Software Performance Engineering for Foundation Model-Powered Software (FMware)

The rise of Foundation Models (FMs) like Large Language Models (LLMs) is revolutionizing software development. Despite the impressive prototypes, transforming FMware into production-ready products demands complex engineering across various domains. A critical but overlooked aspect is performance engineering, which aims at ensuring FMware meets performance goals such as throughput and latency to avoid user dissatisfaction and financial loss. Often, performance considerations are an afterthought, leading to costly optimization efforts post-deployment. FMware's high computational resource demands highlight the need for efficient hardware use. Continuous performance engineering is essential to prevent degradation. This paper highlights the significance of Software Performance Engineering (SPE) in FMware, identifying four key challenges: cognitive architecture design, communication protocols, tuning and optimization, and deployment. These challenges are based on literature surveys and experiences from developing an in-house FMware system. We discuss problems, current practices, and innovative paths for the software engineering community.

Appliance Operation Modes Identification Using Cycles Clustering

The increasing cost, energy demand, and environmental issues has led many researchers to find approaches for energy monitoring, and hence energy conservation. The emerging technologies of Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning (ML) deliver techniques that have the potential to efficiently conserve energy and improve the utilization of energy consumption. Smart Home Energy Management Systems (SHEMSs) have the potential to contribute in energy conservation through the application of Demand Response (DR) in the residential sector. In this paper, we propose appliances Operation Modes Identification using Cycles Clustering (OMICC) which is SHEMS fundamental approach that utilizes the sensed residential disaggregated power consumption in supporting DR by providing consumers the opportunity to select lighter appliance operation modes. The cycles of the Single Usage Profile (SUP) of an appliance are extracted and reformed into features in terms of clusters of cycles. These features are then used to identify the operation mode used in every occurrence using K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). Operation modes identification is considered a basis for many potential smart DR applications within SHEMS towards the consumers or the suppliers

Relationship between Student Engagement and Performance in e-Learning Environment Using Association Rules

The field of e-learning has emerged as a topic of interest in academia due to the increased ease of accessing the Internet using using smart-phones and wireless devices. One of the challenges facing e-learning platforms is how to keep students motivated and engaged. Moreover, it is also crucial to identify the students that might need help in order to make sure their academic performance doesn't suffer. To that end, this paper tries to investigate the relationship between student engagement and their academic performance. Apriori association rules algorithm is used to derive a set of rules that relate student engagement to academic performance. Experimental results' analysis done using confidence and lift metrics show that a positive correlation exists between students' engagement level and their academic performance in a blended e-learning environment. In particular, it is shown that higher engagement often leads to better academic performance. This cements the previous work that linked engagement and academic performance in traditional classrooms.

DNS Typo-squatting Domain Detection: A Data Analytics & Machine Learning Based Approach

Domain Name System (DNS) is a crucial component of current IP-based networks as it is the standard mechanism for name to IP resolution. However, due to its lack of data integrity and origin authentication processes, it is vulnerable to a variety of attacks. One such attack is Typosquatting. Detecting this attack is particularly important as it can be a threat to corporate secrets and can be used to steal information or commit fraud. In this paper, a machine learning-based approach is proposed to tackle the typosquatting vulnerability. To that end, exploratory data analytics is first used to better understand the trends observed in eight domain name-based extracted features. Furthermore, a majority voting-based ensemble learning classifier built using five classification algorithms is proposed that can detect suspicious domains with high accuracy. Moreover, the observed trends are validated by studying the same features in an unlabeled dataset using K-means clustering algorithm and through applying the developed ensemble learning classifier. Results show that legitimate domains have a smaller domain name length and fewer unique characters. Moreover, the developed ensemble learning classifier performs better in terms of accuracy, precision, and F-score. Furthermore, it is shown that similar trends are observed when clustering is used. However, the number of domains identified as potentially suspicious is high. Hence, the ensemble learning classifier is applied with results showing that the number of domains identified as potentially suspicious is reduced by almost a factor of five while still maintaining the same trends in terms of features' statistics.

Demand Response For Residential Uses: A Data Analytics Approach

In the Smart Grid environment, the advent of intelligent measuring devices facilitates monitoring appliance electricity consumption. This data can be used in applying Demand Response (DR) in residential houses through data analytics, and developing data mining techniques. In this research, we introduce a smart system foundation that is applied to user's disaggregated power consumption data. This system encourages the users to apply DR by changing their behaviour of using heavier operation modes to lighter modes, and by encouraging users to shift their usages to off-peak hours. First, we apply Cross Correlation (XCORR) to detect times of the occurrences when an appliance is being used. We then use The Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) to recognize the operation mode used.