Digital Commons Network^™

Game Changing Factors Impacting The Scholarly Records, Aaron Tay

Research Collection Library

Invited talk for 18th Annual Library Leadership Institute - Hong Kong | 17 - 20 January 2022.

In this 2022 talk Aaron Tay, reflects and expands on the talk he gave at the OCLC APRC in 2018 where he proposes 3 main trends that will impact the long term future of academic libraries.

1. Increasing diversity of the Scholarly Record

2. Push towards "Open"

3. Increasing effectiveness of technology - e.g.. Machine learning.

All three trends work indepdendently as well as reinforce each other. In this updated talk he give examples of some of these trends from the use of …

Learning Before Testing: A Selective Nonparametric Test For Conditional Moment Restrictions, Jia Li, Zhipeng Liao, Wenyu Zhou

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops a new test for conditional moment restrictions via nonparametric series regression, with approximating series terms selected by Lasso. Machine-learning the main features of the unknown conditional expectation function beforehand enables the test to seek power in a targeted fashion. The data-driven selection, however, also tends to distort the test’s size nontrivially, because it restricts the (growing-dimensional) score vector in the series regression on a random polytope, and hence, effectively alters the score’s asymptotic normality. A novel critical value is proposed to account for this truncation effect. We establish the size and local power properties of the proposed …

The Lives Of Late Soviet Science, 1945-1991, Grégory Dufaud, Ksenia Tatarchenko

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This study explores the multifaceted landscape of Soviet science from the end of World War II to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. It examines the interplay between scientific innovation and political ideology, highlighting how the state shaped research agendas and scientific practices during a period marked by both significant achievements and profound challenges. Through an analysis of key scientific institutions, prominent figures, and pivotal projects, the study illustrates the tensions between ideological constraints and the pursuit of knowledge. Additionally, it addresses the impacts of international collaboration and competition during the Cold War, revealing how these dynamics influenced scientific …

The Precise Ambit Of The Sealing Requirement For Deeds, Robbie Shih Rong Tan

Singapore Law Journal (Lexicon)

Parties (“creditors”) who loan money to others (“debtors”) are often concerned that the debtors will be unable or unwilling to repay them. Such creditors may then enter into deeds of guarantee with third parties (“guarantors”) to secure the repayment of their loans if their debtors default on payment of the same. Unlike a contract, a deed does not require consideration to be legally enforceable. However, for a deed to be legally enforceable, several other formalities must be fulfilled. In particular, the deed must be “signed, sealed, and delivered”.

Remedying The Uncertainty Surrounding Penalties And Liquidated Damages: Denka Advantech Pte Ltd V Seraya Energy Pte Ltd [2021] 1 Slr 631, Qing Zhe Tan, Rui Xin Lee

Singapore Law Journal (Lexicon)

In Singapore, the authority for penalty clauses had always been the seminal case of Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company, Limited v New Garage and Motor Company, Limited (“Dunlop”).

Walking A Tightrope In The Online Arena – Regulating The Freedom Of Expression, Yoong San Tan

Singapore Law Journal (Lexicon)

Accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic is the rise of online hate speech, where the Internet and social media platforms become convenient breeding grounds for prohibited speech. While there are existing liabilities imposed on Internet intermediaries to regulate the online arena, this article explores the shortcomings of such measures. It proposes other means to complement the efforts of the intermediaries in cultivating a safer online sphere for the freedom of expression.

Giants Of Contract Law – Some Personal Reflections, Hon. Andrew Phang

Singapore Law Journal (Lexicon)

The law of contract may seem mostly technical and, on occasion, even overly theoretical. However, if one looks more closely at its foundations as well as scholarship, it is clear that contract law has much greater value to offer us. In that regard, the present essay has two main aims. The first is the give a brief account of the lives as well as scholarship of four giants of contract law whom we have lost in the past few years. Indeed, it may be said that their scholarship has contributed to the foundational bedrock of the law of contract as …

Just-In-Time Defect Prediction On Javascript Projects: A Replication Study, Chao Ni, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang, Ahmed E. Hassan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Change-level defect prediction is widely referred to as just-in-time (JIT) defect prediction since it identifies a defect-inducing change at the check-in time, and researchers have proposed many approaches based on the language-independent change-level features. These approaches can be divided into two types: supervised approaches and unsupervised approaches, and their effectiveness has been verified on Java or C++ projects. However, whether the language-independent change-level features can effectively identify the defects of JavaScript projects is still unknown. Additionally, many researches have confirmed that supervised approaches outperform unsupervised approaches on Java or C++ projects when considering inspection effort. However, whether supervised JIT defect …

