusion in future surveys of questions on soft skills, and (iii) specific consideration of the graduate profile and learning outcomes.

This paper evaluates the compliance of the Software Engineering Program (SWE-Curriculum) at Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) with the first five of the fifteen Software Engineering Knowledge Areas (SWE-KAs #6–10) of the SWEBOK-V3.0 of the IEEE Computer Society. This research is the first to measure the coverage of the SWE-KAs in any SWE-Curriculum. It is essential to line up the said SWE-Curriculum with the IEEE view of Software Engineering (SWEBOK-V3.0), in addition to its IET accreditation.This research was divided into three parts. The first part (P#1) focused on SWE-KAs#1–5, the second part (P#2) focuses on SWE-KAs#6–10, and the third part (P#3) will focus on SWE-KA#11–15. This paper inspected SWE-KAs#6–10’s coverage across the said SWE-Curriculum courses. The results were identified as either Fully Compliant, Highly Compliant, Partially Compliant, or Poorly Compliant (e.g., the concerned SWE-KA is either fully, highly, partially, or poorly covered across one or more of the said SWE-Curriculum courses).This research found the compliance as Fully Compliant in the cases of the SWE-KAs of the SWE management and software quality but found Partially Compliant in the cases of the SWE-KAs of the software configuration management, SWE process, and SWE models and methods.

This work presents a redeveloped introductory course in Digital Systems Design, often considered a course on embedded systems and IoT in an undergraduate computer engineering program at a Canadian university. The course was moved from a theory-driven course to a team project-based course built on a framework of sustainable design, design for accessibility, and equity principles for deaf curling athletes. Students were guided through a modified design cycle, from conceptual design to a functional prototype and physical prototype. In addition, the course included a strong emphasis on allied topics for knowledge transfer, including business development, technology marketing, intellectual property protection, and moving toward commercialization.

This study investigates the use of WhatsApp as a Mobile Learning System on freshman and sophomore students doing multimedia-based courses. The study uses a conceptual model based on the second thesis of Anderson’s Interactivity Equivalency Equation to determine the impact the use of the technology has on student learning outcomes. Results showed that the most noticeable factor of interaction was the student to teacher construct. Due to their interaction on the WhatsApp group with their peers, content, and teacher, they achieved higher final results. Significant factors were the value placed on real-time chatting with peers, practical assessment on overall learning, and the reading of instructor posts. 85% of the control group had GPA of 2.57 and below, which suggests that the lack of the additional interaction may have been a contributing factor to lower GPAs than the experimental group which had a mean GPA of 2.85, with the highest recorded ones being 3.71.

This paper describes an approach for introducing data and information literacy to undergraduates. This work aims to address the following research question: “What impact does the Dear Data approach have on data literacy and information literacy skills of undergraduates in an introductory data visualization course?” The initial aim of the project was to create an assignment to reinforce concepts covered in class and motivate students to think differently about data and how data is communicated. Elements of the Dear Data Project were adapted as part of a 4-week assignment that paired students from two sections of the course as “Data Buddies.” Dear Data Postcards were created by students with themes that aligned with data literacy and information literacy concepts. Postcards served as a hands-on exercise for reinforcing course topics. Student self-assessment results show students found the assignment helped to broaden students’ ideas of what data is or could be, helped students see data in a variety of ways that were not previously considered, and helped students think critically about how to visually communicate ideas and think of their audience when creating visualizations. This work contributes to the pedagogy of data visualization and to the knowledge base of data visualization capacity building.

Pumping lemma has been a very difficult topic for students to understand in a theoretical computer science course due to a lack of tool support. In this paper, we present an active learning tool called MInimum PUmping length (MIPU) educational software to explore the pumping lemma property for regular languages. For a given regular language, MIPU offers three major functionalities: determining the membership of an input string, generating a list of short strings that belong to the language, and automatically calculating the minimal pumping length of the language. The software tool has been developed to provide educational assistance to students to better understand the concepts of pumping lemma and minimum pumping length and promote active learning through hands-on practice.

This work presents a comprehensive guide for students and developers who are interested in developing and experimenting with a blockchain technology for cryptocurrencies. Our work allows students to rapidly deploy a new cryptocurrency and provides an accessible way for users to process transactions and mine blocks. A new blockchain can be created using the source code of Litecoin alongside with the Microsoft Azure’s cloud service to deploy the requirements necessary for running the network associated with the blockchain. As Litecoin, we utilize scrypt as the “proof-of-work” algorithm. Built into the codebase for Litecoin, this computationally heavy algorithm is designed to ward off large-scale brute-force attacks, preventing criminals with strong hardware capabilities from bypassing the security measures of the algorithm. This article dives into the intricacies of the steps taken to deploy a new blockchain designed to be used for cryptocurrency.

