Olga Ormandjieva

Concordia University · Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering

The rapid growth in social communication increases the importance of detecting toxic languages. However, detecting toxic language is difficult because of deliberately noisy words and lack of labeled data. These issues cause a low recall in toxic language detection. To address these, we utilized pre-trained BERT models for toxic language detection....

Social media provides a powerful platform for individuals to communicate globally. This capability has many benefits, but it can also be used by malevolent individuals, i.e. predators. Anonymity exacerbates the problem. The motivation of our work is to help protect our children from this potentially hostile environment, without excluding them from...

The Mobile technology evolution has greatly affected our lives, in terms of performing our daily tasks more efficiently and effectively. It includes recent advances in voice-enabled technology empowered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing. Then again, technology evolution has created a problem for low and po...

Recent research findings demonstrate that process-oriented programming languages provide a suitable means to develop concurrent systems. In this paper, we propose to use mandatory/optional trace sets to model the semantics of a process-oriented programming language named Erasmus. Inspired by Hoare's view of category theory and obtained research res...

Recurrent Neural Networks with Long Short-Term Memory cell (LSTM-RNN) have impressive ability in sequence data processing, particularly for language model building and text classification. This research proposes the combination of sentiment analysis, new approach of sentence vectors and LSTM-RNN as a novel way for Sexual Predator Identification (SP...

Mobile computing has become one of the most dominant computer use paradigms and an essential part of the modern healthcare environment. As these applications become more sophisticated, a trend will inevitably develop towards providing comprehensive support for healthcare practitioners. In this paper, we propose a novel mobile healthcare platform fo...

Undoubtedly, one of the prominent elements of patient education is skill building and numeracy skill assessment is a very essential primary step in this regard. Here, we aim to review the existing patient numeracy assessment approaches and present the motivation for our novel quality model. Only through comparison, we could establish the place of o...

The process-oriented design and implementation of concurrent systems have important advantages. However, it is challenging to verify the consistency of process communications between the design and the implementation. To deal with such a challenge, we construct a formal framework for designing, implementing and verifying the consistency of process...

The process-oriented design and implementation of concurrent systems have important advantages. However, it is challenging to verify the consistency of process communications between the design and the implementation. To deal with such a challenge, we construct a formal framework for designing, implementing and verifying the consistency of process...

This paper reports on research carried out in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) on the interaction between a human and a mobile device, in the specific case where a healthcare professional uses the mobile device to access a medical application. The quality of mobile user interface is crucial in the healthcare domain, as the attention of...

Automatic identification of predatory conversations in chat logs helps the law enforcement agencies act proactively through early detection of predatory acts in cyberspace. In this paper, we describe the novel application of a deep learning method to the automatic identification of predatory chat conversations in large volumes of chat logs. We pres...

Category theory is considered to be a suitable means for verifying consistency of process communications between design and implementation of concurrent systems. In this paper, certain features of a proposed categorical framework for the verification are studied by using a Client/Server example. In particular, Communicating Sequential Processes (CS...

Providing a safe environment for juveniles and children in online social networks is considered as one of the major factors of improving public safety. Due to the prevalence of the online conversations, mitigating the undesirable effects of child abuse in cyber space has become inevitable. Using automatic ways to combat this kind of crime is challe...

The aim of this paper is to formalize the connection between two widely separated branches of knowledge: multi-agent systems (MAS) and category theory. The relationship of category theory to multi-agent systems is as follows: (1) agents and their relations are represented as categorical concepts; and (2) verification of system properties becomes co...

Numeracy skill level of patients has great influence on their preferences and priorities for the treatment options concerning their healthcare. Not properly numeracy-assessed patients are prone to make inaccurate and inappropriate decisions for their medical treatments. There are many challenges that the researchers face in designing and developing...

The Canadian Engineering Accreditation Boardhas defined 12 attributes that an institution must demonstrategraduates of its engineering program possess. We are inpursuit of the attribute "Design” dealing with the students’ability to select candidate engineering design solutions fordevelopment, with three indicators relating to how candidatesolutions...

The research has shown that process-oriented programming languages provide a suitable means for developing concurrent systems. However, in the development of a concurrent system, there is a challenge to manage consistency between design and implementation. To deal with such a challenge, we propose a new formal verification methodology and illustrat...

The increasing significance of concurrency and the need to address the challenges presented by concurrency motivate its formalization. In this paper, a methodology for modeling and verifying communications in a concurrent system developed in Erasmus, a process-oriented programming language, is proposed. The innovative aspects of this methodology in...

The users of mobile healthcare applications are not all the same, and there may be considerable variation in their requirements. In order for the application to be attractive to potential adopters, the interface should be very convenient and straightforward to use, and easy to learn. One way to accomplish this is with an intelligent mobile user int...

Mobile technology is an integral part of the modern healthcare environment. In Pervasive Healthcare, the Mobile User interface (MUI) serves as the bridge between the application and the healthcare professional. It is important that the doctor be able to easily express his needs on the MUI and correctly interpret the information displayed. The conte...

