We present the next generation of ORIS, a toolbox for quantitative evaluation of concurrent models with non-Markovian timers. The tool shifts its focus from timed models to stochastic ones, it ...includes a new graphical user interface, new analysis methods and a Java Application Programming Interface (API). Models can be specified as Stochastic Time Petri Nets (STPNs) through the graphical editor, validated using an interactive token game, and analyzed through several techniques to compute instantaneous or cumulative rewards. STPNs can also be exported as Java code to conduct extensive parametric studies through the Java library, now distributed as open-source. A well-engineered software architecture allows the user to implement new features for STPNs, new modeling formalisms, and new analysis methods. The most distinctive features of ORIS include transient and steady-state analysis of STPNs modeling Markov Regenerative Processes (MRPs), and transient analysis of STPNs modeling generalized semi-Markov processes. ORIS also supports state-space analysis of Time Petri Nets (TPNs), simulation of STPNs, and standard analysis techniques for continuous-time Markov chains or MRPs with at most one non-exponential timer in each state. We illustrate the general workflow for the application of ORIS to the modeling and evaluation of non-functional requirements of software-intensive systems.
Most of today’s software applications feature a graphical user interface (GUI) front-end. System testing of these applications requires that test cases, modeled as sequences of GUI events, be ...generated and executed on the software. We term
GUI testing
as the process of testing a software application through its GUI. Researchers and practitioners agree that one must employ a variety of techniques (e.g., model-based, capture/replay, manually scripted) for effective GUI testing. Yet, the tools available today for GUI testing are limited in the techniques they support. In this paper, we describe an innovative tool called GUITAR that supports a wide variety of GUI testing techniques. The innovation lies in the architecture of GUITAR, which uses plug-ins to support flexibility and extensibility. Software developers and quality assurance engineers may use this architecture to create new toolchains, new workflows based on the toolchains, and plug in a variety of measurement tools to conduct GUI testing. We demonstrate these features of GUITAR via several carefully crafted case studies.
DeepFaceDrawing Chen, Shu-Yu; Su, Wanchao; Gao, Lin ...
ACM transactions on graphics,
08/2020, Letnik:
39, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Recent deep image-to-image translation techniques allow fast generation of face images from freehand sketches. However, existing solutions tend to overfit to sketches, thus requiring professional ...sketches or even edge maps as input. To address this issue, our key idea is to implicitly model the shape space of plausible face images and synthesize a face image in this space to approximate an input sketch. We take a local-to-global approach. We first learn feature embeddings of key face components, and push corresponding parts of input sketches towards underlying component manifolds defined by the feature vectors of face component samples. We also propose another deep neural network to learn the mapping from the embedded component features to realistic images with multi-channel feature maps as intermediate results to improve the information flow. Our method essentially uses input sketches as soft constraints and is thus able to produce high-quality face images even from rough and/or incomplete sketches. Our tool is easy to use even for non-artists, while still supporting fine-grained control of shape details. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show the superior generation ability of our system to existing and alternative solutions. The usability and expressiveness of our system are confirmed by a user study.
The real‐time simulation of human crowds has many applications. In a typical crowd simulation, each person ('agent') in the crowd moves towards a goal while adhering to local constraints. Many ...algorithms exist for specific local ‘steering’ tasks such as collision avoidance or group behavior. However, these do not easily extend to completely new types of behavior, such as circling around another agent or hiding behind an obstacle. They also tend to focus purely on an agent's velocity without explicitly controlling its orientation. This paper presents a novel sketch‐based method for modelling and simulating many steering behaviors for agents in a crowd. Central to this is the concept of an interaction field (IF): a vector field that describes the velocities or orientations that agents should use around a given ‘source’ agent or obstacle. An IF can also change dynamically according to parameters, such as the walking speed of the source agent. IFs can be easily combined with other aspects of crowd simulation, such as collision avoidance. Using an implementation of IFs in a real‐time crowd simulation framework, we demonstrate the capabilities of IFs in various scenarios. This includes game‐like scenarios where the crowd responds to a user‐controlled avatar. We also present an interactive tool that computes an IF based on input sketches. This IF editor lets users intuitively and quickly design new types of behavior, without the need for programming extra behavioral rules. We thoroughly evaluate the efficacy of the IF editor through a user study, which demonstrates that our method enables non‐expert users to easily enrich any agent‐based crowd simulation with new agent interactions.
Objective: This paper presents an asynchronous electrooculography (EOG)-based human-machine interface (HMI) for smart home environmental control with the purpose of providing daily assistance for ...severe spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. Methods: The proposed HMI allows users to interact with a smart home environment through eye blinking. Specifically, several buttons, each corresponding to a control command, randomly flash on a graphical user interface. Each flash of the buttons functions as a visual cue for the user to blink. To issue a control command, the user can blink synchronously with the flashes of the corresponding button. Through detecting blinks based on the recorded EOG signal, the target button and its corresponding control command are determined. Seven SCI patients participated in an online experiment, during which the patients were required to control a smart home environment including household electrical appliances, an intelligent wheelchair, as well as a nursing bed via the proposed HMI. Results: The average false operation ratio in the control state was 4.1%, whereas during the idle state, no false operations occurred. Conclusion: All SCI patients were able to control the smart home environment using the proposed EOG-based HMI with satisfactory performance in terms of the false operation ratio in both the control and the idle states. Significance: The proposed HMI offers a simple and effective approach for patients with severe SCIs to control a smart home environment. Therefore, it is promising to assist severe SCI patients in their daily lives.