This paper reports the development and testing of a new intervention to recruit terminal Master’s students into computer science (CS) PhD programs and to enhance diversity in academic CS. We introduced peer assistants (i.e., successful PhD students) to CSCI 549: Intelligent Systems, a popular course for Master’s students with approximately 40–50% women and 90% international students. Although there is a fair amount of diversity in this course and in the CS Master’s program generally (i.e., international female students), many of these students do not continue to earn a PhD or get involved in research during the Master’s program. Because increasing the diversity of CS professors is imperative for enhancing the diversity of CS majors and the CS workforce, it is critical to test new methods to recruit Master’s students from underrepresented groups into academic CS. To address this need, we introduced PhD student peer assistants into Intelligent Systems not only to help Master’s students with in-class research projects but to also act as role models to promote Master’s students’ interest in CS research and PhD programs. Thus, this paper suggests a new and innovative technique for an enhancing diversity in academic CS and STEM generally.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly growing field of great interest to students and educators. However, designing and teaching a project-based IoT course can be challenging. While some textbooks and courses are already available in IoT, limited information is available on how to successfully pair the IoT curriculum with hardware and hands-on projects. More work and open discussion are needed to develop courses which successfully and effectively combine hardware and software. In the present work, we summarize how we designed and taught a graduate level IoT course at California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) by effectively pairing lectures with hands-on labs and projects. The course provided a broad introduction to IoT topics, software, and hardware through the use of hands-on projects and low-cost hardware kits (≈$544 each). By strategically combining lectures with hands-on practice, we successfully introduced computer science students to key IoT and hardware skills such as assembling devices, debugging issues, reviewing specs and data, and optimizing performance. We also share the equipment and software packages used, topics covered, labs and projects given, and lessons learned. This course was favorably reviewed by students, led to several successful capstone projects, and even helped one student to secure an internship in IoT. We anticipate that these project-based approaches to teaching and learning IoT will be beneficial to many students and educators who are interested in the IoT field.

Graduation rates are generally low among undergraduate Computer Science (CS) majors, so we are motivated to employ flipped classroom model at CSUB to improve 4-year graduation rates. There is a plethora of literature supporting improved information retention using the flipped classroom model. However, its impact on upper-division core CS courses has been understudied. An active learning environment using Just-in-Time-Teaching (JiTT), pair instruction, and computational thinking has been implemented in this study. This flipped classroom model was applied to two upper-division CS courses, Computer Architecture II and Artificial Intelligence. A year-long study measured the impact on performance through surveys, performance on group activities, and class performance such as test scores, with comparison to a control population (non-flipped classroom class) normalized for a specific instructor. An increased student performance and ultimately better graduation rates among the 40 flipped classroom model students is anticipated.

Despite a robust recent U.S. job market, new IT graduates tend to be long on theoretical knowledge yet very short on practical mastery of actual skills and knowledge needed to meet typical IT job requirements. Thus, graduates are increasingly facing the problem of either being unable to secure full-time IT employment at all—or, if they do land a first job, it is merely a low-paying entry-level position. Typically, such newly minted graduates become frustrated and switch jobs within six to 12 months to secure a higher salary. This, in turn, causes the initial employer to lose money and time, essentially having to start all over with a new entry-level hiree. Consequently, companies are increasingly refusing to hire entry-level graduates and instead are requiring significant industry experience. Accordingly, this chapter presents an innovative solution for students, universities, and technical schools alike: a unique educational model that actually provides students with sufficient practical mastery to qualify them for mid-level IT positions immediately following graduation. As the illustration below shows, and as any corporate hiring manager will readily admit, a successful IT job applicant needs to exude competence in a full range of areas in order to maximize the chances of securing a mid-level, higher-paying position. Therefore, it only makes logical sense for the educational institutions to explicitly address all of the same knowledge and skill sets as an intrinsic part of the educational experience. In fact, there is an educational institution that has been successfully applying this innovative practical skills mastery model over the last 15 years for IT education. PeopleNTech has placed virtually all of its students in “first jobs” at mid-level and senior-level IT positions which ordinarily require years of industry experience in order to secure.

System view, understanding systems and how they are controlled, is an important discipline in engineering education. Nowadays considering the ever-increasing knowledge, the explosion of information, the available visual technics and software tools, and the requirement for online distance education, there is a need to revisit the content and the teaching methodology of the basic control course. Here we present our experience in renewing the basic control course. The topics of the course are given. The lectures are available electronically and can be used also in online teaching. The main ideas are explained on two levels: hopefully in an understandable way for everyone and precisely, using mathematical tools. In the lectures, some parts of the multilevel e-book, SYSBOOK, are referred, which has been developed to present the main principles on different levels, for everyone, for the students, and partly for researchers. Besides static teaching materials, some interactive demonstrations can also be used in the lectures contributing to the enjoyment of the learning process. During computer laboratory exercises using MATLAB/SIMULINK software, the students apply the analysis and synthesis methods discussed in the lectures. In the content of the control course, a new feature is the emphasis of the YOULA parameterization method for controller design showing that other methods can be considered as its special cases. Nowadays in education a new teaching-learning paradigm is Open Content Development (OCD) which means active participation of the teachers and students creating an up-to-date teaching material. Utilizing the experiences of these pilot efforts, the SYSBOOK platform has been connected to the OCD model providing the possibility for the students to develop their own control case studies. Besides it is also important to execute real-time experiments in laboratory work or using distant laboratories.

This work presents a modelling and simulation study of academic hiring policies to address equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in an engineering program. An agent-based modelling approach is used to investigate the comparative impacts of various EDI hiring interventions on outputs including the time associated with achieving target representation of underrepresented groups, average value (‘qualification score’) of new hires, and number of positions that the best qualified overrepresented group applicant applies for before being hired. The simulation results demonstrate that the time constants for cultural change are long even with proposals that may be considered radical. Also, the simulation results do not support a common argument that EDI initiatives will sacrifice excellence in faculty hiring.

Current manual therapy pedagogical tools do not enable instructors to objectively assess the precision of hand movements. Methods for capturing the pressure applied to specific regions of the human body are lacking. Instructors of applied manual therapy techniques will benefit from a tool that streamlines their teaching process, thereby enabling their students to be trained accurately and precisely through comparisons of their learned techniques to the instructor’s mastered techniques. This project seeks to accomplish this by providing manual therapy instructors a scalable research platform that models instructor and student manual therapy data provided by a Studio 1 Labs pressure sensing fabric. The combination of the pressure sensing fabric and real-time data visualizations will enable instructors to provide immediate feedback to students to improve the quality of the therapy they provide. This paper will show the evolution of this physical therapy research platform, its development life cycle, current state, plans for future research and development, and a potential implementation of the tool in academic institutions.

