Susan Mengel - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Susan Mengel

Proceedings 12th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (Cat. No.PR00131)

... Susan A. Mengel and Joseph V. Ulans Texas Tech University Computer Science Lubbock, TX 79409 ... more ... Susan A. Mengel and Joseph V. Ulans Texas Tech University Computer Science Lubbock, TX 79409 3104 E Mail: mengel@ttu.edu ... It instead uses the formula: E s N + 2 + AEn + AEx whereAEn is the number of auxiliary entries (equal to zero for C++ programs) and AEx is the ...

Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE/ACM International Conference on Big Data Computing, Applications and Technologies

This project focuses on analyzing the sentiment of tweets in order to find a correspondence to he... more This project focuses on analyzing the sentiment of tweets in order to find a correspondence to health issues and to gain a new perspective in analyzing health data. Twitter social media is a huge source of information that can augment data about health in particular geographic locations. For this project, analyzing tweets is an attempt to find some relation between the sentiment of tweets and Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) in the counties along Interstate 20 (I-20) in Texas. Only geo-tagged tweets that are mapped to the counties of interest are used in the main analysis. The sentiment of the text of the Tweet is determined as being either positive or negative. Using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), several classifiers are trained to determine the sentiment of the tweet. Each of the classifier's results are compared to measure the confidence of the sentiment declared. After all the tweets are classified, then the results are used to calculate the following for each county: Positive-to-Negative ratio, Positive-to-Population ratio, and Negative-to-Population ratio. This data is then separated into quintiles and compared to the Cardiovascular Disease map of I-20 in order to determine if a relationship may exist between CVD and the tweets. The preliminary results show that a correspondence exists between the low CVD rate in a county to the Positive-to-Negative ratio of that same county.

Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE/ACM International Conference on Big Data Computing, Applications and Technologies, 2017

Proceedings Frontiers in Education 1997 27th Annual Conference. Teaching and Learning in an Era of Change

K12 students who are the college students of tomorrow are growing in their sophistication with co... more K12 students who are the college students of tomorrow are growing in their sophistication with computers. As an example, K12 web pages show complex designs by the students that rival or surpass university web pages. The students are also very adept at searching the web for information. Since students are becoming more sophisticated with computers, higher education institutions will be able to take advantage of that sophistication and should track the progress of K12 web usage to understand how this increased sophistication will impact and improve college courses. They might also be able to exploit the web better to attract students to their institution or even particular subject areas. This paper can serve as a starting point to discover what is happening at the K12 level on the World Wide Web (WWW). It shows numerous resources for K12 including those for putting up school web pages, finding out about science experiments, going through museums, and communicating with students in other countries. It gives examples where K12 students along with their teachers are designing sophisticated web pages for others to learn about their school. In these examples, students put up original artwork, produce movies, or write about their school, and educators make their students' work a showcase or show their own creativity in projects they have their students do.

Companion Proceedings of the10th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing, 2017

The transdisciplinary big data medical research of the Exposome project discussed in this paper c... more The transdisciplinary big data medical research of the Exposome project discussed in this paper can be best described by the old adage 'Finding a needle in a haystack', in this case, of Excel .csv or other types of disparate files from various service providers, such as the US Census Bureau and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the US Department of Health and Human Services. The Exposome project aims to bring together such data files from different sources to draw previously unknown insights into medical and other types of issues, such as cardiovascular disease and infant mortality. Data from these and other providers, however, continues to grow with new data added frequently; so, the process of finding the correct or desired data is a quite cumbersome and time-consuming task. The data may also be unstructured causing relational databases to be less optimal for handling and processing such enormous data volumes. Thus, NoSQL databases offer a promising means to...

2019 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and Applications (BigDataService), 2019

This paper presents a new procedure that uses spatial statistics to identify clusters of counties... more This paper presents a new procedure that uses spatial statistics to identify clusters of counties having either a high or low incidence of a disease (dependent variable). These counties provide a spatial snapshot that describes the disease in the study area. Using this spatial snapshot as a reference, the procedure evaluates potential factors (independent variables) sorted out by the degree of similarity with the disease when comparing spatial snapshots. The greater the similarity, the greater the likelihood for a causal relationship. Similarity also can facilitate the selection of variables to be considered rather than relying only on the researcher's expertise. In particular, the procedure is used to analyze Cardiovascular Disease at the county level for the contiguous 48 states using the Public Health Exposome, a data repository of environmental factors to which a given group of people may be exposed over the course of their lifetime and that may impact their health. The prop...