Automating App Review Response Generation Based On Contextual Knowledge, Cuiyun Gao, Wenjie Zhou, Xin Xia, David Lo, Qi Xie, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User experience of mobile apps is an essential ingredient that can influence the user base and app revenue. To ensure good user experience and assist app development, several prior studies resort to analysis of app reviews, a type of repository that directly reflects user opinions about the apps. Accurately responding to the app reviews is one of the ways to relieve user concerns and thus improve user experience. However, the response quality of the existing method relies on the pre-extracted features from other tools, including manually labelled keywords and predicted review sentiment, which may hinder the generalizability and flexibility of …

Cross-Modal Food Retrieval: Learning A Joint Embedding Of Food Images And Recipes With Semantic Consistency And Attention Mechanism, Hao Wang, Doyen Sahoo, Chenghao Liu, Ke Shu, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee-Peng Lim, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food retrieval is an important task to perform analysis of food-related information, where we are interested in retrieving relevant information about the queried food item such as ingredients, cooking instructions, etc. In this paper, we investigate cross-modal retrieval between food images and cooking recipes. The goal is to learn an embedding of images and recipes in a common feature space, such that the corresponding image-recipe embeddings lie close to one another. Two major challenges in addressing this problem are 1) large intra-variance and small inter-variance across cross-modal food data; and 2) difficulties in obtaining discriminative recipe representations. To address these …

Lessons Learnt Conducting Capture The Flag Cybersecurity Competition During Covid-19, Kee Hock Tan, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative practice full paper describes our experiences conducting cybersecurity capture the flag (CTF) competition for cybersecurity enthusiast participants (inclusive of both tertiary students and working professionals) local and abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning and appreciation of cybersecurity concepts for our participants with little to no technical background can be challenging. Gamification methods such as capture the flag competition style is a popular form of cybersecurity education to help participants overcome this challenge and identify talents. Participants get to apply theoretical concepts in a controlled environment, solve hands-on tasks in an informal, game-like setting and gain hands-on active learning …

An Exploratory Study On The Repeatedly Shared External Links On Stack Overflow, Jiakun Liu, Haoxiang Zhang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ying Zou, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On Stack Overflow, users reuse 11,926,354 external links to share the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow website. The external links connect to the existing programming-related knowledge and extend the crowdsourced knowledge on Stack Overflow. Some of the external links, so-called as repeated external links, can be shared for multiple times. We observe that 82.5% of the link sharing activities (i.e., sharing links in any question, answer, or comment) on Stack Overflow share external resources, and 57.0% of the occurrences of the external links are sharing the repeated external links. However, it is still unclear what types of external resources …

Enjoy Your Observability: An Industrial Survey Of Microservice Tracing And Analysis, Bowen Li, Xin Peng, Qilin Xiang, Hanzhang Wang, Tao Xie, Jun Sun, Xuanzhe Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microservice systems are often deployed in complex cloud-based environments and may involve a large number of service instances being dynamically created and destroyed. It is thus essential to ensure observability to understand these microservice systems’ behaviors and troubleshoot their problems. As an important means to achieve the observability, distributed tracing and analysis is known to be challenging. While many companies have started implementing distributed tracing and analysis for microservice systems, it is not clear whether existing approaches fulfill the required observability. In this article, we present our industrial survey on microservice tracing and analysis through interviewing developers and operation engineers …

Orchestration Or Automation: Authentication Flaw Detection In Android Apps, Siqi Ma, Juanru Li, Surya Nepal, Diethelm Ostry, David Lo, Sanjay K. Jha, Robert H. Deng, Elisa Bertino

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Passwords are pervasively used to authenticate users' identities in mobile apps. To secure passwords against attacks, protection is applied to the password authentication protocol (PAP). The implementation of the protection scheme becomes an important factor in protecting PAP against attacks. We focus on two basic protection in Android, i.e., SSL/TLS-based PAP and timestamp-based PAP. Previously, we proposed an automated tool, GLACIATE, to detect authentication flaws. We were curious whether orchestration (i.e., involving manual-effort) works better than automation. To answer this question, we propose an orchestrated approach, AUTHEXPLOIT and compare its effectiveness GLACIATE. We study requirements for correct implementation of PAP …

Audit Adjustments Matter: What They Reveal About Companies' Financial Reporting, Themin Suwardy, Chu Yeong Lim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study investigates the characteristics, nature and extent of proposed audit adjustments to the financial statements of listed companies in Singapore. Data was gathered from the 2018 to 2020 financial statements of 412 companies, along with views of close to 280 audit committee chairs and heads of finance (or similar designations) on the effectiveness of their companies’ finance function.

