Computing and Information Systems - Theses

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Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: computer programs ×

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    Predicting the priority of email messages using stylistic features
    Ward, Belinda ( 2001)
    LASSIE (Learning Apprentice System for Sorting Incoming Email) is an email management tool that has been constructed in order to demonstrate a possible solution to the problem of email overload. It is designed to help users manage their incoming messages more efficiently by sorting the messages according to their level of urgency. This thesis discusses the motivation and requirements for such a system, and describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of LASSIE. We identify stylistic features that are good indicators of message urgency, describe how these features can be extracted from plain text messages, and present an algorithm for inferring the relationship between these attributes and the message urgency for any individual user. We discuss the considerations involved in constructing a practical email management tool and describe the design decisions that were made in constructing LASSIE. The results of a user trial indicate that LASSIE is able to achieve a high level of predictive accuracy and is readily adopted by users, although improvements in its long-term performance are desirable.
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    Program instrumentation for the detection of software anomalies
    Price, David Andrew ( 1985)
    This thesis examines the automated detection of program errors through the insertion of software instruments into the source to flag anomalies at run-time. Anomalies are located using data flow analysis and pointer checking. Explicit state variables are eliminated using the address and size of an object as keys to an implicit state variable. Expressions are functionally instrumented, that is, instrumented without decomposition. Dead definitions are characterized by a new statement-based dead-on-all-paths criterion. Inefficient definition anomalies are flagged for live definitions which are dead on most paths. The handling of objects whose parts are in many states is elucidated. The utilization of reference-only states to detect parameter anomalies for certain languages is proposed. The pointer range error and the accompanying concept of ‘base’ are invented. All of these innovations are original contributions to the field. The software tool DDF was written by the author to apply the above ideas to the C programming language.