The advent of technological evolution, particularly in artificial intelligence, has increased the responsibility of academics toward students today. It is important to understand how students view artificial intelligence, its development and use to provide ethical framework to help develop an understanding of standards, codes of conduct, right and wrong.This study records changing student choices and opinions on artificial intelligence during a capstone ethics course topic taught to tertiary students across 10 years, and how introducing them to moral principles and ethical guidelines changes the way they accept or question artificial intelligence.It is important to note that the study finds that students’ perceptions and opinions have indeed been changing over the years, with newer generations finding the concept of artificial moral agents as viable, impressive, and exciting. The study also records how students may not grasp the full implications of artificial moral agents and that a stand-alone ethics course that focuses on learning objectives that include ethical theories and framework and runs the due course of a complete semester can help to ensure students are asking the right questions, understanding their legal, social, economic, and moral responsibilities, thus emphasizing the importance of including such topics and subjects to computer and engineering degrees.

There are myriad factors which can affect a student’s academic performance as measured by Grade Point Average (GPA). Identifying characteristics of students with high GPA can help more students understand how to achieve the best grades possible. In this paper, a variety of data mining algorithms are used to predict the GPA of undergraduate students majoring in Computer Science based on survey questions. The results demonstrate that the number of hours of sleep per night, the frequency of illicit drug use, the number of hours spent studying per week, and the number of hours spent on social media platforms per week are important factors that can be used to classify student GPA. The Random Forest data mining algorithm performed the best and was able to achieve a predictive accuracy of 95% when placing students into one of four academic performance groupings.

A binary search tree (BST) is a strictly ordered data structure that permits quick storage and access of its data. Changing a value in a node of a BST requires ascertaining that such an update will not violate the tree’s order; otherwise the update requires replacing the source node with a new node (in a different location). In this work, an algorithm for determining whether a value in a BST can be updated within an existing node will be developed. It provides experience in algorithmic development for students and may lead to improvements in more complex tree structures.

College faculty and students often believe that student performance can be impacted by the time of day that a course is offered and may schedule their courses based on personal preference. This paper examines the relationship between the time of day for course offering and academic success, controlling for course characteristics and instructor variability. Data from a medium-sized private university was studied for a course that was taught by three professors over a period of 13 years. The content of the course was consistent, and the assignments and examinations followed a standard format. Results show that the time of day did not impact the academic performance of students when the instructor variable was controlled.

Indian technical education system consists of three levels: Industrial Training Institutes (ITI), Polytechnic Colleges (Diploma), and Engineering Colleges (Degree). Also for postgraduate studies, Masters and PhD programs are available at university level. There are a large number of underrepresented students on the basis of caste, income, and communities they belong. These students are not academically very sound and have average grades. Therefore government is funding their engineering education through various financial assistance schemes. Such students look for courses of their choice and for funding their education interests. Educational institutions develop solutions to handle such large amount of student data ranging from enrollments, scholarships, academic content, literature search, testing, results, and finally placements of these students. There was a need for developing framework for computerization with a view to manage huge amounts of student data which is multiplying every year in the state and country as a whole. Such data require a lot of integrity and scalability, memory-saving schema for hardware and software platforms for the needy institutions along with a lot of mobility. In this paper a new framework for computerization of Punjab Technical Education has been suggested using modern-day database technologies rather than conventional ones. Results show that the new framework is easy to use through mobile phones, tablets, and laptops and also a lot of memory have been saved along with demonstration of data integrity, security, and improvement of response time, scalability, and also authorized accessibility anywhere.

One of the hardest tasks facing elementary school teachers today is working with the parents of their students to make the learning experience the best it can be for the student. Most teachers and parents recognize the importance of effective parent-teacher communication. There are various ways that parents and teachers can communicate with each other, rather than relying on the scheduled parent-teacher meetings. Phone calls and visits to the classroom are also good ways to cooperate with teachers and keep informed about the child’s progress. Good two-way communication between parents and teachers is necessary for student’s success. Having an effective parent-teacher communication helps the children do better, both socially and academically. The goal of the Parent-Teacher Portal (PTP) application is to help streamline communication between elementary school teachers and the parents of their students. The PTP will allow direct communication so that any issues whether they are behavioral, learning, etc. can be addressed as soon as possible. The PTP application will allow teachers to communicate with the parents of students in their classes as a whole or individually. Also, with the PTP application, teachers will have the ability to create events and notify parents regarding school-wide announcements.

Standard IEEE floating point, which defines the representation and calculations of real numbers using a binary representation similar to scientific notation, does not define an exact floating-point result. In contrast, here we use a patented bounded floating-point (BFP) device and method for calculating and retaining the precision of the floating-point number represented, which provides an indication of exactness, with an “exact” floating-point result defined as a result that has error within + or – ½ units in the last place (ulps). Analysis and notification of exactness is important because subtraction of “similar,” but inexact, floating-point numbers can introduce an error (even catastrophic error) in the calculation. Here we also define “similar” and use bounded floating point to provide examples comparing subtraction of exact and inexact similar numbers by comparing the results from 64-bit and 128-bit standard and 80-bit bounded floating-point calculations.

