Automatic marking of coursework has many advantages in terms of resource benefits and consistency. Diagrams are quite common in many domains including computer science but marking them automatically is a challenging task. There has been previous research to accomplish this, but results to date have been limited. Much of the meaning of a diagram is contained in the labels and in order to automatically mark the diagrams the labels need to be understood. However the choice of labels used by students in a diagram is largely unrestricted and diversity of labels can be a problem while matching. This thesis has measured the extent of the diagram label matching problem and proposed and evaluated a configurable extensible framework to solve it. A new hybrid syntax matching algorithm has also been proposed and evaluated. This hybrid approach is based on the multiple existing syntax algorithms. Experiments were conducted on a corpus of coursework which was large scale, realistic and representative of UK HEI students. The results show that the diagram label matching is a substantial problem and cannot be easily avoided for the e-assessment of diagrams. The results also show that the hybrid approach was better than the three existing syntax algorithms. The results also show that the framework has been effective but only to limited extent and needs to be further refined for the semantic stage. The framework proposed in this Thesis is configurable and extensible. It can be extended to include other algorithms and set of parameters. The framework uses configuration XML, dynamic loading of classes and two design patterns namely strategy design pattern and facade design pattern. A software prototype implementation of the framework has been developed in order to evaluate it. Finally this thesis also contributes the corpus of coursework and an open source software implementation of the proposed framework. Since the framework is configurable and extensible, its software implementation can be extended and used by the research community.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / alities. The extensible Markup Language (XML) is used for data storage and message exchange, Extensible 3D (X3D) Graphics for visualization and XML Schema-based Binary Compression (XSBC) for data compression. The AUV Workbench provides an intuitive cross-platform-capable tool with extensibility to provide for future enhancements such as agent-based control, asynchronous reporting and communication, loss-free message compression and built-in support for mission data archiving. This thesis also investigates the Jabber instant messaging protocol, showing its suitability for text and file messaging in a tactical environment. Exemplars show that the XML backbone of this open-source technology can be leveraged to enable both human and agent messaging with improvements over current systems. Integrated Jabber instant messaging support makes the NPS AUV Workbench the first custom application supporting XML Tactical Chat (XTC). Results demonstrate that the AUV Workbench provides a capable testbed for diverse AUV technologies, assisting in the development of traditional single-vehicle operations and agent-based multiple-vehicle methodologies. The flexible design of the Workbench further encourages integration of new extensions to serve operational needs. Exemplars demonstrate how in-mission and post-mission event monitoring by human operators can be achieved via simple web page, standard clients or custom instant messaging client. Finally, the AUV Workbench's potential as a tool in the development of multiple-AUV tactics and doctrine is discussed. / Civilian, Singapore Defence Science and Technology Agency

