Computer Sciences Commons^™

Rack: Code Search In The Ide Using Crowdsourced Knowledge, Mohammad Masudur Rahman, Chanchal K. Roy, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional code search engines often do not perform well with natural language queries since they mostly apply keyword matching. These engines thus require carefully designed queries containing information about programming APIs for code search. Unfortunately, existing studies suggest that preparing an effective query for code search is both challenging and time consuming for the developers. In this paper, we propose a novel code search tool-RACK-that returns relevant source code for a given code search query written in natural language text. The tool first translates the query into a list of relevant API classes by mining keyword-API associations from the crowdsourced …

Cataloging Github Repositories, Abhishek Sharma, Ferdian Thung, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Agus Sulistya, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

GitHub is one of the largest and most popular repository hosting service today, having about 14 million users and more than 54 million repositories as of March 2017. This makes it an excellent platform to find projects that developers are interested in exploring. GitHub showcases its most popular projects by cataloging them manually into categories such as DevOps tools, web application frameworks, and game engines. We propose that such cataloging should not be limited only to popular projects. We explore the possibility of developing such cataloging system by automatically extracting functionality descriptive text segments from readme files of GitHub repositories. …

Revisiting Assert Use In Github Projects, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Assertions are often used to test the assumptions that developers have about a program. An assertion contains a boolean expression which developers believe to be true at a particular program point. It throws an error if the expression is not satisfied, which helps developers to detect and correct bugs. Since assertions make developer assumptions explicit, assertions are also believed to improve under-standability of code. Recently, Casalnuovo et al. analyse C and C++ programs to understand the relationship between assertion usage and defect occurrence. Their results show that asserts have a small effect on reducing the density of bugs and developers …

The Dark Side Of Banning Hacking Technique Discussion, Qiu-Hong Wang, Ting Zhang Le

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prior studies have evidenced the effectiveness of more severe and broader enforcement in deterringcybercrimes. This study addresses the other side of the story. Our data analysis shows that theenforcement against the production / distribution / possession of computer misuse tools tends toincrease the contribution on detection and protection related posts in online hacker forums. Butthis enforcement may discourage those contributors who had originally actively contributed to theprotection discussions. Thus government regulations have to be cautiously justify the incentives ofmultiple parties in the cybersecurity context.

Breathprint: Breathing Acoustics-Based User Authentication, Jagmohan Chauhan, Yining Hu, Suranga Sereviratne, Archan Misra, Aruna Sereviratne, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose BreathPrint, a new behavioural biometric signature based on audio features derived from an individual's commonplace breathing gestures. Specifically, BreathPrint uses the audio signatures associated with the three individual gestures: sniff, normal, and deep breathing, which are sufficiently different across individuals. Using these three breathing gestures, we develop the processing pipeline that identifies users via the microphone sensor on smartphones and wearable devices. In BreathPrint, a user performs breathing gestures while holding the device very close to their nose. Using off-the-shelf hardware, we experimentally evaluate the BreathPrint prototype with 10 users, observed over seven days. We show that users …

Measuring The Declared Sdk Versions And Their Consistency With Api Calls In Android Apps, Daoyuan Wu, Ximing Liu, Jiayun Xu, David Lo, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android has been the most popular smartphone system, with multiple platform versions (e.g., KITKAT and Lollipop) active in the market. To manage the application’s compatibility with one or more platform versions, Android allows apps to declare the supported platform SDK versions in their manifest files. In this paper, we make a first effort to study this modern software mechanism. Our objective is to measure the current practice of the declared SDK versions (which we term as DSDK versions afterwards) in real apps, and the consistency between the DSDK versions and their app API calls. To this end, we perform a …

Employing Smartwatch For Enhanced Password Authentication, Bing Chang, Ximing Liu, Yingjiu Li, Pingjian Wang, Wen-Tao Zhu, Zhan Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents an enhanced password authentication scheme by systematically exploiting the motion sensors in a smartwatch. We extract unique features from the sensor data when a smartwatch bearer types his/her password (or PIN), and train certain machine learning classifiers using these features. We then implement smartwatch-aided password authentication using the classifiers. Our scheme is user-friendly since it does not require users to perform any additional actions when typing passwords or PINs other than wearing smartwatches. We conduct a user study involving 51 participants on the developed prototype so as to evaluate its feasibility and performance. Experimental results show that …

Tackling Large-Scale Home Health Care Delivery Problem With Uncertainty, Cen Chen, Zachary Rubinstein, Stephen Smith, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we investigate a multi-period Home HealthCare Scheduling Problem (HHCSP) under stochastic serviceand travel times. We first model the deterministic problemas an integer linear programming model that incorporatesreal-world requirements, such as time windows, continuityof care, workload fairness, inter-visit temporal dependencies.We then extend the model to cope with uncertainty in durations,by introducing chance constraints into the formulation.We propose efficient solution approaches, which providequantifiable near-optimal solutions and further handlethe uncertainties by employing a sampling-based strategy. Wedemonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches oninstances synthetically generated by real-world dataset forboth deterministic and stochastic scenarios.