A new computational model, called the ex-machine, executes standard instructions, meta instructions, and random instructions. Standard instructions behave similarly to machine instructions in a digital computer. Meta instructions self-modify the ex-machine’s program during its execution. We construct a countable set of ex-machines; each can compute a Turing incomputable language, whenever the quantum random measurements in the random instructions behave like unbiased Bernoulli trials. In 1936, Turing posed the halting problem and proved that this problem is unsolvable for Turing machines. Let { ( M i , T i ) : i ∈ ℕ } $$\{({M}_i, T_i): i \in \mathbb {N} \}$$ be a Turing computable enumeration of all Turing machines M i and finite tapes T i. Does there exist an ex-machine X $$\mathcal {X}$$ that has at least one evolutionary path X → X 1 → X 2 → ⋯ → X m $$\mathcal {X} \rightarrow \mathcal {X}_1 \rightarrow \mathcal {X}_2 \rightarrow \dots \rightarrow \mathcal {X}_m$$ , so at the mth stage, the ex-machine X m $$\mathcal {X}_m$$ can correctly determine for 0 ≤ i ≤ m whether M i’s execution on tape T i eventually halts? We construct an ex-machine Z(x) that has one such evolutionary path; at stage m, Z(x) has used a finite amount of computational resources. The existence of this path suggests that David Hilbert (Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Mathematische-Physikalische Klasse. 3:253–297, 1900) may not have been misguided to propose that mathematicians search for finite methods to help construct proofs. Our refinement is to not use a program that behaves according to a fixed set of mechanical rules. We must pursue computation that exploits randomness and self-modification so that the complexity of the program can increase during computation.

Quispel–Roberts–Thompson (QRT) maps are a family of birational maps of the plane which provide the simplest discrete analogue of an integrable Hamiltonian system and are associated with elliptic fibrations in terms of biquadratic curves. Each generic orbit of a QRT map corresponds to a sequence of points on an elliptic curve. In this preliminary study, we explore versions of the elliptic curve method (ECM) for integer factorization based on performing scalar multiplication of a point on an elliptic curve by iterating three different QRT maps with particular initial data. Pseudorandom number generation and other possible applications are briefly discussed.

Quantum computing is of high interest because it promises to perform at least some kinds of computations much faster than classical computers. Arute et al. (Nature 574:505–511, 2019; Supplemental Information for Arute F et al. 2019a. File supp_info_41586_2019_1666_MOESM1_ESM.pdf. https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-019-1666-5/MediaObjects/41586_2019_1666_MOESM1_ESM.pdf . Accessed 6 February 2020, 2019) (informally, “the Google Quantum Team”) report the results of experiments that purport to demonstrate “quantum supremacy” – the claim that the performance of some quantum computers is better than that of classical computers on some problems. Do these results close the debate over quantum supremacy? We argue that they do not. In the following, we provide an overview of the Google Quantum Team’s experiments and then identify some open questions in the quest to demonstrate quantum supremacy.

A two-player deterministic board game is primitive recursive if there exists a primitive recursive function that returns a sequence of optimal moves for a given player and a given epoch number. The game of chess is shown to be primitive recursive.

The presently used computing paradigm was invented for processing a small amount of data on a single segregated processor, and it cannot meet the challenges set by the present-day computing demands. The recent technical implementations are based on that paradigm and became bottlenecks of computing performance. The paper proposes a new computing paradigm (extending the old one to use several processors explicitly) and discusses some ideas of its possible implementation. Some advantages of the implemented approach, illustrated with the results of a loosely-timed simulator, are presented.

Formal specification and verification of complex IoT systems’ behavior can efficiently improve the systems’ correctness and reliability. This paper presents an enhanced time behavior protocol to specify real-time components’ timed interaction behaviors in IoT systems. The protocol model bound event tokens with time consumption constraint information according to requirements of practical applications, and time-related operators are added into the model language. Visualization and verification method for composited behavior is given. An application example is introduced, and the experimental results show that the enhanced time behavior protocol-based model can be used easily to specify, visualize, and verify IoT systems’ interaction behavior and timing constraint information.

The abstraction introduced by von Neumann correctly reflected the state of the art 70 years ago. Although it omitted data transmission time between components of the computer, it served as an excellent base for classic computing for decades. Modern computer components and architectures, however, require to consider their temporal behavior: data transmission time in contemporary systems may be higher than their processing time. Using the classic paradigm leaves a growing number of issues unexplained, from enormously high power consumption to days-long training of artificial neural networks to failures of some cutting-edge supercomputer projects. The paper introduces the up to now missing temporal behavior (a temporal logic) into computing, while keeps the solid computing science base. The careful analysis discovers that with considering the temporal behavior of components and architectural principles, the mystic issues have a trivial explanation. Some classic design principles must be revised, and the temporal logic enables us to design a more powerful and efficient computing.

The performance of software applications for computer networking, Web services, and cloud computing, with respect to speed, scalability, fault tolerance, and quality of service, is critical. Designing software involves the appropriate choice of data structures, because their performance with respect to space (memory utilization for data storage) and time (execution speed of operations) play significant roles in determining the performance of the software. This paper evaluates the performance of Java Collections implementation of classical data structures and how it scales with increase in data size. The effects of memory allocation, heap memory size, and garbage collection on performance are discussed. Also, this paper identifies areas for improvement in the implementation of the classical data structures and discusses their asymptotic analysis.

The open and cooperative nature of cyber-physical systems (CPS) poses a significant new challenge in assuring dependability. A European-funded project named DEIS addresses this important and unsolved challenge by developing technologies that facilitate the efficient synthesis of components and systems based on their dependability information. The key innovation that is the aim of DEIS is the corresponding concept of a Digital Dependability Identity (DDI). A DDI contains all the information that uniquely describes the dependability characteristics of a CPS or CPS component.In this paper we present an overview of the DDI and provide the protocol for ensuring the security of the DDI while it is in transit and rest. Additionally, we provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability validation of the protocol.