In the mid-eighties, researchers at the University of Miami confronted their problem of informati... more In the mid-eighties, researchers at the University of Miami confronted their problem of information overload while investigating information on worker performance. They required literature sources from various fields, such as engineering, business, and psychology, to name a few. To cope with their information overload, they devised a research methodology to partition information resources into category matrices in order to find patterns, trends, or voids. The approach was termed State-of-the-Art Matrix or SAM Analysis. SAM Analysis is a manual process, thus restricting the amount of information for conveying category decisions. During the first phase of the manual process, researchers construct models or categories that best describe the research area. In the next phase, articles from the information sources are read and assigned to the pre-defined categories based on the judgment of assessors. The manual approach presents major challenges to researchers who must deal with identifyi...

With the growing importance of communications, the establishment of a network laboratory with a n... more With the growing importance of communications, the establishment of a network laboratory with a networking course is becoming a necessary and rewarding venture. Not only do the students receive instruction in class, but they also obtain hands-on experience through setting up commercial networks in the lab. One such lab is being established at the University of Arkansas in the Computer Systems Engineering and Electrical Engineering Departments to support the undergraduate and graduate network courses. The lab has 12 PCs with Ethernet combination cards so that coaxial or twisted-pair cables may be used. The software for the lab currently consists of Novell NetWare 3.12, Novell NetWare 4.1, Linux, PC-NFS, Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and Artisoft LANtastic 6.0. The students set up the networks and perform various exercises, including troubleshooting, administrating and timing. The students also have access to a protocol analyzer that can be used on the University of Arkansas ...

Predicting project resource utilization is a risky business. This paper presents results from a d... more Predicting project resource utilization is a risky business. This paper presents results from a domain-independent product development model that enables objective and quantitative calculation of certain development cycle characteristics and risks. One result is improved project resource estimation.

Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering & Science

Hierarchical scheduling frameworks are a new scheduling paradigm where multiple system schedules ... more Hierarchical scheduling frameworks are a new scheduling paradigm where multiple system schedules are integrated (one-within-another). HSFs presents a multi-layered complexity problem that system engineers are struggling to contain. A promising trend in the aerospace and defense industry is to employ Digital Engineering’s Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) to deal with the complexity of HSFs. MBSE permits the abstraction of application-specific details that can radically speed up system design exploration. Thus, this paper investigates how the output from an HSF algorithm can be converted into an MBSE modeling language that enables architectural exploration for resource allocation. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded Systems (MARTE) Profile is the chosen unified modeling language of MBSE. The modeling language is used with an HSF application for demonstration purposes. The approach in this paper seeks to limit tool use by comb...

Cluster Computing

It is essential to ensure the data security of data analytical frameworks as any security vulnera... more It is essential to ensure the data security of data analytical frameworks as any security vulnerability existing in the system can lead to a data loss or data breach. This vulnerability may occur due to attacks from live attackers as well as automated bots. However inside attacks are also becoming more frequent because of incorrectly implemented security requirements and access control policies. Thus, it is important to understand security goals and formulate security requirements and access control policies accordingly. Therefore, it is equally important to identify the existing security vulnerabilities of a given software system. To find the available vulnerabilities against any system, it is mandatory to conduct vulnerability assessments as scheduled tasks in a regular manner. Thus, an easily deployable, easily maintainable, accurate vulnerability assessment testbed or a model is helpful as facilitated by Linux containers. Nowadays Linux containers (LXCs) which have operating system level virtualization, are very popular over virtual machines (VMs) which have hypervisor or kernel level virtualization in high performance computing (HPC) due to reasons, such as high portability, high performance, efficiency and high security (Chae et al in Clust Comput 22:1765-1775, 2019. 10.1007/s10586-017-1511-2). Hence, LXCs can make an efficient and scalable vulnerability assessment testbed or a model by using already developed analyzing tools such as OpenVas, Dagda, PortSpider, MongoAudit, NMap, Metasploit Framework, Nessus, OWASP Zed Attack Proxy, and OpenSCAP, to assure the required security level of a given system very easily. To verify the overall security of any given software system, this paper first introduces a virtual, portable and easily deployable vulnerability assessment general testbed within the Linux container network. Next, the paper presents, how to conduct experiments using this testbed on a MongoDB database implemented in Singularity Linux containers to find the available vulnerabilities in 1. MongoDB application itself, 2. Images accompanied by containers, 3. Host, and 4. Network by integrating seven tools: OpenVas, Dagda, PortSpider, MongoAudit, NMap, Metasploit Framework, and Nessus to the container-based testbed. Finally, it discusses how to use generated results to improve the security level of the given system.

