Previous research has revealed gender differences that impact females’ willingness to adopt software features in end users’ programming environments. Since these features have separately been shown to help end users problem solve, it is important to female end users’ productivity that we find ways to make these features more acceptable...
Functional programming is concerned with referential transparency, that is, given a certain function and its parameter, that the result will always be the same. However, it seems that this is violated in applications involving uncertainty, such as rolling a dice. This thesis defines the background of probabilistic programming and domain-specific...
As broadband Internet becomes widely available, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications over the Internet are becoming increasingly popular. Such an example is a video multicast application in which, one source streams a video to a large number of destination nodes through an overlay multicast tree consisting of peers.
These overlay multicast-based applications,...
Finding information can cost a significant amount of time, even when the information is already stored on the user’s local computer system. There is significant research aimed at reducing these time costs, but little research into exactly what these costs are or how they impact people’s use of tools and...
Packet loss, delay and time-varying bandwidth are three main problems facing multimedia streaming applications over the Internet. Existing techniques such as Media-aware network protocol, network adaptive source and channel coding, etc. have been proposed to either overcome or alleviate these drawbacks of the Internet. But these techniques either need specialized...
Cryptographic devices leak timing and power consumption information that is easily measurable, radiation of various levels, and more. Such devices also have additional inputs, other than plaintext and keys, like voltage, which can be modified to force the device to produce certain faulty outputs that can be used to reveal...
Accessing information on the Web has become ingrained into our daily lives, and we seek information from many different sources, including conference and journal publications, personal web pages, and others. Increasingly, web-based information retrieval systems such as web-based search engines, library on-line catalog systems, and subscription-based federated search systems are...
Protecting end-users privacy and building trust are the two most important factors needed to support the growth of ecommerce. The increased dependence on the Internet for a wide variety of daily transactions causes a corresponding loss in privacy for many users, as virtually all websites collect data from users directly...
Active participation and collaboration of community members are crucial to the continuation and expansion of open source software projects. Researchers have recognized the value of community in open source development and studied various aspects of it including structure of communities, motivations for participation, and collaboration among members. However, the majority...
Many conventionally reinforced concrete deck girder (RCDG) bridges were built in the US during the 1950s, throughout the expansion of the Interstate System. Designs followed the AASHO standard of the time, which permitted higher shear stress in concrete and reduced detailing requirements than permitted by current specifications. Many of these...