Webapirec: Recommending Web Apis To Software Projects Via Personalized Ranking, Ferdian Thung, Richard J. Oentaryo, David Lo, Yuan Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Application programming interfaces (APIs) offer a plethora of functionalities for developers to reuse without reinventing the wheel. Identifying the appropriate APIs given a project requirement is critical for the success of a project, as many functionalities can be reused to achieve faster development. However, the massive number of APIs would often hinder the developers' ability to quickly find the right APIs. In this light, we propose a new, automated approach called WebAPIRec that takes as input a project profile and outputs a ranked list of web APIs that can be used to implement the project. At its heart, WebAPIRec employs …

Online Advertising, Retail Platform Openness, And Long Tail Sellers, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It becomes increasingly popular that some large online retailers such as Amazon open their platforms to allow third-party retail competitors to sell on their own platforms. We develop an analytical model to examine this retailer market place model and its business impact. We assume that a leading retailer has both valuation advantage that may come from its reputation and information advantage that may come from its brand awarenewss. We find that the availability of relatively low-cost advertising through social media or search engine can effectively reduce the leading retailer's information advantage, and thus be an important driving force for its …

Sampling Based Approaches For Minimizing Regret In Uncertain Markov Decision Problems (Mdps), Asrar Ahmed, Pradeep Varakantham, Meghna Lowalekar, Yossiri Adulyasak, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are an effective model to represent decision processes in the presence of transitional uncertainty and reward tradeoffs. However, due to the difficulty in exactly specifying the transition and reward functions in MDPs, researchers have proposed uncertain MDP models and robustness objectives in solving those models. Most approaches for computing robust policies have focused on the computation of maximin policies which maximize the value in the worst case amongst all realisations of uncertainty. Given the overly conservative nature of maximin policies, recent work has proposed minimax regret as an ideal alternative to the maximin objective for robust …

Understanding Music Track Popularity In A Social Network, Jing Ren, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Thousands of music tracks are uploaded to the Internet every day through websites and social networks that focus on music. While some content has been popular for decades, some tracks that have just been released have been ignored. What makes a music track popular? Can the duration of a music track’s popularity be explained and predicted? By analysing data on the performance of a music track on the ranking charts, coupled with the creation of machine-generated music semantics constructs and a variety of other track, artist and market descriptors, this research tests a model to assess how track popularity and …

Charitable Fundraising: Gaining Donors' Trust On Online Platforms, Deserinas Sulaeman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trust is crucial in the relationships between charitable fundraisers and potential donors. This study examines factors that can help fundraisers gain potential donors’ trust, which is crucial to the success of the campaigns. Examining charitable fundraising campaigns on an online platform, this study finds that trust issues can be mitigated by providing a campaign description that is more sophisticated, more informative, and with fewer errors. Additionally, setting a higher campaign funding goal tends to lead to a more successful campaign. These characteristics likely reflect a competent, committed, and passionate fundraiser. On the other hand, mere exposure to a wide set …

On The Similarities Between Random Regret Minimization And Mother Logit: The Case Of Recursive Route Choice Models, Tien Mai, Fabian Bastin, Emma Frejinger

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on the comparison of the random regret minimization (RRM) and mother logit models for analyzing the choice between alternatives having deterministic attributes. The mother logit model allows utilities of a given alternative to depend on attributes of other alternatives. It was designed to relax the independence from irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property while keeping the random terms independently and identically distributed extreme value distributed (McFadden et al., 1978).We adapt and extend the RRM model proposed by Chorus (2014) to the case of recursive logit (RL) route choice models (Fosgerau et al., 2013). We argue that these RRM models …

Is The Whole Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts?, Liangyue Li, Hanghang Tong, Yong Wang, Conglei Shi, Nan Cao, Norbou Buchler

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The PART-WHOLE relationship routinely finds itself in many disciplines, ranging from collaborative teams, crowdsourcing, autonomous systems to networked systems. From the algorithmic perspective, the existing work has primarily focused on predicting the outcomes of the whole and parts, by either separate models or linear joint models, which assume the outcome of the parts has a linear and independent effect on the outcome of the whole. In this paper, we propose a joint predictive method named PAROLE to simultaneously and mutually predict the part and whole outcomes. The proposed method offers two distinct advantages over the existing work. First (Model Generality), …

Custom T-Shirt Designs, Ranjan Khadka

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Custom T-shirt Designs is a web-based application. The purpose of this project is to provide a website that would allow customers to be able to customize T-shirt and place an order of custom T-shirt. Customers can sign up, sign in, select T-shirt color, add text, choose Font, choose Font color, upload an image, apply filters to images, transform text or images, choose T-shirt size and save designs for future references. Customers would be able to add the design to a cart, manage cart and checkout with their credit card to purchase for the order and view their previous orders. The …

An Adaptive Time Reduction Technique For Video Lectures, Sreenivas P. Shenoy, Ashish Amresh, John Femiani

Ashish Amresh

Evidence-Based-Review-Of-Academic-Web-Search-Engines-Preprint.Pdf, Jody C. Fagan 5609471

Jody C Fagan

Accuracy And Racial Biases Of Recidivism Prediction Instruments, Julia J. Dressel

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Algorithms have recently become prevalent in the criminal justice system. Tools known as recidivism prediction instruments (RPIs) are being used all over the country to assess the likelihood that a criminal defendant will reoffend at some point in the future. In June of 2016, researchers at ProPublica published an analysis claiming an RPI called COMPAS was biased against black defendants. This claim sparked a nation-wide debate as to how fairness of an algorithm should be measured, and exposed the many ways that algorithms are not necessarily fair. Algorithms are used in the criminal justice system because they are regarded as …

Assemble.Live: Designing For Schisms In Large Groups In Audio/Video Calls, Benjamin P. Packer

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Although new communication technologies have compressed the space and latency between participants, leading to new forms of computer mediated interaction that scale with the number of participants [Klein, 1999], there still exist no audio/video calling solutions that can accommodate the type of group conversation that takes place in a group of four or more. Groups of this size frequently schism, forming two or more sub-conversations with their own independently operating turn taking systems [Egbert, 1997]. This paper proposes that traditional audio/video calling fails to accommodate schisms because a) there is no way to signal intended recipiency, b) there exists only …