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Publications

Publications by CSE

2014

Structure Editing of Handwritten Mathematics

Authors
Mendes, A; Backhouse, R; Ferreira, JF;

Publication
Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces - ITS '14

Abstract

2014

Distributed Prime Sieve in Heterogeneous Computer Clusters

Authors
Costa, CM; Sampaio, AM; Barbosa, JG;

Publication
COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE AND ITS APPLICATIONS - ICCSA 2014, PT IV

Abstract
Prime numbers play a pivotal role in current encryption algorithms and given the rise of cloud computing, the need for larger primes has never been so high. This increase in available computation power can be used to either try to break the encryption or to strength it by finding larger prime numbers. With this in mind, this paper provides an analysis of different sieve implementations that can be used to generate primes to near 2(64). It starts by analyzing cache friendly sequential sieves with wheel factorization, then expands to multi-core architectures and ends with a cache friendly segmented hybrid implementation of a distributed prime sieve, designed to efficiently use all the available computation resources of heterogeneous computer clusters with variable workload and to scale very well in both the shared and distributed memory versions.

2014

Structure Editing of Handwritten Mathematics: Improving the Computer Support for the Calculational Method

Authors
Mendes, A; Backhouse, RC; Ferreira, JF;

Publication
Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, ITS 2014, Dresden, Germany, November 16 - 19, 2014

Abstract
We present a structure editor that aims to facilitate the presentation and manipulation of handwritten mathematical expressions. The editor is oriented to the calculational mathematics involved in algorithmic problem solving and it provides features that allow reliable structure manipulation of mathematical formulae, as well as flexible and interactive presentations. We describe some of its most important features, including the use of gestures to manipulate algebraic formulae, the structured selection of expressions, definition and redefinition of operators in runtime, gesture's editor, and handwritten templates. The editor is made available in the form of a C# class library which can be easily used to extend existing tools. For example, we have extended Classroom Presenter, a tool for ink-based teaching presentations and classroom interaction. We have tested and evaluated the editor with target users. The results obtained seem to indicate that the software is usable, suitable for its purpose and a valuable contribution to teaching and learning algorithmic problem solving.

2014

A Simple and Efficient Lock-Free Hash Trie Design for Concurrent Tabling

Authors
Areias, M; Rocha, R;

Publication
CoRR

Abstract

2014

Challenges in Computing Semantic Relatedness for Large Semantic Graphs

Authors
Costa, T; Leal, JP;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 18TH INTERNATIONAL DATABASE ENGINEERING AND APPLICATIONS SYMPOSIUM (IDEAS14)

Abstract
The research presented in this paper is part of an ongoing work to define semantic relatedness measures to any given semantic graph. These measures are based on a prior definition of a family of proximity algorithms that computes the semantic relatedness between pairs of concepts, and are parametrized by a semantic graph and a set of weighted properties. The distinctive feature of the proximity algorithms is that they consider all paths connecting two concepts in the semantic graph. These parameters must be tuned in order to maximize the quality of the semantic measure against a benchmark data set. From a previous work, the process of tuning the weight assignment is already developed and relies on a genetic algorithm. The weight tuning process, using all the properties in the semantic graph, was validated using WordNet 2.0 and the data set WordSim-353. The quality of the obtained semantic measure is better than those in the literature. However, this approach did not produce equally good results in larger semantic graphs such as WordNet 3.0, DBPedia and Freebase. This was in part due to the size of these graphs. The current approach is to select a sub-graph of the original semantic graph, small enough to enable processing and large enough to include all the relevant paths. This paper provides an overview of the ongoing work and presents a strategy to overcome the challenges raise by large semantic graphs.

2014

Smelling Faults in Spreadsheets

Authors
Abreu, R; Cunha, J; Fernandes, JP; Martins, P; Perez, A; Saraiva, J;

Publication
2014 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION (ICSME)

Abstract
Despite being staggeringly error prone, spreadsheets are a highly flexible programming environment that is widely used in industry. In fact, spreadsheets are widely adopted for decision making, and decisions taken upon wrong (spreadsheet-based) assumptions may have serious economical impacts on businesses, among other consequences. This paper proposes a technique to automatically pinpoint potential faults in spreadsheets. It combines a catalog of spreadsheet smells that provide a first indication of a potential fault, with a generic spectrum-based fault localization strategy in order to improve (in terms of accuracy and false positive rate) on these initial results. Our technique has been implemented in a tool which helps users detecting faults. To validate the proposed technique, we consider a well-known and well-documented catalog of faulty spreadsheets. Our experiments yield two main results: we were able to distinguish between smells that can point to faulty cells from smells and those that are not capable of doing so; and we provide a technique capable of detecting a significant number of errors: two thirds of the cells labeled as faulty are in fact (documented) errors.

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