Postmaterialism And Corporate Tax Avoidance, Yujia Cui, Jiwei Wang, Kangtao Ye

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper explores how postmaterialism culture influences corporate tax avoidance behavior. Using a proprietary dataset of China tax audits, we find that firms owned by investors from countries with higher postmaterialism values are less likely to engage in tax avoidance behavior in China. In addition, we find some evidence that the negative association between postmaterialism and tax avoidance is more pronounced when tax enforcement is stronger, indicating that national culture and formal institutions act as complements. To check the external validity of our main results, we further use a cross-country sample from 21 countries over 22 years. The evidence from …

Just-In-Time Defect Identification And Localization: A Two-Phase Framework, Meng Yan, Xin Xia, Yuanrui Fan, Ahmed E. Hassan, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Defect localization aims to locate buggy program elements (e.g., buggy files, methods or lines of code) based on defect symptoms, e.g., bug reports or program spectrum. However, when we receive the defect symptoms, the defect has been exposed and negative impacts have been introduced. Thus, one challenging task is: whether we can locate buggy program prior to appearance of the defect symptom at an early time (e.g., when buggy program elements are being checked-in). We refer to this type of defect localization as “Just-In-Time (JIT) Defect localization”. Although many prior studies have proposed various JIT defect identification methods to identify …

Action-Centric Relation Transformer Network For Video Question Answering, Jipeng Zhang, Jie Shao, Rui Cao, Lianli Gao, Xing Xu, Heng Tao Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video question answering (VideoQA) has emerged as a popular research topic in recent years. Enormous efforts have been devoted to developing more effective fusion strategies and better intra-modal feature preparation. To explore these issues further, we identify two key problems. (1) Current works take almost no account of introducing action of interest in video representation. Additionally, there exists insufficient labeling data on where the action of interest is in many datasets. However, questions in VideoQA are usually action-centric. (2) Frame-to-frame relations, which can provide useful temporal attributes (e.g., state transition, action counting), lack relevant research. Based on these observations, we …

The Case Of Singapore, Hwee Kwan Chow, Kong Weng Ho

Research Collection School of Economics

The economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Singapore was more severe and protracted than the global financial crisis. Singapore responded with easing of the monetary policy stance, reinforcing financial stability, helping individuals to reduce debt obligations, easing business cashflow constraints, adjusting financial regulatory and supervisory protocols to cope with immediate challenges, and enabling the financial sectors to build long-term capabilities. Fiscal responses were unprecedented with four consecutive budgets and two ministerial statements, initially focusing on immediate assistance in respect of jobs, businesses, households, and later refined to providing more sector-specific assistance as the pandemic evolved with more detailed information …

Smart Heuristics For Individuals, Teams, And Organizations, Gerd Gigerenzer, Jochen Reb, Shenghua Luan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Heuristics are fast, frugal, and accurate strategies that enable rather than limit decision making under uncertainty. Uncertainty, as opposed to calculable risk, is characteristic of most organizational contexts. We review existing research and offer a descriptive and prescriptive theoretical framework to integrate the current patchwork of heuristics scattered across various areas of organizational studies. Research on the adaptive toolbox is descriptive, identifying the repertoire of heuristics on which individuals, teams, and organizations rely. Research on ecological rationality is prescriptive, specifying the conditions under which a given heuristic performs well, that is, when it is smart. Our review finds a relatively …

The Moderating Effect Of Solar Radiation On The Association Between Human Mobility And Covid-19 Infection In Europe, Wenyu Zhao, Yongjian Zhu, Jingui Xie, Zhichao Zheng, Haidong Luo, Oon Cheong Ooi

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused a global pandemic. Some studies have suggested a negative association between sunlight intensity and COVID-19 infection, alluding to the belief that it might be safe to go out on sunny days. This paper examined whether solar radiation mitigated the association between human mobility and COVID-19 infection in Europe using a dynamic panel data model to investigate the effect of human mobility, solar radiation, and their interaction on COVID-19 infection. The results revealed that outgoing mobility was positively correlated and solar radiation was negatively correlated with COVID-19 infection at lag levels of 1, …

Exploring How Online Responses Change In Response To Debunking Messages About Covid-19 On Whatsapp, Xingyu Ken Chen, Jin-Cheon Na, Luke Kien-Weng Tan, Mark Chong, Murphy Choy

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a concurrent outbreak of false information online. Debunking false information about a health crisis is critical as misinformation can trigger protests or panic, which necessitates a better understanding of it. This exploratory study examined the effects of debunking messages on a COVID-19-related public chat on WhatsApp in Singapore. Design/methodology/approach: To understand the effects of debunking messages about COVID-19 on WhatsApp conversations, the following was studied. The relationship between source credibility (i.e. characteristics of a communicator that affect the receiver's acceptance of the message) of different debunking message types and their effects on the length …

Accessibility In Software Practice: A Practitioner's Perspective, Tingting Bi, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy, Thomas Zimmermann, Denae Ford

