arXiv subjects

David Lillis

Publications and source records attributed to David Lillis.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

Current Challenges and Future Research Areas for Digital Forensic Investigation

Given the ever-increasing prevalence of technology in modern life, there is a corresponding increase in the likelihood of digital devices being pertinent to a criminal investigation or civil litigation. As a direct consequence, the number of investigations requiring digital forensic expertise is resulting in huge digital evidence backlogs being encountered by law enforcement agencies throughout the world. It can be anticipated that the number of cases requiring digital forensic analysis will greatly increase in the future. It is also likely that each case will require the analysis of an increasing number of devices including computers, smartphones, tablets, cloud-based services, Internet of Things devices, wearables, etc. The variety of new digital evidence sources pose new and challenging problems for the digital investigator from an identification, acquisition, storage and analysis perspective. This paper explores the current challenges contributing to the backlog in digital forensics from a technical standpoint and outlines a number of future research topics that could greatly contribute to a more efficient digital forensic process.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2015

Space-Time Diagram Generation for Profiling Multi Agent Systems

Advances in Agent Oriented Software Engineering have focused on the provision of frameworks and toolkits to aid in the creation of Multi Agent Systems (MASs). However, despite the need to address the inherent complexity of such systems, little progress has been made in the development of tools to allow for the debugging and understanding of their inner workings. This paper introduces a novel performance analysis system, named AgentSpotter, which facilitates such analysis. AgentSpotter was developed by mapping conventional profiling concepts to the domain of MASs. We outline its integration into the Agent Factory multi agent framework.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2015

Call Graph Profiling for Multi Agent Systems

The design, implementation and testing of Multi Agent Systems is typically a very complex task. While a number of specialist agent programming languages and toolkits have been created to aid in the development of such systems, the provision of associated development tools still lags behind those available for other programming paradigms. This includes tools such as debuggers and profilers to help analyse system behaviour, performance and efficiency. AgentSpotter is a profiling tool designed specifically to operate on the concepts of agent-oriented programming. This paper extends previous work on AgentSpotter by discussing its Call Graph View, which presents system performance information, with reference to the communication between the agents in the system. This is aimed at aiding developers in examining the effect that agent communication has on the processing requirements of the system.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2014

Extending Probabilistic Data Fusion Using Sliding Windows

Recent developments in the field of data fusion have seen a focus on techniques that use training queries to estimate the probability that various documents are relevant to a given query and use that information to assign scores to those documents on which they are subsequently ranked. This paper introduces SlideFuse, which builds on these techniques, introducing a sliding window in order to compensate for situations where little relevance information is available to aid in the estimation of probabilities. SlideFuse is shown to perform favourably in comparison with CombMNZ, ProbFuse and SegFuse. CombMNZ is the standard baseline technique against which data fusion algorithms are compared whereas ProbFuse and SegFuse represent the state-of-the-art for probabilistic data fusion methods.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2014

Evaluation of a Conversation Management Toolkit for Multi Agent Programming

The Agent Conversation Reasoning Engine (ACRE) is intended to aid agent developers to improve the management and reliability of agent communication. To evaluate its effectiveness, a problem scenario was created that could be used to compare code written with and without the use of ACRE by groups of test subjects. This paper describes the requirements that the evaluation scenario was intended to meet and how these motivated the design of the problem. Two experiments were conducted with two separate sets of students and their solutions were analysed using a combination of simple objective metrics and subjective analysis. The analysis suggested that ACRE by default prevents some common problems arising that would limit the reliability and extensibility of conversation-handling code. As ACRE has to date been integrated only with the Agent Factory multi agent framework, it was necessary to verify that the problems identified are not unique to that platform. Thus a comparison was made with best practice communication code written for the Jason platform, in order to demonstrate the wider applicability of a system such as ACRE.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2014

An Agent-Based Approach to Component Management

This paper details the implementation of a software framework that aids the development of distributed and self-configurable software systems. This framework is an instance of a novel integration strategy called SoSAA (SOcially Situated Agent Architecture), which combines Component-Based Software Engineering and Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, drawing its inspiration from hybrid agent control architectures. The framework defines a complete construction process by enhancing a simple component-based framework with reasoning and self-awareness capabilities through a standardized interface. The capabilities of the resulting framework are demonstrated through its application to a non-trivial Multi Agent System (MAS). The system in question is a pre-existing Information Retrieval (IR) system that has not previously taken advantage of CBSE principles. In this paper we contrast these two systems so as to highlight the benefits of using this new hybrid approach. We also outline how component-based elements may be integrated into the Agent Factory agent-oriented application framework.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2014

ProbFuse: A Probabilistic Approach to Data Fusion

Data fusion is the combination of the results of independent searches on a document collection into one single output result set. It has been shown in the past that this can greatly improve retrieval effectiveness over that of the individual results. This paper presents probFuse, a probabilistic approach to data fusion. ProbFuse assumes that the performance of the individual input systems on a number of training queries is indicative of their future performance. The fused result set is based on probabilities of relevance calculated during this training process. Retrieval experiments using data from the TREC ad hoc collection demonstrate that probFuse achieves results superior to that of the popular CombMNZ fusion algorithm.

cs.IR↗