18166781
A State-Based Approach to Testing Aspect-Oriented Programs
This paper presents a state-based approach to testing aspect-oriented programs. Aspectual state models, as an extension to the testable FREE state model of classes, are exploited to capture the impact of aspects on the state models of classes. To generate test suites for adequately testing object behavior and interaction between classes and aspects in terms of message sequences, we transform an aspectual state model to a transition tree, where each path from the root to some leaf node indicates a template of test cases, i.e. message sequences. Since the statebased approach is directly built upon the test design patterns for object-oriented programs, it is not only applicable to the simultaneous development of classes and aspects, but also to the incremental development of aspects based on the existing classes.
41800471
Ensuring Consistent Use/Misuse Case Decomposition for Secure Systems
14135016
A Study on Illumination Invariant Face Recognition Methods Based on Multiple Eigenspaces
This paper presents two multiple illumination eigenspaces-based methods, RDEB and BPNNB, for solving the variable illumination problem of face recognition. The experiment shows that the methods have a high recognition ratio. In particular, BPNNB has outperformed the assumptive method which knows the illumination directions of faces and completes recognition in the specific eigenspace using eigenface method[2] for each face subset with a specific illumination direction.
14562584
Integrating functional and security requirements with use case decomposition
Misuse case modeling is a viable option to depict the security requirements together with functional requirements. To investigate the interplay between functional and security requirements, this paper presents an approach to decomposing use cases, misuse cases, and mitigation use cases. We identify relationships among decomposed cases for each case type (use, misuse, mitigation use) and ensure consistency among the cases as decomposition occurs by properly modeling shared and optional cases. We also assign applicable actors to the decomposed cases. Decomposition is conducted for each case type independently and then integrated with the "threatens" and "mitigates" relationships. We provide processes for the proper use of the "threatens" relationship between misuse cases and use cases and the "mitigates" relationship between mitigation use cases and misuse cases at different levels of abstraction. Thus, a complete set of security-centric requirements can be specified from the project outset to guide subsequent software development phases
11130686
An Aspect-Oriented Approach to Security Requirements Analysis
This paper presents an aspect-oriented approach to integrated elicitation of functional and security requirements based on use case-driven development. We identify security threats with respect to use cases and adopt threat mitigations for preventing or reducing security threats. To capture crosscutting nature of threats and mitigations, we specify them as aspects that encapsulate pointcuts and advice. A threat (mitigation) pointcut is a collection of join points in use cases at which the use cases are threatened (secured); whereas threat/mitigation advice describes how a threat can become an attack (can be mitigated). Eliciting threats and mitigations as aspects provides a structured way for separating functional and security concerns
11509547
Illumination invariant face recognition based on neural network ensemble
An illumination invariant face recognition method based on neural network ensemble architecture is proposed. Given a face image with an arbitrary illumination direction, it can complete recognition in a uniform way with high performance without knowing or estimating the illumination direction. Experimental result shows that the recognition ratio of the ensemble architecture is higher than the conventional approach that uses a single neural network to recognize faces of a specific illumination direction.
18488788
A preference aggregation method through the estimation of utility intervals
In this paper, a preference aggregation method is developed for ranking alternative courses of actions by combining preference rankings of alternatives given on individual criteria or by individual decision makers. In the method, preference rankings are viewed as constraints on alternative utilities, which are normalized, and linear programming models are constructed to estimate utility intervals, which are weighted and averaged to generate an aggregated utility interval. A simple yet pragmatic interval ranking method is used to compare and/or rank alternatives. The final ranking is generated as the most likely ranking with certain degrees of belief. Three numerical examples are examined to illustrate the potential applications of the proposed method.
205336
A strategy for persistent object service under CORBA and Web environment
With the rapid development of the Internet, the integrated applications of Web, database, CORBA and Java have offered the three-tiered client/server application models a good computing environment and implementation strategy. This paper briefly introduces this kind of client/server application model based on CORBA and Web, and discusses a persistent object service for it. The paper describes in detail the persistent object service's architecture model, interactive process of components, main interface descriptions and some considerations when implementing this strategy. Finally, a summary is supplied for the persistent object service.
15272784
Protecting Web usage of credit cards using One-Time Pad cookie encryption
The blooming e-commerce is demanding better methods to protect online users' privacy, especially the credit card information that is widely used in online shopping. Holding all these data in a central database of the Web sites would attract hackers' attacks, impose unnecessary liability on the merchant Web sites, and raise the customers' privacy concerns. We introduce and discuss in detail the secure distributed storage of sensitive information using HTTP cookie encryption. We are able to employ One-Time Pads to encrypt the cookies, because encryption and decryption are both done by the server, which is an interesting characteristic overlooked by the existing systems. We implemented this protocol and showed that it is simple, fast and easy to program with.
46223238
Environmental impact assessment using the evidential reasoning approach
Environmental impact assessment (EIA) problems are often characterised by a large number of identified environmental factors that are qualitative in nature and can only be assessed on the basis of human judgments, which inevitably involve various types of uncertainties such as ignorance and fuzziness. So, EIA problems need to be modelled and analysed using methods that can handle uncertainties. The evidential reasoning (ER) approach provides such a modelling framework and analysis method. In this paper the ER approach will be applied to conduct EIA analysis for the first time. The environmental impact consequences are characterized by a set of assessment grades that are assumed to be collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive. All assessment information, quantitative or qualitative, complete or incomplete, and precise or imprecise, is modelled using a unified framework of a belief structure. The original ER approach with a recursive ER algorithm will be introduced and a new analytical ER algorithm will be investigated which provides a means for using the ER approach in decision situations where an explicit ER aggregation function is needed such as in optimisation problems. The ER approach will be used to aggregate multiple environmental factors, resulting in an aggregated distributed assessment for each alternative policy. A numerical example and its modified version are studied to illustrate the detailed implementation process of the ER approach and demonstrate its potential applications in EIA.
9229028
A conceptual model of personalized virtual learning environments
The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is one of the fastest growing areas in educational technology research and development. In order to achieve learning effectiveness, ideal VLEs should be able to identify learning needs and customize solutions, with or without an instructor to supplement instruction. They are called Personalized VLEs (PVLEs). In order to achieve PVLEs success, comprehensive conceptual models corresponding to PVLEs are essential. Such conceptual modeling development is important because it facilitates early detection and correction of system development errors. Therefore, in order to capture the PVLEs knowledge explicitly, this paper focuses on the development of conceptual models for PVLEs, including models of knowledge primitives in terms of learner, curriculum, and situational models, models of VLEs in general pedagogical bases, and particularly, the definition of the ontology of PVLEs on the constructivist pedagogical principle. Based on those comprehensive conceptual models, a prototyped multiagent-based PVLE has been implemented. A field experiment was conducted to investigate the learning achievements by comparing personalized and non-personalized systems. The result indicates that the PVLE we developed under our comprehensive ontology successfully provides significant learning achievements. These comprehensive models also provide a solid knowledge representation framework for PVLEs development practice, guiding the analysis, design, and development of PVLEs.