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Being able to access software in daily life is vital for everyone, and thus accessibility is a fundamental challenge for software development. However, given the number of accessibility issues reported by many users, e.g., in app reviews, it is not clear if accessibility is widely integrated into current software projects and how software projects address accessibility issues. In this article, we report a study of the critical challenges and benefits of incorporating accessibility into software development and design. We applied a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach for gathering data from 15 interviews and 365 survey respondents from 26 countries across …

Codematcher: Searching Code Based On Sequential Semantics Of Important Query Words, Chao Liu, Xin Xia, David Lo, Zhiwei Liu, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To accelerate software development, developers frequently search and reuse existing code snippets from a large-scale codebase, e.g., GitHub. Over the years, researchers proposed many information retrieval (IR)-based models for code search, but they fail to connect the semantic gap between query and code. An early successful deep learning (DL)-based model DeepCS solved this issue by learning the relationship between pairs of code methods and corresponding natural language descriptions. Two major advantages of DeepCS are the capability of understanding irrelevant/noisy keywords and capturing sequential relationships between words in query and code. In this article, we proposed an IR-based model CodeMatcher that …

Why Do Smart Contracts Self-Destruct? Investigating The Selfdestruct Function On Ethereum, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The selfdestruct function is provided by Ethereum smart contracts to destroy a contract on the blockchain system. However, it is a double-edged sword for developers. On the one hand, using the selfdestruct function enables developers to remove smart contracts (SCs) from Ethereum and transfers Ethers when emergency situations happen, e.g., being attacked. On the other hand, this function can increase the complexity for the development and open an attack vector for attackers. To better understand the reasons why SC developers include or exclude the selfdestruct function in their contracts, we conducted an online survey to collect feedback from them and …

Toward Video-Conferencing Tools For Hands-On Activities In Online Teaching, Audrey Labrie, Terrance Mok, Anthony Tang, Michelle Lui, Lora Oehlberg, Lev Poretski

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many instructors in computing and HCI disciplines use hands-on activities for teaching and training new skills. Beyond simply teaching hands-on skills like sketching and programming, instructors also use these activities so students can acquire tacit skills. Yet, current video-conferencing technologies may not effectively support hands-on activities in online teaching contexts. To develop an understanding of the inadequacies of current video-conferencing technologies for hands-on activities, we conducted 15 interviews with university-level instructors who had quickly pivoted their use of hands-on activities to an online context during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on our analysis, we uncovered four pedagogical …

"More Than Deep Learning": Post-Processing For Api Sequence Recommendation, Chi Chen, Xin Peng, Bihuan Chen, Jun Sun, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Wang, Wenyun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the daily development process, developers often need assistance in finding a sequence of APIs to accomplish their development tasks. Existing deep learning models, which have recently been developed for recommending one single API, can be adapted by using encoder-decoder models together with beam search to generate API sequence recommendations. However, the generated API sequence recommendations heavily rely on the probabilities of API suggestions at each decoding step, which do not take into account other domain-specific factors (e.g., whether an API suggestion satisfies the program syntax and how diverse the API sequence recommendations are). Moreover, it is difficult for developers …

Kg4vis: A Knowledge Graph-Based Approach For Visualization Recommendation, Haotian Li, Yong Wang, Songheng Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Huamin. Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Visualization recommendation or automatic visualization generation can significantly lower the barriers for general users to rapidly create effective data visualizations, especially for those users without a background in data visualizations. However, existing rule-based approaches require tedious manual specifications of visualization rules by visualization experts. Other machine learning-based approaches often work like black-box and are difficult to understand why a specific visualization is recommended, limiting the wider adoption of these approaches. This paper fills the gap by presenting KG4Vis, a knowledge graph (KG)-based approach for visualization recommendation. It does not require manual specifications of visualization rules and can also guarantee good …

M2lens: Visualizing And Explaining Multimodal Models For Sentiment Analysis, Xingbo Wang, Jianben He, Zhihua Jin, Muqiao Yang, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to recognize people's attitudes from multiple communication channels such as verbal content (i.e., text), voice, and facial expressions. It has become a vibrant and important research topic in natural language processing. Much research focuses on modeling the complex intra- and inter-modal interactions between different communication channels. However, current multimodal models with strong performance are often deep-learning-based techniques and work like black boxes. It is not clear how models utilize multimodal information for sentiment predictions. Despite recent advances in techniques for enhancing the explainability of machine learning models, they often target unimodal scenarios (e.g., images, sentences), and …

Defining Smart Contract Defects On Ethereum, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy, Xiapu Luo, Ting Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are programs running on a blockchain. They are immutable to change, and hence can not be patched for bugs once deployed. Thus it is critical to ensure they are bug-free and well-designed before deployment. A Contract defect is an error, flaw or fault in a smart contract that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. The detection of contract defects is a method to avoid potential bugs and improve the design of existing code. Since smart contracts contain numerous distinctive features, such as the gas system. decentralized, it is important …