College campuses can be large, confusing, and intimidating for new students and visitors. Finding the campus may be easy using a GPS unit or Google Maps directions, but this is not the case when you are actually on the campus. There is no service that provides directional assistance for the campus itself. This thesis proposes a driver assistant application running on an Android platform that can direct drivers to different buildings and parking lots in the campus. The application's user interface lets the user select a user type, a campus, and a destination through use of drop down menus and buttons. Once the user submits the needed information, then the next portion of the application runs in the background. The app retrieves the Campus Map XML created by the mapping tool that was constructed for this project. The XML data containing all the map elements is then parsed and stored in a hierarchal data structure. The resulting objects are then used to construct a campus graph, on which an altered version of Dijkstra's Shortest Path algorithm is executed. When the path to the destination has been discovered, the campus map with the computed path overlaid is displayed on the user's device, showing the route to the desired destination. / by Iana Zankina. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Information system development (ISD) projects have been associated with the "software crisis" for over three decades. A set of common "root causes" has often been cited in literature with corresponding "solutions". Yet the overall project success rate has remained low, resulting in a paradox of many solutions and little progress over the years. This study examines the management of application software acquisition from external suppliers in ISD projects. Three case studies are documented based on participant observation with complete membership roles. After within-case analyses highlighting issues in individual cases, crosscase analyses are conducted, first to identify a pattern of ISD project challenges and then to search for their explanations. Concepts from agency theory, contract theory and product development literature are used in the process of diagnosing root causes behind the observations. The proposed explanation is that the Traditional Systems Development Framework (TSDF), characterized by competitive-bidding-monopolized-development, underlies the identified root causes. Accordingly, competitive development is suggested as an alternative approach. Following the "Inference to the Best Explanation" (IBE) analytical strategy, the suggested approach is subject to two contrastive analyses, first with the prepackaged software development and then with the construction industry, to demonstrate that the suggestion is a "warranted inference". Further analogical analyses illustrate the feasibility of development competition for software product development. A Performance-Based Systems Development Framework (PBSDF) is outlined as a tentative implementation of the suggested competitive development approach for ISD projects supported by risk-sharing supplier contract and a relative product evaluation approach. A number of future research implications are described as a result of this study after summarizing the research contributions.

The booming mobile app market attracts a large number of developers. As a result, the competition is extremely tough. This fierce competition leads to high standards required for mobile apps, which mandates efficient and effective testing. Efficient testing requires little effort to use, while effective testing checks that the app under test behaves as expected. Manual testing is highly effective, but it is costly. Automatic testing should come to the rescue, but current automatic methods are either ineffective or inefficient. Methods using implicit specifications – for instance, “an app should not crash” for catching fail-stop errors – are ineffective because they cannot find semantic problems. Methods using explicit specifications such as test scripts are inefficient because they require huge developer effort to create and maintain specifications. In this thesis, we present our two approaches for solving these challenges. We first built the AppDoctor system which efficiently tests mobile apps. It quickly explores an app then slowly but accurately verifies the potential problems to identify bugs without introducing false positives. It uses dependencies discovered between actions to simplify its reports. Our second approach, implemented in the AppFlow system, leverages the ample opportunity of reusing test cases between apps to gain efficiency without losing effectiveness. It allows common UI elements to be used in test scripts then recognizes these UI elements in real apps using a machine learning approach. The system also allows tests to be specified in reusable pieces, and provides a system to synthesize complete test cases from these reusable pieces. It enables robust tests to be created and reused across apps in the same category. The combination of these two approaches enables a developer to quickly test an app on a great number of combinations of actions for fail-stop problems, and effortlessly and efficiently test the app on most common scenarios for semantic problems. This combination covers most of her test requirements and greatly reduces her burden in testing the app.

No description available.

The scope of this project includes a re-engineering of the internal architecture of the Solicitation Management System (SMS), a web-based application that facilitates the running of grant proposal solicitations for the Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization at California State University San Bernardino (CSUSB). A goal of the project is to increase consistency and efficiency of the code base of the system, making it easier to understand, maintain, and extend. The previous version of SMS was written to rely on the Spring and Hibernate frameworks. The project includes a restructuring of the system to remove reliance on the Spring framework, but maintain reliance on Hibernate. The result is an updated version of the SMS. The system was written using current technologies such as Java, JSP, and CSS.