Mobile technology is an integral part of the modern health care environment. In mHealth, the mobile user interface (MUI) serves as the bridge between the application and the health care professional. It is important that the doctor be able to easily express his needs on the MUI and correctly interpret the information displayed. New techniques for a...

This paper proposes a new quality-in-use model for measuring user interface design quality, and is intended specifically for mobile devices. The proposed model is based on the international standard ISO 9126-4 [ISO/IEC TR 9126-4:2004] and can be adapted to various applications. The quality-in-use factors of effectiveness, productivity, efficiency,...

A software requirements specification (SRS) contains all the requirements for a system-to-be. These are typically separated into functional requirements (FR), which describe the features of the system under development, and the non-functional requirements (NFR), which include quality attributes, design constraints, among others. It is well known th...

Mobile technology has been piloted in a range of health-related areas, allowing doctors to receive critically important patient information in an automated way. It is vital that the technology be adaptable, so that the right information is available to the right doctors. We investigate the use of smartphones and various user stereotypes functioning...

The demands in the software industry of estimating development effort in the early phases of development are met by measuring software size from user requirements. A large number of companies have adapted themselves with Agile processes, which, although, promise rapid software development, pose a huge burden on the development teams for continual d...

Software Requirements Engineering addresses specific challenges which exist in the effort to gain an understanding of the nature of the engineering problem arising from user's real-world needs and desires. This research is aimed at helping software analysts meet these challenges. The proposed methodology forms the basis of the automated process des...

Annotation of software requirements documents is performed by experts during the requirements analysis phase to extract crucial knowledge from informally written textual requirements. Different annotation tasks target the extraction of different types of information and require the availability of experts specialized in the field. Large scale annot...

Mobile technology has been piloted in a variety of domains. We investigate the use of smart phones in the hospital environment, as they can play an important role in the recording and exchanging of information. This paper examines how context can be characterised for developing context sensitive user interfaces for smart phone application in a hosp...

ISO/IEC 27001 is the most used standard within the information security field. It is used by organizations that manage information on behalf of others and it is applied to assure the protection of critical client information. In general, applying ISO standards could be costly and require expert people. This paper introduces a survey study about usi...

The effort estimation techniques used in the software industry often tend to ignore the impact of Non-functional Requirements (NFR) on effort and reuse standard effort estimation models without local calibration. Moreover, the effort estimation models are calibrated using data of previous projects that may belong to problem domains different from t...

In software industry, many organizations either focus their traceability efforts on Functional Requirements (FRs) or else fail entirely to implement an effective traceability process. Non­ Functional Requirements (NFRs) such as security, safety, performance, and reliability are treated in a rather ad hoc fashion and are rarely traced. This is mainl...

This paper presents an overview of some measurement concepts across both COSMIC-FFP, an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 19761) for functional size measurement and Functional Complexity (FC), an entropy-based measure. It investigates in particular three metrological properties (scale, unit and scale type) in both of these measurement methods.

The NASA's Autonomous Nano Technology Swarm (ANTS) is a generic mission architecture consisting of miniaturized, autonomous, self-similar, reconfigurable, and addressable components forming structures. The Prospecting Asteroid Mission (PAM) is one of ANTS applications for survey of large dynamic populations. In this paper, we propose a formal appro...

Measurement of software size from user requirements is crucial for the estimation of the developmental time and effort. COSMIC, an ISO/IEC international standard for functional size measurement, provides an objective method of measuring the functional size of the software from user requirements. COSMIC requires the user requirements to be written a...

A major difference between what we refer to as a “well-developed” science, such as civil engineering, and sciences which are less so, like enterprise engineering, is the degree to which nonfunctional requirements, such as performance, are integrated into the design and development process, and satisfaction of those requirements is controlled by the...

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been widely proposed and applied to various application domains, such as space exploration missions. MAS can offer greater redundancy, efficiency, and scalability; however, they also raise new challenges, for instance, complex and often unexpected emergent group behavior, which require a formal specification as well a...

This paper reports on an experiment that investigates the predictability of software project size from software product size. The predictability research problem is analyzed at the stage of early requirements by accounting the size of functional requirements as well as the size of non-functional requirements. The experiment was carried out with 55...

Formal methods are proven approaches to ensure the correct operation of complex interacting systems. However, current formal methods do not address well problems of verifying emergent behavior and evolution, which are two of the most important characteristics of complex software systems. A subset of the Category Theory has been proposed in this pap...

This paper presents an overview of quantitative analysis techniques for software quality and their applicability during the software development life cycle (SDLC). This includes the Seven Basic Tools of Quality, Statistical Process Control, and Six Sigma, and it highlights how these techniques can be used for managing and controlling the quality of...

