Software Engineering Commons^™

Sentiment Analysis Of Public Perception Towards Elon Musk On Reddit (2008-2022), Daniel Maya Bonilla, Samuel Iradukunda, Pamela Thomas

The Cardinal Edge

As Elon Musk’s influence in technology and business continues to expand, it becomes crucial to comprehend public sentiment surrounding him in order to gauge the impact of his actions and statements. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of comments from various subreddits discussing Elon Musk over a 14-year period, from 2008 to 2022. Utilizing advanced sentiment analysis models and natural language processing techniques, we examined patterns and shifts in public sentiment towards Musk, identifying correlations with key events in his life and career. Our findings reveal that public sentiment is shaped by a multitude of factors, including his …

A Social Profile-Based E-Learning Model, Xola Ntlangula

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

Many High Education Institutions (HEIs) have migrated to blended or complete online learning to cater for less interruption with learning. As such, there is a growing demand for personalized e-learning to accommodate the diversity of students' needs. Personalization can be achieved using recommendation systems powered by artificial intelligence. Although using student data to personalize learning is not a new concept, collecting and identifying appropriate data is necessary to determine the best recommendations for students. By reviewing the existing data collection capabilities of the e-learning platforms deployed by public universities in South Africa, we were able to establish the readiness of …

Factors Influencing The Retention Of Millennial Software Developers In South African Companies, Kim Fouche, Maureen Tanner

African Conference on Information Systems and Technology

South Africa has an Information Technology skills shortage leading to high turnover of Information Technology professionals. Not only do companies face significant costs in replacing software developers, but high mobility also affects staff morale. Millennials are known to be more loyal to their own needs and do not tend to stay at companies for long, increasing the complexities of retention. This study explores the factors that influence the retention of millennial software developers in South African companies. The qualitative study was carried out using online semi-structured interviews. The study found that work environment, lifestyle, and management style, play a key …

Towards Safe Automated Refactoring Of Imperative Deep Learning Programs To Graph Execution, Raffi Takvor Khatchadourian Ph.D., Tatiana Castro Vélez, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Nan Jia, Anita Raja

Publications and Research

Efficiency is essential to support responsiveness w.r.t. ever-growing datasets, especially for Deep Learning (DL) systems. DL frameworks have traditionally embraced deferred execution-style DL code—supporting symbolic, graph-based Deep Neural Network (DNN) computation. While scalable, such development is error-prone, non-intuitive, and difficult to debug. Consequently, more natural, imperative DL frameworks encouraging eager execution have emerged at the expense of run-time performance. Though hybrid approaches aim for the “best of both worlds,” using them effectively requires subtle considerations to make code amenable to safe, accurate, and efficient graph execution. We present our ongoing work on automated refactoring that assists developers in specifying whether …

K-St: A Formal Executable Semantics Of The Structured Text Language For Plcs, Kun Wang, Jingyi Wang, Christopher M. Poskitt, Xiangxiang Chen, Jun Sun, Peng Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are responsible for automating process control in many industrial systems (e.g. in manufacturing and public infrastructure), and thus it is critical to ensure that they operate correctly and safely. The majority of PLCs are programmed in languages such as Structured Text (ST). However, a lack of formal semantics makes it difficult to ascertain the correctness of their translators and compilers, which vary from vendor-to-vendor. In this work, we develop K-ST, a formal executable semantics for ST in the K framework. Defined with respect to the IEC 61131-3 standard and PLC vendor manuals, K-ST is a high-level …

Edge Distraction-Aware Salient Object Detection, Sucheng Ren, Wenxi Liu, Jianbo Jiao, Guoqiang Han, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Integrating low-level edge features has been proven to be effective in preserving clear boundaries of salient objects. However, the locality of edge features makes it difficult to capture globally salient edges, leading to distraction in the final predictions. To address this problem, we propose to produce distraction-free edge features by incorporating cross-scale holistic interdependencies between high-level features. In particular, we first formulate our edge features extraction process as a boundary-filling problem. In this way, we enforce edge features to focus on closed boundaries instead of those disconnected background edges. Second, we propose to explore cross-scale holistic contextual connections between every …

Arduinoprog: Towards Automating Arduino Programming, Imam Nur Bani Yusuf, Diyanah Binte Abdul Jamal, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Writing code for Arduino poses unique challenges. A developer 1) needs hardware-specific knowledge about the interface configuration between the Arduino controller and the I/Ohardware, 2) identifies a suitable driver library for the I/O hardware, and 3) follows certain usage patterns of the driver library in order to use them properly. In this work, based on a study of real-world user queries posted in the Arduino forum, we propose ArduinoProg to address such challenges. ArduinoProg consists of three components, i.e., Library Retriever, Configuration Classifier, and Pattern Generator. Given a query, Library Retriever retrieves library names relevant to the I/O hardware identified …