Software project teams often need to customize standard software processes to fit projects’ particularities. This process customization is called software process tailoring (SPT). SPT is a critical issue in contemporary software development such as agile; its importance is widely recognized in both practice and the academia, yet most of existing SPT literature focus on technical aspect at developing better tailoring guidelines and approaches. However, from the human and managerial perspective, SPT is a collaborative yet highly conflicting process involving task and temporal conflicts, and how teams’ operational mechanisms, under these situations, can increase SPT performance remain unknown. To address the aforementioned gap, this study bases on transactive memory systems (TMS) and shared temporal cognitions (STC) to conduct an introductory review on the theories and concepts in the SPT context and explore how a team’s TMS and STC may be applied in the conflictual SPT process to facilitate the tailoring performance.

This paper discusses the jointly quay crane and yard truck scheduling problems (QCYTSP) with unloading and loading containers from/to vessel(s) in the same time. Yard trucks transport the containers to/from yard locations with all containers that are homogeneous. We propose a mixed integer linear programming model to solve the scheduling problem. We consider in this study, the quay crane interference, containers precedence and safety margin. The main objective is to minimize the total completion time of the vessels.

To access and use the functionality of a software system, different interfaces must be provided. When establishing a system-to-system communication, a clear definition and specification of the interfaces must exist. In the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) environment different Standardization Agreements (STANAGs) are defined. When exchanging reconnaissance and surveillance data between NATO partners, the STANAG 4559 is used. To ensure interoperability, it is necessary to be able to test the corresponding implementations regarding the adherence of the guidelines defined in the standard.Within this chapter, an idea of a test center is presented which can be used as an independent instance to test and validate a system’s conformance to the STANAG 4559 standard.

In cooperative development, vehicle manufacturers follow the AUTOSAR standard to synthesize the overall scheduling of a component-based real-time software system. However, the vehicle manufacturer is not able to define overall scheduling requirements as the decomposition of subsystems into software components is determined in later development steps by subsystem developers. The determination of an overall scheduling can only take place when integrating the subsystem models into the system model. Due to the missing scheduling requirements cost- and time-consuming quality assurance measures are required to find a correct overall scheduling. To overcome this challenge, this chapter presents the PortChain as a specification for overall scheduling requirements extending the AUTOSAR standard and an approach for overall scheduling synthesis based on that specification.

Finding even a partially covering set of requirements for a system may be challenging some times. The modern quick prototyping and minimum viable product approaches may not favor a full-scale requirement analysis and respective design work. For this study we initially created a minimum working example of an electricity flexibility marketplace targeting mainly household-level customers. It was successful in a technical sense as many of the features were based on the generic patterns of online trading especially on the stock markets. However, after the very brief analysis and implementation phase, it was apparent that domain expertise was necessary in some of the energy-related and other general details. The expert panel was created from the research project participants representing expertise on the electrical energy, related ICT solution, and grid governance fields. The panel was somewhat familiar with the already existing solution and was able to produce feedback and their expert views that mostly was recorded on the free formed worksheets provided for the occasion. This research is based on the analysis of those recorded worksheets and presents an extraction of the supplementary requirements for the electricity flexibility trading marketplace.

The continuous growth of data volume in various fields such as healthcare, sciences, economics, and business has caused an overwhelming flow of data in the last decade. The overwhelming flow of data has raised challenges in processing, analyzing, and storing data, which lead many systems to face an issue in performance. Poor performance of systems, such as slow processing speed, creates negative impact such as delays, unprocessed data, and increasing response time. This paper presents a novel dynamic scaling methodology to improve the performance of data-intensive systems. The dynamic scaling methodology is developed to scale up the system based on the several aspects from the data-intensive perspective. Moreover, these aspects are used by the helper project algorithm which is designed to divide a task into small pieces to be processed by the system. These small pieces run on several virtual machines to work in parallel to enhance the system’s runtime performance. In addition, the dynamic scaling methodology does not require many modifications on the applied, which makes it easy to use.

Technical personality is introduced and defined as a profile of the broad technical preferences of an individual. Intrinsic personality is the customary personality profile as measured by a standard personality test such as the Big Five personality test. The relationship between intrinsic and technical personalities is evaluated in this research. The proposed technical personality traits are defined, and statistical data about each technical trait is provided and evaluated in order to identify any correlation between intrinsic and technical personality traits. The result of this research provides a useful tool for self-discovery and can also confirm or dispel certain stereotypes in fields related to information technology.

An investigation is presented into musical note recognition and pitch correction using only recently sung notes captured in real time. The goal is to improve, by correcting inaccuracies in singing execution, the performance of a voice-driven musical instrument that translates sung pitch into notes played by a separate virtual instrument. This is accomplished without a priori knowledge of musical key and, in order to enable real-time response, with a minimal number of recent sung notes. The technique involves inferring a tonal center, or set of keys, and then performing analysis and pitch correction based on expected note usage in that tonal center. It provides an interesting and potentially useful study in human/computer interaction with application in live musical performance.

This study aims to analyze the code examples of two widely adopted collegiate level programming textbooks using static analysis tools and compared them with the bugs found in real-world Open-Source Projects. Overall, 42.6% of the bugs found in the Texts relate to Internationalization, while the Open-Source Software (OSS) has 39.8% of their source code associated with Dodgy Code. Bad Practice issues consistently present in both Texts (18.0%) and OSS (26.4%) groups. DM_DEFAULT_ENCODING violation type ranked first in Texts. SE_NO_SERIALVERSIONID ranked first in OSS. DLS_DEAD_LOCAL_STORE in a Dodge Code category ranked fourth in both Texts and OSS. Textbooks are missing certain code examples that are related to the high-ranked bug types in OSS.