This thesis addresses two ubiquitous trends in the embedded system world - the increasing importance of design turnaround time as a design metric, and the move towards closing the design productivity gap. Adopting the right choice of design approach has been recognised as an integral part of the design flow in order to meet desired characteristics such as increasing software content, satisfying the growing complexities of an application, reusing off-the-shelf components, and exploring design metrics tradeoff, which closes the design productivity gap. The importance of design turnaround time is motivated by the intensive competition between manufacturers, especially makers of mainstream electronic consumer products, who shrinks the product life cycle and requires faster time-to-market to maximise economic benefits. This thesis presents a suite of design automation methodologies to automatically design embedded systems for an application in the state-of-the-art design approach - the extensible processor platform. These design automation methodologies systematise the extensible processor platform???s design flow, with particular emphasis on solving four challenging design problems: i) code segment identification; ii) instruction generation; iii) architectural customisation selection; and iv) processor evaluation. Our suite of design automation methodologies includes: i) a semi-automatic design system - to design an extensible processor that maximises the application performance while satisfying the area constraint. By specifying a fitting function to identify suitable code segments within an application, a two-level hierarchy selection algorithm is used to first select a predefined processor and then select the right instruction, and a performance estimator is used to estimate an application's performance; ii) a tool to match instructions - to automatically match the pre-designed instructions with computationally intensive code segments, reducing verification time and effort; iii) an instructions estimation model - to estimate the area overhead, latency, power consumption of extensible instructions, exploring larger design space; and iv) an instructions generation tool - to generate new extensible instructions that maximises the speedup while minimising power dissipation. A number of techniques such as system decomposition, combinational equivalence checking and regression analysis etc., have been heavily relied upon in the creation of the final design system. This thesis shows results at every stage to demonstrate the efficacy of our design methodologies in the creation of extensible processors. The methodologies and results presented in this thesis demonstrate that automating the design process for an extensible processor platform results in significant performance increase - on average, an increase of 4.74x (up to 15.71x) compared to the original base processor. Our system achieves significant design turnaround time savings (2.5% of the full simulation time for the entire design space) with majority Pareto points obtained (91% on average), and can lead to fewer and faster design iterations. Our instruction matching tool is 7.3x faster on average compared to the best known approaches to the problem (partial simulations). Our estimation model has a mean absolute error as small as 3.4% (6.7% max.) for area overhead, 5.9% (9.4% max.) for latency, and 4.2% (7.2% max.) for power consumption, compared to estimation through the time consuming synthesis and simulation steps using commercial tools. Finally, the instruction generation tool reduces energy consumption by a further 5.8% on average (up to 17.7%) compared to extensible instructions generated by previous approaches.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879), which is a well defined, public standard. It uses plain text to encode a hierarchical set of information using verbose tags to allow the XML document to be understood without any special reader. The use of schemas in XML also allows a well defined contract describing what a single XML document means. The self-contained nature of XML and the strong contract provided by its schemas makes it useful as an archival storage format and as a means of communicating across system or organizational boundaries. As such XML is being increasingly used by businesses throughout the world. These businesses use XML as a means of storing, transmitting and (with the use of style sheets) displaying information. The simple, well defined structure of XML does present some problems when it is used by businesses and similar organizations. As it is an open, plain text based standard care must be taken when looking at security. The use of plain text with verbose tags also results in XML documents that are far larger than other means of storing the same information. This thesis focuses on the affect of the large size of XML when it is used to communicate across a network. This large size can often increase the time taken to transmit the document and we were interested to see how it could be minimized. we investigated the ways that are used to control the size of XML documents and how they are transmitted. We carefully investigated by implementing solutions on how to transmit the XML document. We then first presented a new method, called dynamic adaptive threshold transmission (DATT), in comparisons with other existing similar methods, which, under the discussed conditions, offers significant improvements in transmission times and network transmission efficiencies.

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has become the standard format for data exchange on the Internet, providing interoperability between different business applications. Such wide use results in large volumes of heterogeneous XML data, i.e., XML documents conforming to different schemas. Although schemas are important in many business applications, they are often missing in XML documents. In this thesis, we present a suite of algorithms that are effective in extracting schema information from a large collection of XML documents. We propose using the cost of NFA simulation to compute the Minimum Length Description to rank the inferred schema. We also studied using frequencies of the sample inputs to improve the precision of the schema extraction. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation framework to quantify the quality of the extracted schema. Experimental studies are conducted on various data sets to demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of our approach.

It is necessary to authenticate users when they want to access services in WLANs. Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is an authentication framework widely used in WLANs. Authentication mechanisms built on EAP are called EAP methods. The requirements for EAP methods in WLAN authentication have been defined in RFC 4017. Besides, low computation cost and forward secrecy, excluded in RFC 4017, are noticeable requirements in WLAN authentication. However, all EAP methods and authentication schemes designed for WLANs so far do not satisfy all of the above requirements. Therefore, we will propose an EAP method which utilizes three factors, stored secrets, passwords, and biometrics, to verify users. Our proposed method fully satisfies 1) the requirements of RFC 4017, 2) forward secrecy, and 3) lightweight computation. Moreover, the privacy of biometrics is protected against the authentication server, and the server can flexibly decide whether passwords and biometrics are verified in each round or not.