Computers

The aerospace and defense industry is facing an end-of-life production issue with legacy embedded... more The aerospace and defense industry is facing an end-of-life production issue with legacy embedded uniprocessor systems. Most, if not all, embedded processor manufacturers have already moved towards system-on-a-chip multicore architectures. Current scheduling arrangements do not consider schedules related to safety and security. The methods are also inefficient because they arbitrarily assign larger-than-necessary windows of execution. This research creates a hierarchical scheduling framework as a model for real-time multicore systems to integrate the scheduling for safe and secure systems. This provides a more efficient approach which automates the migration of embedded systems’ real-time software tasks to multicore architectures. A novel genetic algorithm with a unique objective function and encoding scheme was created and compared to classical bin-packing algorithms. The simulation results show the genetic algorithm had 1.8–2.5 times less error (a 56–71% difference), outperforming...

2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

IEEE Systems Journal

In this paper, an application of cyclomatic complexity to enterprise scale is proposed. Enterpris... more In this paper, an application of cyclomatic complexity to enterprise scale is proposed. Enterprise architecture frameworks are introduced as a standard way to document enterprises. A specific enterprise architecture framework is selected for the implementation of the proposed cyclomatic complexity application. A candidate implementation shows how the cyclomatic complexity of an enterprise documented in an enterprise architecture framework is estimated. Results from manual analysis of the enterprise elements comprising enterprise cyclomatic complexity are compared to results of the proposed extension, showing the two approaches are equivalent. The method is applied to U.S. Army application showing the ease of the practical use. The result is a tool for enterprise architects to easily assess the complexity of enterprises of interest.

Soft Computing

Abstract Decision trees are a classification model that allow rule generation. Depending upon the... more Abstract Decision trees are a classification model that allow rule generation. Depending upon the type of decision tree model, rules may have one to hundreds of conditions and with repeating data attributes over different conditional values causing the rules to be difficult to understand. To achieve more understandable rules, the number of nodes can be minimized to control the depth of the tree and, therefore, the number of conditions in the rules. Further, the study described in this paper seeks to optimize the decision tree for the generation of rules specific to the infrequent class which presents another challenge since the infrequent class may have few instances in the dataset. Rules that are generated using either decision trees or class association mining generally come from the major class of the dataset. These two mining techniques, decision trees and association mining, are utilized together through ensemble learning in an adaptable manner so that they expand and contract to accommodate the characteristics of the dataset. The ensemble learning occurs in phases: a partially generated or minimized decision tree mining phase, and association mining phase, to increase the probability of finding infrequent class rules. The ensemble learning technique developed in this study is found to generate understandable rules with increased coverage and confidence for the infrequent class with balanced or unbalanced datasets.

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Proceedings of 1994 Ieee Frontiers in Education Conference Fie 94, Nov 2, 1994

The process of learning new material can be frustrating for many students particularly if they th... more The process of learning new material can be frustrating for many students particularly if they think they are making more mistakes than positive steps forward. Students need to be shown that mistakes are indicators of how well they have mastered the material and how alert they are when working on the material. They need to view mistakes as an opportunity to improve rather than in the more negative light as an "ego deflater". In order to help data structure students in the Computer Systems Engineering Department at the University of Arkansas to become more motivated and to give themselves a chance to complete the program assignments, several techniques were used to help students complete the program assignments adequately. At the beginning of the course, the students were given small assignments which were graded, but not recorded, in order to give them an idea of how grading would proceed in the course. Most of the students would complete these assignments. Furthermore, labs were given and reviewed in class to reinforce the concepts in the material just covered in lectures. The results of this method and tracking of student progress are discussed.

Papers from a March 2000 conference address themes including professional issues, training curric... more Papers from a March 2000 conference address themes including professional issues, training curricula, distance education, and undergraduate and graduate curricula. Increased attention is paid this year to Web-based SE methods. Specific topics include technology transfer for formal methods of software specification, student collaboration across universities, and student-run usability testing. Other subjects are teaching software project management in industrial and academic environments, real-time computing in software engineering education, the implication of different thinking styles on software engineering education, and faculty issues in distance education. Lacks a subject index.