Blockchains are tamper-evident and tamper-resistant digital ledgers. Due to their distributed and shared nature, and their cryptographic functions, blockchains are resilient to alterations. They provide a trustworthy environment for the data stored in the ledgers. However, each new technology brings its own challenges along with the opportunities. Our minds are still busy with the question of “how could blockchain technology potentially benefit us?” In this paper, we approach to this question from the health domain perspective. Based on a systematic literature review, we discuss to what extent blockchain could provide solutions for the challenges inherited in the health domain and if blockchain technology introduces new challenges for development of health applications. The review included 27 publications which share experiences of practitioners from 2016 to 2020.

The rise in the number of mobile-connected devices and the emergence of new streaming models, such as on-demand, on-the-go, and interactive streaming, has an impact on the viewing practice of consumers. Mobile devices will play a major role in new viewing habit changes. In this paper, we present a generic framework for developing custom live streaming multimedia apps for mobile devices, i.e., we identify the principal characteristics of mobile live streaming apps, the components, components’ interactions, and the design decision needed to create such apps. To demonstrate how the generic framework can be used, we created an app for live streaming audio for Android devices using URLs. The app acts as an instance of the framework and validates it. The paper has two main contributions: (1) the generic framework which can be adapted when developing live streaming multimedia apps or similar apps and (2) developers and end users can reuse the instance app to their own specific needs using live streaming URLs.

Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGM) have been used to predict future defects in a software release. Modern software engineering databases contain Change Requests (CR), which include both defects and other maintenance requests. Our goal is to use defect prediction methods to help predict CRs in an evolving legacy system. CRs include both corrective and perfective requests. Limited research has been done in defect prediction using curve-fitting methods an evolving software systems, with one or more change-points. This work demonstrates the use of curve-fitting defect prediction methods to predict CRs. We compare future CR predictions for three different approaches. Our data show that the Time Transformation (TT) approach provides more accurate CR predictions than the other existing curve-fitting approaches.

Extract Class refactoring refers to the process of separating the different responsibilities of a class into different classes. Existing approaches of the Extract Class refactoring are based on factors internal to the class, i.e., structural and semantic relationships between methods. However, using the internal factors to identify and separate the responsibilities of the class is inadequate in many cases. Therefore, this chapter proposes a novel approach that exploits the clients of the class to support the Extract Class refactoring. The proposed approach is useful and complementary to the existing approaches because it involves factors external to the class to be refactored, i.e., the clients.

Poor decisions and suboptimal actions taken in software development result in technical debt. In service business, technical debt may become more evident and destructive. Customer relationship management (CRM) platform is one example of such businesses where several customizations are performed to adapt the software to customers’ processes and needs. The purpose of this study is to investigate technical debt in customizations made in different Salesforce CRM organizations based on ambiguous issue statements. We categorized 300 anonymous confessions of Salesforce consultants, administrators, and developers by using three different technical debt categorization approaches. This study would improve awareness among CRM teams for potential technical debts and may serve as a starting point to determine appropriate strategies to deal with technical debt.

Agile software engineering principles and practices have been widely adopted by the software-intensive organizations. There is an increasing interest among organizations in adopting DevOps for improving their distributed agile software environments. However, the challenge is how best to adopt and integrate DevOps in their software development environments – especially in distributed agile environment. This paper presents one such successful case study of DevOps adoption by the distributed agile teams for the development and deployment of a real-time high-performance gaming platform. (1) Small teams, (2) trust, (3) active communication and collaboration culture, (4) shared product vision and roadmap, (5) continuous feedback and learning culture, and (6) appreciation and excellent senior management support are some of the key success factors of DevOps. The experiences and learnings discussed in this paper can be used by other organizations to effectively plan and adopt DevOps for their environment.

Water is a limited resource and is necessary for the preservation of life. It would be hard for individuals to live without water. Consequently, the diversity of ways of getting water is required. Water is utilized by humans, farms, or industries. The problem is that some regions around the world do not have enough amount of water to utilize. Water in the Jazan region is generated using desalination plants, which is costly. Water can be generated using desalination plant, water well, or water-from-air (WFA) method. Rainfall in the Jazan region is limited because it is a hot area and has fairly high humidity as well as constant wind. People or industries can utilize solar energy and wind energy to generate electricity. After that, they can use them to operate watermaking devices. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the possibility of water market by computer simulations. In addition, it aims to help individuals to take benefit of watermaking in dry area with some humidity.

Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and agile software development are gaining popularity in the Department of Defense (DoD) because of their promise of more flexible and higher quality products. However, these newer methods have yet to be implemented across the DoD which leads to questions of effectiveness in different environments. This research will seek to determine how effective the use of MBSE and agile software development is in fielded, distributed systems to close a capability gap. A small team will lead the development of both the MBSE products and the agile software prototype. The use of iterative development with continuous customer feedback is expected to yield a more effective product with higher user satisfaction than traditional methods.

Contribution: This paper evaluates the compliance of the Software Engineering Program (SWE-Curriculum) at Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) with the first 5 of the 15 Software Engineering Knowledge Areas (SWE-KAs) of the SWEBOK-V3.0 of the IEEE Computer Society. This research is the first to measure the coverage of the SWE-KAs in any SWE-Curriculum. Background: Although the SWE-Curriculum is accredited by the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), it is essential to line up the said Curriculum with the IEEE view of Software Engineering (SWEBOK-V3.0). Research Questions: (1) What is the gap in the coverage of the SWE-KAs #1–5 topics across the said SWE-Curriculum? (2) What can be done to eliminate that gap? Methodology: This research was divided into three parts. This paper focused on SWE-KAs#1–5, and the second and third (P#2 and P#3) shall focus on SWE-KA#6–10 and SWE-KA#11–15, respectively. The coverage of SWE-KAs#1–5 was inspected across the SWE-Curriculum courses. The results are identified as either Fully Compliant (e.g., the SWE-KA is fully covered across one or more of the SWE-Curriculum courses), Highly Compliant (e.g., the SWE-KA is highly covered), Partially Compliant (e.g., the SWE-KA is partially covered), or Poorly Compliant (e.g., the SWE-KA is poorly covered). Findings: The compliance was found as Fully Compliant in the cases of the Software Requirements, Software Design, and Software Testing SWE-KAs, while it was found as Partially Compliant in the cases of the Software Construction and Software Maintenance SWE-KAs.