The increased awareness of the non-functional requirements as a key to software project and product success makes explicit the need to include them in any software project effort estimation activity. However, the existing approaches to defining size-based effort relationships still pay insufficient attention to this need. This paper presents a flex...

The growing awareness of the importance of Non- Functional Requirements (NFRs) among the requirements engineering (RE) community in the last few years led to a heightened interest in NFRs description and modeling and, in turn, to the emergence of several models intended to capture and structure the relevant concepts defining the NFRs and their rela...

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is concerned with the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use. HCI is important in Health Information Systems (HIS), because misunderstandings arising because of poorly designed interfaces may lead to medical errors. This paper proposes a Quality-in-Use Model for HIS use...

The research work presented in this paper is motivated by the need to build performance measurement and decision making process into the enterprise models, a need rooted in the current industrial trend toward developing complex integrated enterprises. In order to accomplish Enterprise Integration (EI) compliance with the imposed performance require...

Requirement volatility is an issue in software engineering in general, and in Web-based clinical applications in particular, which often originates from an incomplete knowledge of the domain of interest. With advances in the health science, many features and functionalities need to be added to, or removed from, existing software applications in the...

The tendency for Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) to have a wide-ranging impact on a software system, and the strong interdependencies and tradeoffs that exist between NFRs and the software project, leave typical existing software modeling methods incapable of integrating them into the software engineering. In this paper, we propose a metamodel w...

The increasing trend toward complex software systems has highlighted the need to incorporate quality requirements earlier in the development process. Reliability is one of the important quality indicators of such systems. This paper proposes a reliability analysis approach to measure reliability in the early development of real-time reactive system...

The compliance with quality requirements such as performance is one of the most important issues in the enterprise integration field today. None of the current strategic models and frameworks for performance measurement, such as balanced scorecard, performance prism, IPMS, smart pyramid etc., consider performance measurement and management from ent...

Software complexity is the main obstacle to further progress in the IT industry. One solution is the autonomic system with self-* properties. Formal methods are proven approaches to ensuring the correct operation of complex interacting systems. However, the current formal methods do not adequately address the problem of verifying two of the most im...

The project effort calculation with a functional size measurement method such as COSMIC can only be properly performed after the “Requirements Analysis” phase in a Project Life Cycle. The goal of this research is to investigate an early and project-level tuned prediction of the product size with the intent to reduce the effect of the ‘cone of uncer...

The increasing trend toward complex software systems has highlighted the need to incorporate quality requirements earlier in the development cycle. We propose a new methodology for monitoring quality in the earliest phases of real-time reactive system (RTRS) development. The targeted quality characteristics are functional complexity, performance, r...

Requirements changes are an issue in the software development life cycle which often originates from an incomplete knowledge of the domain of interest. Hardly any requirement manifests in isolation, and usually the provision of one requirement may affect the level of provision of another. Understanding the relations among system requirements is ess...

This paper describes an elaborate methodology that constitutes a proof of concept for the idea that a conceptual knowledge on the software to be developed can be acquired through an automated process, with a corpus of textual requirement documents as input and diagrams representing its static (domain model) and dynamic (context use-case model) aspe...

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) pose unique challenges in estimating the effort it would take to implement them. This is mainly because of their unique nature; NFRs are subjective, relative, interactive and tending to have a broad impact on the system as a whole. Nevertheless, it is crucial, when making decisions about the scope of software by g...

The growing trend toward developing complex software systems has highlighted the need to build software Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) into the system model. This research proposes a Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) approach in Reactive Autonomic Systems (RAS) whose architecture, configuration, and self-monitoring of the NFR at runtime are specified in...

Non-functional Requirements (NFRs) such as software quality attributes, software design constraints and software interface requirements hold crucial information about the constraints on the software system under development and its behavior. NFRs are subjective in nature and have a broad impact on the system as a whole. Being distinct from Function...

Software component technology has a substantial impact on modern IT evolution. The benefits of this technology, such as reusability, complexity management, time and effort reduction, and increased productivity, have been key drivers of its adoption by industry. One of the main issues in building component-based systems is the reliability of the com...

Real-time reactive systems are among the most difficult systems to test because of their size and complex time-dependent functionality. The number of test experiments for such systems is very large, if not infinite. Often such systems arise in safety-critical contexts. Hence, such systems require a rigorous analysis and thorough testing before they...

Self-monitoring is one of the main attributes for reactive autonomic systems modeled with the Reactive Autonomic System Framework (RASF) where each reactive autonomic component is designed to react to every request from the environment in real-time and synchronize their behavior with the environment (including other reactive autonomic components)....

The success of a software project is highly dependent upon thoroughly understanding the customer's needs which are revealed and identified in the Software Requirements Specification phase. The research reported in this paper is motivated by the industrial importance of correctly documenting requirements and of reducing the costs inherent in identif...

The success of a software project is largely dependent upon the quality of the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document, which serves as a medium to communicate user requirements to the technical personnel responsible for developing the software. This paper addresses the problem of providing automated assistance for assessing the quality...