New software, OLEX2, has been developed for the determination, visualization and analysis of molecular crystal structures. The software has a portable mouse‐driven workflow‐oriented and fully ...comprehensive graphical user interface for structure solution, refinement and report generation, as well as novel tools for structure analysis. OLEX2 seamlessly links all aspects of the structure solution, refinement and publication process and presents them in a single workflow‐driven package, with the ultimate goal of producing an application which will be useful to both chemists and crystallographers.
Automated testing is ubiquitous in modern software development and used to verify requirement conformance on all levels of system abstraction, including the system’s graphical user interface (GUI). ...GUI-based test automation, like other automation, aims to reduce the cost and time for testing compared to alternative, manual approaches. Automation has been successful in reducing costs for other forms of testing (like unit- or integration testing) in industrial practice. However, we have not yet seen the same convincing results for automated GUI-based testing, which has instead been associated with multiple technical challenges. Furthermore, the software industry has struggled with some of these challenges for more than a decade with what seems like only limited progress.
This systematic literature review takes a longitudinal perspective on GUI test automation challenges by identifying them and then investigating why the field has been unable to mitigate them for so many years.
The review is based on a final set of 49 publications, all reporting empirical evidence from practice or industrial studies. Statements from the publications are synthesized, based on a thematic coding, into 24 challenges related to GUI test automation.
The most reported challenges were mapped chronologically and further analyzed to determine how they and their proposed solutions have evolved over time. This chronological mapping of reported challenges shows that four of them have existed for almost two decades.
Based on the analysis, we discuss why the key challenges with GUI-based test automation are still present and why some will likely remain in the future. For others, we discuss possible ways of how the challenges can be addressed. Further research should focus on finding solutions to the identified technical challenges with GUI-based test automation that can be resolved or mitigated. However, in parallel, we also need to acknowledge and try to overcome non-technical challenges.
•The technical challenges of test automation through the GUI reported by literature.•A longitudinal perspective of how the key challenges have evolved.•To what extent the proposed mitigation strategies have solved the key challenges.
To improve the quality of Android apps, developers use automated debugging and testing solutions to determine whether the previously found crashes are reproducible. However, existing GUI fuzzing ...solutions for Android apps struggle to reproduce crashes efficiently based solely on a crash stack trace. This trace provides the location in the app where the crash occurs. GUI fuzzing solutions currently in use rely on heuristics to generate UI events. Unfortunately, these events often do not align with the investigation of an app's UI event space to reach a specific location of code. Hence, they generate numerous events unrelated to the crash, leading to an event explosion. To address this issue, a precise static UI model of widgets and screens can greatly enhance the efficiency of a fuzzing tool in its search. Building such a model requires considering all possible combinations of event sequences on widgets since the execution order of events is not statically determined. However, this approach presents scalability challenges in complex apps with several widgets. In this paper, we propose a directed-based fuzzing solution to reduce an app's event domain to the necessary ones to trigger a crash. Our insight is that the dependencies between widgets in their visual presentation and attribute states provide valuable information in precisely identifying events that trigger a crash. We propose an attribute-sensitive reachability analysis (ASRA) to track dependent widgets in reachable paths to the crash point and distinguish between events in terms of their relevancy to be generated in the crash reproduction process. With instrumentation, we inject code to prune irrelevant events, reducing the event domain to search at run time. We used four famous fuzzing tools, Monkey, Ape, Stoat, and FastBot2, to assess the impact of our solution in decreasing the crash reproduction time and increasing the possibility of reproducing a crash. Our results show that the success ratio of reproducing a crash has increased for one-fourth of crashes. In addition, the average reproduction time of a crash becomes at least 2× faster. Wilcoxon Mann-Whitney test shows this enhancement is significant when our tool is used compared to baseline and insensitive reachability analysis.
Graphical user interfaces (GUIs), due to their event-driven nature, present an enormous and potentially unbounded way for users to interact with software. During testing, it is important to ..."adequately cover" this interaction space. In this paper, we develop a new family of coverage criteria for GUI testing grounded in combinatorial interaction testing. The key motivation of using combinatorial techniques is that they enable us to incorporate "context" into the criteria in terms of event combinations, sequence length, and by including all possible positions for each event. Our new criteria range in both efficiency (measured by the size of the test suite) and effectiveness (the ability of the test suites to detect faults). In a case study on eight applications, we automatically generate test cases and systematically explore the impact of context, as captured by our new criteria. Our study shows that by increasing the event combinations tested and by controlling the relative positions of events defined by the new criteria, we can detect a large number of faults that were undetectable by earlier techniques.
This paper presents details and applications of a novel channel simulation software named NYUSIM, which can be used to generate realistic temporal and spatial channel responses to support realistic ...physical-and link-layer simulations and design for fifth-generation (5G) cellular communications. NYUSIM is built upon the statistical spatial channel model for broadband millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless communication systems developed by researchers at New York University (NYU). The simulator is applicable for a wide range of carrier frequencies (500 MHz to 100 GHz), radio frequency (RF) bandwidths (0 to 800 MHz), antenna beamwidths (7° to 360° for azimuth and 7° to 45° for elevation), and operating scenarios (urban microcell, urban macrocell, and rural macrocell), and also incorporates multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna arrays at the transmitter and receiver. This paper also provides examples to demonstrate how to use NYUSIM for analyzing MIMO channel conditions and spectral efficiencies, which show that NYUSIM is an alternative and more realistic channel model compared to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and other channel models for mmWave bands.
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