Autoconf: Automated Configuration Of Unsupervised Learning Systems Using Metamorphic Testing And Bayesian Optimization, Lwin Khin Shar, Goknil Arda, Erik Johannes Husom, Sagar Sen Sen, Naing Tun Yan, Kisub Kim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unsupervised learning systems using clustering have gained significant attention for numerous applications due to their unique ability to discover patterns and structures in large unlabeled datasets. However, their effectiveness highly depends on their configuration, which requires domain-specific expertise and often involves numerous manual trials. Specifically, selecting appropriate algorithms and hyperparameters adds to the com- plexity of the configuration process. In this paper, we propose, apply, and assess an automated approach (AutoConf) for config- uring unsupervised learning systems using clustering, leveraging metamorphic testing and Bayesian optimization. Metamorphic testing is utilized to verify the configurations of unsupervised learning systems by applying a …

Endwatch: A Practical Method For Detecting Non-Termination In Real-World Software, Yao Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Yi Li, Sen Chen, Cen Zhang, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Detecting non-termination is crucial for ensuring program correctness and security, such as preventing denial-of-service attacks. While termination analysis has been studied for many years, existing methods have limited scalability and are only effective on small programs. To address this issue, we propose a practical termination checking technique, called EndWatch, for detecting non-termination through testing. Specifically, we introduce two methods to generate non-termination oracles based on checking state revisits, i.e., if the program returns to a previously visited state at the same program location, it does not terminate. The non-termination oracles can be incorporated into testing tools (e.g., AFL used in …

Testsgd: Interpretable Testing Of Neural Networks Against Subtle Group Discrimination, Mengdi Zhang, Jun Sun, Jingyi Wang, Bing Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Discrimination has been shown in many machine learning applications, which calls for sufficient fairness testing before their deployment in ethic-relevant domains. One widely concerning type of discrimination, testing against group discrimination, mostly hidden, is much less studied, compared with identifying individual discrimination. In this work, we propose TestSGD, an interpretable testing approach which systematically identifies and measures hidden (which we call ‘subtle’) group discrimination of a neural network characterized by conditions over combinations of the sensitive attributes. Specifically, given a neural network, TestSGD first automatically generates an interpretable rule set which categorizes the input space into two groups. Alongside, TestSGD …

Are We Ready To Embrace Generative Ai For Software Q&A?, Bowen Xu, Thanh-Dat Nguyen, Thanh Le-Cong, Thong Hoang, Jiakun Liu, Kisub Kim, Chen Gong, Changan Niu, Chenyu Wang, David Lo, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow, the world's largest software Q&A (SQA) website, is facing a significant traffic drop due to the emergence of generative AI techniques. ChatGPT is banned by Stack Overflow after only 6 days from its release. The main reason provided by the official Stack Overflow is that the answers generated by ChatGPT are of low quality. To verify this, we conduct a comparative evaluation of human-written and ChatGPT-generated answers. Our methodology employs both automatic comparison and a manual study. Our results suggest that human-written and ChatGPT-generated answers are semantically similar, however, human-written answers outperform ChatGPT-generated ones consistently across multiple aspects, …

Fine-Grained In-Context Permission Classification For Android Apps Using Control-Flow Graph Embedding, Vikas Kumar Malviya, Naing Tun Yan, Chee Wei Leow, Ailys Xynyn Tee, Lwin Khin Shar, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android is the most popular operating system for mobile devices nowadays. Permissions are a very important part of Android security architecture. Apps frequently need the users’ permission, but many of them only ask for it once—when the user uses the app for the first time—and then they keep and abuse the given permissions. Longing to enhance Android permission security and users’ private data protection is the driving factor behind our approach to explore fine-grained contextsensitive permission usage analysis and thereby identify misuses in Android apps. In this work, we propose an approach for classifying the fine-grained permission uses for each …

Experimental Comparison Of Features, Analyses, And Classifiers For Android Malware Detection, Lwin Khin Shar, Biniam Fisseha Demissie, Mariano Ceccato, Naing Tun Yan, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Christoph Bienert

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android malware detection has been an active area of research. In the past decade, several machine learning-based approaches based on different types of features that may characterize Android malware behaviors have been proposed. The usually-analyzed features include API usages and sequences at various abstraction levels (e.g., class and package), extracted using static or dynamic analysis. Additionally, features that characterize permission uses, native API calls and reflection have also been analyzed. Initial works used conventional classifiers such as Random Forest to learn on those features. In recent years, deep learning-based classifiers such as Recurrent Neural Network have been explored. Considering various …

