Computer Science Technical Reports

Applying Agile Methodology in Mobile Software Engineering: Android Application Development and its Challenges

Shakira Banu Kaleel et al. — Wed, 01 May 2013 09:50:23 PDT

Highly volatile requirements of mobile applications require adaptive software development methods. Several attempts to address challenges in mobile software engineering have found agile methodology to be appropriate for mobile application development. This project report provides a detailed analysis on various challenges involved in mobile software development which are addressed using Agile-SCRUM methodologies. An efficient mobile software development concept derived from Agile-Scrum methodology is designed in this project. A light-weight Android application for secure and incremental backup has been developed using the proposed methodology. An in-depth illustration of the practical experience in developing the application has been discussed. Unlike other prominent languages like Java, the use of Python for Android platform has emerged recently. Hence developing the secure-backup application in Python was a challenge, which has been dealt in this report. We believe our proposed methodology has a potential to help developers deliver improved quality of mobile applications in short time.

SQLite Page Caching Algorithm

Jason V. Ma — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:05:08 PDT

SQLite is a database which can be easily embedded inside an application written in the C programming language. One common use is inside the Mozilla Firefox web browser. This project's purpose is to modify SQLite's page caching algorithm so that it will be able to determine which cache page to evict based on the number of historical memory references to a page based on the Least Recently Used (LRU) algorithm.

A Logic For Decidable Reasoning About Actions

Yilan Gu et al. — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:55:46 PDT

We consider a modified version of the situation calculus built using a two-variable fragment of the first-order logic extended with counting quantifiers. We mention several additional groups of axioms that can be introduced to capture taxonomic reasoning. We show that the regression operator in this framework can be defined similarly to regression in Reiter’s version of the situation calculus. Using this new regression operator, we show that the projection and executability problems (the important reasoning tasks in the situation calculus) are decidable in the modified version even if an initial knowledge base is incomplete. We also discuss the complexity of solving the projection problem in this modified language in general. Furthermore, we define description logic based sub-languages of our modified situation calculus. They are based on the description logics ALCO(U) (or ALCQO(U), respectively). We show that in these sub-languages solving the projection problem has better computational complexity than in the general modified situation calculus. We mention possible applications to formalization of Semantic Web services and some connections with reasoning about actions based on description logics.

A Logic of Actions Revisited

Yilan Gu et al. — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:55:45 PDT

We propose a theory for reasoning about actions based on order-sorted predicate logic where one can consider an elaborate taxonomy of objects. We are interested in the projection problem: whether a statement is true after executing a sequence of actions. To solve it we design a regression operator that takes advantage of well-sorted unification between terms. We show that answering projection queries in our logical theories is sound and complete with respect to that of in Reiter’s basic action theories. Moreover, we demonstrate that our regression operator based on order-sorted logic can provide significant computational advantages in comparison to Reiter’s regression operator.