To increase productivity, application developers are using tools that allow them to create higher quality applications faster. One such set of tools, open-source frameworks, allows application developers to reuse software artifacts and should increase application quality. However, given the vast number of open-source frameworks available, users must be able to differentiate among frameworks and select the one best suited for them. In this study, we expand the taxonomy of open-source frameworks and analyze the impact of the framework's characteristics, technical quality, and social pressure on perceived usefulness and continued framework usage intention. Our findings suggest that understandability and flexibility have a significant impact on perceived ease of use, while perceived usefulness is mainly determined by flexibility and efficiency. Our research can be used to understand what influences developers to continue using frameworks and to improve framework development. / viii, 129 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm

In traditional science education, lecture-style presentation dominates. There is a call, however, to integrate a greater amount of inquiry and discovery into the science classroom, specifically utilizing new media and technology. To answer that call, an undergraduate team created a tablet application for primary students, which was designed to supplement instruction in the physical sciences. The app was then taken into the classroom to test for efficacy. The primary students’ test scores showed a significant increase after use of the tablet application. Grade level and school location did affect change in test score; whereas, gender, type of school, student IEP, and iPad use did not. The undergraduate team who designed the app also showed significant increase in concept knowledge after the project in specific topic areas. / Literature review -- Methodology and results for undergraduate study -- iPad application : the product -- Methodology and results for primary student study -- Implications and recommendations. / Department of Chemistry

Games have become important applications on mobile devices. A mobile gaming approach known as remote gaming is being developed to support games on low cost mobile devices. In the remote gaming approach, the responsibility of rendering a game and advancing the game play is put on remote servers instead of the resource constrained mobile devices. The games rendered on the servers are encoded as video and streamed to mobile devices. Mobile devices gather user input and stream the commands back to the servers to advance game play. With this solution, mobile devices with video playback and network connectivity can become game consoles. In this thesis, we present the design and development of such a system and evaluate the performance and design considerations to maximize the end user gaming experience. A gaming user experience model capable of predicting the user experience for a given gaming session is developed and verified. / by Waazim Reza. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Asset management is a time consuming and error prone process. Information Technology (IT) personnel typically perform this task manually by visually inspecting assets to identify misplaced assets. If this process is automated and provided to IT personnel it would prove very useful in keeping track of assets in a server rack. A mobile based solution is proposed to automate this process. The asset management application on the tablet captures images of assets and searches an annotated database to identify the asset. We evaluate the matching performance and speed of asset matching using three different image feature descriptors. Methods to reduce feature extraction and matching complexity were developed. Performance and accuracy tradeoffs were studied, domain specific problems were identified, and optimizations for mobile platforms were made. The results show that the proposed methods reduce complexity of asset matching by 67% when compared to the matching process using unmodified image feature descriptors. / by Reena Ursula Friedel. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2012. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

A Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) system is a cloud-based system that is accessed by the users through their own mobile devices. MCC systems are emerging as the product of two technology trends: 1) the migration of personal computing from desktop to mobile devices and 2) the growing integration of large-scale computing environments into cloud systems. Designers are developing a variety of new mobile cloud computing systems. Each of these systems is developed with different goals and under the influence of different design constraints, such as high network latency or limited energy supply. The current MCC systems rely heavily on Computation Offloading, which however incurs new problems such as scalability of the cloud, privacy concerns due to storing personal information on the cloud, and high energy consumption on the cloud data centers. In this dissertation, I address these problems by exploring different options in the distribution of computation across different computing nodes in MCC systems. My thesis is that "the use of design and simulation tools optimized for design space exploration of the MCC systems is the key to optimize the distribution of computation in MCC." For a quantitative analysis of mobile cloud computing systems through design space exploration, I have developed netShip, the first generation of an innovative design and simulation tool, that offers large scalability and heterogeneity support. With this tool system designers and software programmers can efficiently develop, optimize, and validate large-scale, heterogeneous MCC systems. I have enhanced netShip to support the development of ever-evolving MCC applications with a variety of emerging needs including the fast simulation of new devices, e.g., Internet-of-Things devices, and accelerators, e.g., mobile GPUs. Leveraging netShip, I developed three new MCC systems where I applied three variations of a new computation distributing technique, called Reverse Offloading. By more actively leveraging the computational power on mobile devices, the MCC systems can reduce the total execution times, the burden of concentrated computations on the cloud, and the privacy concerns about storing personal information available in the cloud. This approach also creates opportunities for new services by utilizing the information available on the mobile device instead of accessing the cloud. Throughout my research I have enabled the design optimization of mobile applications and cloud-computing platforms. In particular, my design tool for MCC systems becomes a vehicle to optimize not only the performance but also the energy dissipation, an aspect of critical importance for any computing system.