Companies have to assess the security risk when purchasing third-party software (TPS). There have always been needs for TPS use within companies; however, issues like server space and maintenance up-keep have hindered companies from purchasing TPS. The evolution of the cloud has made it easier for companies to make the necessary TPS purchases that they need. Companies use the TPS to modernize certain processes and make others more efficient; however, there is a cost. Purchases of TPS that reside in the cloud brought new security risks and compliance issues for companies. This research paper analyzed the associated cybersecurity risks of purchasing TPS and the importance of TPS compliance with companies’ policies.

In the past couple of years, YouTube has been criticized for its algorithm radicalizing users. The purpose of this research is to further refute the claims that YouTube’s algorithm radicalizes people. An analysis of the previous research by Mark Ledwich will be used as a base. Anecdotes gathered by the Mozilla Foundation will also be analyzed. An overview of the problems with the algorithm, as stated by a developer, will be introduced. All of this is to illustrate that the current algorithm is a “rabbit-hole” and is not healthy for the user. Rather, the algorithm does a good job at prioritizing a user’s preferences for content which could lead to unintended problems. The unintended problems are what need to be fixed with the YouTube algorithm. Potential solutions are provided and could be used as suggestions for YouTube to investigate to improve the algorithm.

Opinions expressed by learners on courses they attend play a primary role in arranging learning and teaching processes and designing data-driven educational services. The ongoing proliferation of massive open online initiatives and the increasing amount of opinions provided online are turning the exploration and exploitation of this collective intelligence into a challenging, while crucial, task. In this chapter, we characterize learner’s opinions conveyed by means of ratings and textual comments released after attending online courses, aiming at getting insights from multiple perspectives. Dynamics of opinion delivering are extracted from data collected along 10 years on a large-scale online learning platform. Our findings show that this domain has main distinguished peculiarities with respect to other educational domains and other online domains wherein individuals express opinions. We expect that our findings will support the community to better understand opinion patterns in course platforms and, in turn, to devise tailored educational services.

In our previous e-learning publications, we introduced the concepts of Qualifications-Based Learning (QBL), Course Authoring Tools (CAT), and of Didactical Structural Templates (DST) which are a further development of the CAT. The DSTs have been combined with QBL. Therefore, the DSTs represent the pedagogical structure of learning materials. The idea is to have an abstract definition which can be implemented as a traditional course (with or without gaming content), as an applied game, or any other form or modality of learning content. In this paper, we will go in deeper detail, how the DSTs can be accessed from any kind of tool or production environment.

The purpose of the present study is to outline the development of an FD (university teacher professional training) project for music teachers and to examine how it can affect the teachers. The “Grassroots FD Project 2019” was developed in which music teachers would reflect their teaching and write a paper to meet the requirements of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). It was programmed with mainly six activities: observing open music lessons, answering worksheets with cognitive and metacognitive questions, discussing with colleagues, practicing and reflecting on teaching, and writing a paper. To support teacher learning, three worksheets were made. By participating in the project, the 13 music teachers who were novice writers could write a paper and raised their metacognition of teaching.

The US and world economies need more trained cybersecurity workers. The demand for these workers has driven prominent private universities to create large reduced-cost programs for graduate students. Unfortunately, a large segment of the population does not have the prerequisite knowledge to enter into these graduate-level programs. In this paper, we look at how to develop an undergraduate cybersecurity online program through e-learning with automatically graded labs. We develop techniques to increase lab participation and integrity through a concept we call derivate labs. We provide preliminary evidence that these labs have, in fact, increased engagement and integrity in our online sections of courses in our undergraduate cybersecurity program.

Dyslexia is a universal reading difficulty. Each dyslexic suffers from individual reading problems. Some may not understand what is written, while others may omit or transpose letters while reading. Most research has treated all dyslexics as a single class, especially in Arabic. Therefore, the aim of this research is to overcome these problems by training dyslexics using learning material that matches their individual needs, in order to improve their reading. To achieve this, an online training system for Arabic dyslexics has been developed and evaluated (in terms of learning gain and learner satisfaction).

The implementation of the extension of the Knowledge Management Ecosystem Portal (KM-EP) course authoring tool (CAT) is to associate the competencies with the learning activities and an interface in order to export competencies to the learning management system (LMS) Moodle, which will serve as a foundation for enhancing it further with regard to generating a course automation based on students’ assessments for teaching and learning object-oriented programming (OOP) more effective, efficient, and individualized. This concept is elaborated further via the Nunamaker model by stating the problem areas, research questions, challenges, and research goals. The KM-EP CAT and the Qualification-Based Learning Model (QBLM) will provide the details of it. Based on the foundation and the Nunamaker model, the conceptual work will be presented using various Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams and mapping. Finally, the paper will conclude with a prototype implementation and an evaluation of the system via a cognitive walkthrough (CW).