Automated Question Title Reformulation By Mining Modifcation Logs From Stack Overflow, Ke Liu, Xiang Chen, Chunyang Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Zhanqi Cui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Stack Overflow, developers may not clarify and summarize the critical problems in the question titles due to a lack of domain knowledge or poor writing skills. Previous studies mainly focused on automatically generating the question titles by analyzing the posts’ problem descriptions and code snippets. In this study, we aim to improve title quality from the perspective of question title reformulation and propose a novel approach QETRA motivated by the findings of our formative study. Specifically, by mining modification logs from Stack Overflow, we first extract title reformulation pairs containing the original title and the reformulated title. Then we …

Generative Model-Based Testing On Decision-Making Policies, Zhuo Li, Xiongfei Wu, Derui Zhu, Mingfei Cheng, Siyuan Chen, Fuyuan Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The reliability of decision-making policies is urgently important today as they have established the fundamentals of many critical applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. To ensure reliability, there have been a number of research efforts on testing decision-making policies that solve Markov decision processes (MDPs). However, due to the deep neural network (DNN)-based inherit and infinite state space, developing scalable and effective testing frameworks for decision-making policies still remains open and challenging.In this paper, we present an effective testing framework for decision-making policies. The framework adopts a generative diffusion model-based test case generator that can easily adapt to different …

Revisiting The Identification Of The Co-Evolution Of Production And Test Code, Weifeng Sun, Meng Yan, Zhongxin Liu, Xin Xia, Yan Lei, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many software processes advocate that the test code should co-evolve with the production code. Prior work usually studies such co-evolution based on production-test co-evolution samples mined from software repositories. A production-test co-evolution sample refers to a pair of a test code change and a production code change where the test code change triggers or is triggered by the production code change. The quality of the mined samples is critical to the reliability of research conclusions. Existing studies mined production-test co-evolution samples based on the following assumption: if a test class and its associated production class change together in one commit, …

The Devil Is In The Tails: How Long-Tailed Code Distributions Impact Large Language Models, Xin Zhou, Kisub Kim, Bowen Xu, Jiakun Liu, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning-based techniques, especially advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) for code, have gained considerable popularity in various software engineering (SE) tasks. However, most existing works focus on designing better learning-based models and pay less attention to the properties of datasets. Learning-based models, including popular LLMs for code, heavily rely on data, and the data's properties (e.g., data distribution) could significantly affect their behavior. We conducted an exploratory study on the distribution of SE data and found that such data usually follows a skewed distribution (i.e., long-tailed distribution) where a small number of classes have an extensive collection of samples, while a …

Are We Ready To Embrace Generative Ai For Software Q&A?, Bowen Xu, Thanh-Dat Nguyen, Thanh Le Cong, Thong Hoang, Jiakun Liu, Kisub Kim, Chen Gong, Changan Niu, Chenyu Wang, Xuan-Bach Dinh Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow, the world's largest software Q&A (SQA) website, is facing a significant traffic drop due to the emergence of generative AI techniques. ChatGPT is banned by Stack Overflow after only 6 days from its release. The main reason provided by the official Stack Overflow is that the answers generated by ChatGPT are of low quality. To verify this, we conduct a comparative evaluation of human-written and ChatGPT-generated answers. Our methodology employs both automatic comparison and a manual study. Our results suggest that human-written and ChatGPT-generated answers are semantically similar, however, human-written answers outperform ChatGPT-generated ones consistently across multiple aspects, …

Learning Representations For Effective And Explainable Software Bug Detection And Fixing, Yi Li

Dissertations

Software has an integral role in modern life; hence software bugs, which undermine software quality and reliability, have substantial societal and economic implications. The advent of machine learning and deep learning in software engineering has led to major advances in bug detection and fixing approaches, yet they fall short of desired precision and recall. This shortfall arises from the absence of a 'bridge,' known as learning code representations, that can transform information from source code into a suitable representation for effective processing via machine and deep learning.

This dissertation builds such a bridge. Specifically, it presents solutions for effectively learning …

Program Analysis For Android Security And Reliability, Sydur Rahaman

Dissertations

The recent, widespread growth and adoption of mobile devices have revolutionized the way users interact with technology. As mobile apps have become increasingly prevalent, concerns regarding their security and reliability have gained significant attention. The ever-expanding mobile app ecosystem presents unique challenges in ensuring the protection of user data and maintaining app robustness. This dissertation expands the field of program analysis with techniques and abstractions tailored explicitly to enhancing Android security and reliability. This research introduces approaches for addressing critical issues related to sensitive information leakage, device and user fingerprinting, mobile medical score calculators, as well as termination-induced data loss. …