Cette thèse propose un cadre d'évaluation pour des requêtes XQuery dans un<br />contexte de médiation de données XML. Un médiateur doit fédérer des sources de données<br />distribuées et hétérogènes. A cette fin, un modèle de représentation des requêtes est néces-<br />saire. Ce modèle doit intégrer les problèmes de médiation et permettre de définir un cadre<br />d'optimisation pour améliorer les performances. Le modèle des motifs d'arbre est souvent<br />utilisé pour représenter les requêtes XQuery, mais il ne reconnaît pas toutes les spécifica-<br />tions du langage. La complexité du langage XQuery fait qu'aucun modèle de représentation<br />complet n'a été proposé pour reconna^³tre toutes les spécifications. Ainsi, nous proposons un<br />nouveau modèle de représentation pour toutes les requêtes XQuery non typées que nous appe-<br />lons TGV. Avant de modéliser une requête, une étape de canonisation permet de produire une<br />forme canonique pour ces requêtes, facilitant l'étape de traduction vers le modèle TGV. Ce<br />modèle prend en compte le contexte de médiation et facilite l'étape d'optimisation. Les TGV<br />définis sous forme de Types Abstraits de Données facilitent l'intégration du modèle dans tout<br />système en fonction du modèle de données. De plus, une algèbre d'évaluation est définie pour<br />les TGV. Grâce µa l'intégration d'annotations et d'un cadre pour règles de transformation, un<br />optimiseur extensible manipule les TGV. Celui-ci repose sur des règles transformations, un<br />modèle de coût générique et une stratégie de recherche. Les TGV et l'optimiseur extensible<br />sont intégrés dans le médiateur XLive, développé au laboratoire PRiSM.

<p>Abstract</p><p>The program analysis tool, VizzAnalyzer, works good for visualizing the program structure as graphs, but currently it does not allow for a UML conform visualization, which allows a effective communication among software engineers. In this thesis we describe the extension of the VizzAnalyzer to allow the visualization of software systems as UML class diagrams.</p><p>The Eclipse platform provides an open source platform for creating an extensible integrated development environment. We create a plug-in that can be seamlessly integrated in the Eclipse platform through the third party tools in Eclipse to visualize the graph in VizzAnalyzer as UML class diagrams. The third party tools that are used in this thesis are the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) and Draw2D. They are mainly used to create the UML class diagram view.</p><p>In order to get a clear view on the diagram in the limited screen size, it is necessary to provide an appropriate layout for the diagram and drag and zoom actions on its figures. We provide the necessary means and document altogether in this thesis. We implement our solution as Eclipse plug-in and demonstrate feasibility.</p>

A need has arisen for an easy-to-use, flexible, transparent, and cross-platform communication backbone for configuration and execution of distributed simulations and experiments. Open source, open architecture, and custom student written pro- grams have extended the capabilities of educational research facilities and opened the way for the development of the architecture presented in this thesis. The architecture is known by the recursive acronym hADES: hADES Architecture for Distributed Engineering Simulation. Included in this thesis is a discussion of the design and implementation of the novel hADES software architecture for Ethernet and wireless IEEE 802.11 network-based distributed simulation and experiment facilities. The goal of this architecture is to facilitate rapid integration of new and legacy simulations and laboratory equipment to support undergraduate and graduate research projects as well as educational classroom activities and industrial simulation and experiments.

Softwaresysteme sind komplexe immaterielle Systeme mit einer Vielzahl von Bestandteilen und Beziehungen. Um den Aufbau, die Funktionsweise und die Entwicklung von Softwaresystemen besser zu verstehen, eignen sich Softwarevisualisierungen, welche die abstrakte Datengrundlage in eine visuelle Repräsentation übertragen. Auf Grund der Masse und der Komplexität der in der Visualisierung enthaltenen Informationen, kommt es schnell zur Unübersichtlichkeit, was sich negativ auf den Prozess des Verstehens auswirkt. Zur Beherrschung der Komplexität muss der Betrachter daher die Gesamtheit zuerst in mehrere Perspektiven unterteilen, um diese anschließend gezielt nach verschiedenen Aspekten untersuchen zu können. Die dafür benötigten Interaktionsmöglichkeiten sind Gegenstand der Untersuchungen in dieser Arbeit, wobei im Wesentlichen Visualisierungen der Struktur von Software als Ausgangspunkt genutzt werden. Insbesondere wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie die Interaktion gestaltet werden kann, damit der Benutzer ein möglichst umfassendes Verständnis der Struktur erlangt. Zur Umsetzung der theoretischen Erkenntnisse wird ein Prototyp vorgestellt, der automatisiert aus den Strukturinformationen eines Ecore-Modells eine interaktive dreidimensionale Softwarevisualisierung der Struktur im freien standardisierten Format Extensible 3D generiert. Der Prozess der Visualisierung wird dabei durch Werkzeuge des openArchitectureWare-Frameworks realisiert. Zur Integration in den Entwicklungsprozess ist der Prototyp in ein Plugin für Eclipse eingebettet.