Interactions of enterprise resource planning systems and big data are crucial for the automotive industry in the process of quick and reliable decision-making with the use of large chunks of data collected by each department of the organization. Similarly, unstructured data collected by sensor systems need proper control of data to put out the best results combined with automation. This study adopts a systematic literature review conducted mainly under three phases in order to give a robust combination between the three areas, i.e. ERP systems, big data and automotive industry. The three phases are determining the combination between the enterprise resource planning systems and big data and individually explaining their interaction with the automotive industry. This study has been able to identify the strict influence of large chunks of data on the automotive industry such as data management issues, trust issues and complexity in the responsiveness of enterprise resource planning systems. It is recognized that the main reasons for the emergence of complexity in the responsiveness of enterprise resource planning systems are the unstructured data collected by sensors of emerging concepts such as connected cars and the eventual automation of automobile functions. The study depicts the major influence of an enterprise resource planning system in order to centralize the entire organization whilst a large amount of structured and unstructured data collected.

Procurement decisions are particularly affected by the digital transformation in many industries. These decisions aim at cost savings as well as value creation of digital products coming from suppliers. The characteristics of digital components differ from conventional ones. Many companies have great difficulties in verifying the procurement costs of software products. Software evaluation becomes a more and more important part of cost engineering in companies. In theory and scientific literature, a distinction is made in software evaluation procedures between cost-, value-, and license-oriented approaches. This paper presents the design and results of an empirical study to find out which of these approaches are currently being pursued and which ones are eyed for the future by companies in different industries.

Social media is a platform where people share their interests and opinions. Users posting their opinions about a product or a service they used is very common nowadays. This information can be important to marketers. Knowledge about how a product is perceived in a society is crucial to improve the sales and formulate marketing business strategies. The data flow in social media is of extreme high volume and this data is generated in a scale of hundreds of gigabytes each day. There are many applications which have been built to make the most use of this idle data one of the most important one being sentiment analysis.Sentiment analysis is the process of determining the classification of opinions expressed in a text as positive, negative or neutral.In this project, we would like to develop an application that mimics the functions of a sentiment analysis system by using different third-party APIs/libraries to collect data and analyze it. A user can use this application to get the sentiment of users for a product on social media.

Matching algorithm is a key technology in content-based publish/subscribe system. Aiming at the lack of information sharing ability in dynamic wireless networks, an information distribution system model based on content-based publish/subscribe technology is established. Then, according to the subjectivity and fuzziness of users’ information requirements, using the logical coverage relationship between subscription constraints, an efficient fuzzy matching algorithm for battlefield information distribution and sharing is designed. Finally, the time and space efficiency of the algorithm are analyzed by experiments. Experimental results show that the algorithm is reasonable and efficient.

IT service management (ITSM) frameworks and standards have helped to manage the planning, design, deployment, operation, and improvement of IT services in business organizations in the last two decades ago. However, the current business environment has changed from stable and midterm user demands to dynamic and short-term ones. Consequently, ITSM frameworks with an agile perspective are now emerging. This paper reviews four of the main proffered agile ITSM frameworks (ITILv4, VeriSM, FitSM, and the ISO/IEC 20000–1:2018) regarding the expected agile tenets literature. It was found that ITILv4 and VeriSM adequately fit the expected agile tenets, but FitSM and the ISO/IEC 20000–1:2018 can be considered lightweight frameworks but not agile ones. Implications for the knowledge and practice, as well as conclusions, are finally reported.

Contingency planning has been a concept in technology for many decades and is a more prevalent sector of information technology. Over time, procedures have changed, but the object remains: “Always have a plan.” With the drastic and rapid changes in technology, companies have no choice but to have plans in case of major incidents such as natural disasters, blackouts, and certain cyberattacks. In exploring contingency planning as a whole, this paper discusses different topics such as common successful methodologies and new discoveries.

This chapter presents a commercial application of self-driving vehicles and analyzes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) related to the application. To illustrate the market potential of the application, we explore two use cases to present detailed application design, highlight prototyping activity, and identify risks and needs for risk management. In addition, we also discuss target customers and marketing strategies for the proposed application.

The ongoing pandemic created uncertainty worldwide − stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and business closure or reorganization to protect the health of employees and maintain business continuity. For many organizations, this meant a shift from the office to the home and the adoption of collaboration tools for communications and the sustenance of productivity. Operating safely and securely in a virtual workplace, via collaboration tools, requires distinct security considerations and configurations. The rise in the use of video and conferencing meeting applications has increased network traffic and in turn, an attraction for cybercriminals. Four collaboration tools were analyzed to identify their cyber threats, vulnerabilities, and risks. We provide recommendations on how organizations and customers could mitigate risks and vulnerabilities, prevent cyberattacks, and operate securely in a virtual workspace.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a country that contains many historical places for tourists to visit. Moreover, the Kingdom has announced it is opening the door for tourism in Saudi Arabia under the 2030 Vision. An electronic market can provide service providers and tourists a more efficient way to fulfill tourists’ desired activities in Saudi Arabia at a minimum price. This paper proposed and tested a mathematical model and a heuristic algorithm using Java to match service providers’ consortia with tourists’ wanted activity lists. The result of this proposed model and its heuristic algorithm demonstrated a feasible solution for an electronic market for Saudi Arabia’s growing tourism industry.

This paper clarified the role of crowdsourcing in companies. A survey was conducted using the Internet. We analyzed the reasons and results of using crowdsourcing by procuring management resources, improving productivity, reducing costs, and responding to fluctuations. More than half of the companies use crowdsourcing to improve productivity and procure management resources, while one-third of companies introduced crowdsourcing for cost reduction. Large companies are more likely to introduce crowdsourcing for productivity improvement than small and medium enterprises. Many companies use crowdsourcing to improve productivity and reduce costs for their new businesses compared to their main businesses. The results show that crowdsourcing is an innovative strategy of business management, especially in large companies.