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Simultaneous Material Identification And Target Imaging With Commodity Rfid Devices, Ju Wang, Jie Xiong, Xiaojiang Chen, Hongbo Jiang, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Dingyi Fang Feb 2022

Simultaneous Material Identification And Target Imaging With Commodity Rfid Devices, Ju Wang, Jie Xiong, Xiaojiang Chen, Hongbo Jiang, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Dingyi Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Material identification and target imaging play an important role in many applications. This paper introduces TagScan, a system that can identify the material type and image the horizontal cut of a target simultaneously with cheap commodity Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) devices. The key intuition is that different materials and/or target sizes cause different amounts of phase and RSS (Received Signal Strength) changes, when radio frequency (RF) signal penetrates through the target. Multiple challenges need to be addressed before we can turn the idea into a functional system, including (i) indoor environments exhibit rich multipath which breaks the linear relationship between the …


New-Media Advertising And Retail Platform Openness, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo Feb 2022

New-Media Advertising And Retail Platform Openness, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We recently have witnessed two important trends in online retailing: the advent of new media (e.g., social media and search engines) makes advertising affordable for small sellers, and large online retailers (e.g., Amazon and JD.com) opening their platforms to allow even direct competitors to sell on their platforms. We examine how new-media advertising affects retail platform openness. We develop a game-theoretic model in which a leading retailer, who has both valuation and awareness advantages, and a third-party seller, who sells an identical product, engage in price competition. We find that the availability of relatively low-cost advertising through new media plays …


Modeling Functional Similarity In Source Code With Graph-Based Siamese Networks, Nikita Mehrotra, Navdha Agarwal, Piyush Gupta, Saket Anand, David Lo, Rahul Purandare Feb 2022

Modeling Functional Similarity In Source Code With Graph-Based Siamese Networks, Nikita Mehrotra, Navdha Agarwal, Piyush Gupta, Saket Anand, David Lo, Rahul Purandare

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code clones are duplicate code fragments that share (nearly) similar syntax or semantics. Code clone detection plays an important role in software maintenance, code refactoring, and reuse. A substantial amount of research has been conducted in the past to detect clones. A majority of these approaches use lexical and syntactic information to detect clones. However, only a few of them target semantic clones. Recently, motivated by the success of deep learning models in other fields, including natural language processing and computer vision, researchers have attempted to adopt deep learning techniques to detect code clones. These approaches use lexical information (tokens) …


Collaborative Curating For Discovery And Expansion Of Visual Clusters, Duy Dung Le, Hady W. Lauw Feb 2022

Collaborative Curating For Discovery And Expansion Of Visual Clusters, Duy Dung Le, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many visually-oriented applications, users can select and group images that they find interesting into coherent clusters. For instance, we encounter these in the form of hashtags on Instagram, galleries on Flickr, or boards on Pinterest. The selection and coherence of such user-curated visual clusters arise from a user’s preference for a certain type of content as well as her own perception of which images are similar and thus belong to a cluster. We seek to model such curation behaviors towards supporting users in their future activities such as expanding existing clusters or discovering new clusters altogether. This paper proposes …


Active Learning Of Discriminative Subgraph Patterns For Api Misuse Detection, Hong Jin Kang, David Lo Feb 2022

Active Learning Of Discriminative Subgraph Patterns For Api Misuse Detection, Hong Jin Kang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common cause of bugs and vulnerabilities are the violations of usage constraints associated with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). API misuses are common in software projects, and while there have been techniques proposed to detect such misuses, studies have shown that they fail to reliably detect misuses while reporting many false positives. One limitation of prior work is the inability to reliably identify correct patterns of usage. Many approaches confuse a usage pattern’s frequency for correctness. Due to the variety of alternative usage patterns that may be uncommon but correct, anomaly detection-based techniques have limited success in identifying misuses. We …


Emerging App Issue Identification Via Online Joint Sentiment-Topic Tracing, Cuiyun Gao, Jichuan Zeng, Zhiyuan Wen, David Lo, Xin Xia, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu Feb 2022

Emerging App Issue Identification Via Online Joint Sentiment-Topic Tracing, Cuiyun Gao, Jichuan Zeng, Zhiyuan Wen, David Lo, Xin Xia, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Millions of mobile apps are available in app stores, such as Apple’s App Store and Google Play. For a mobile app, it would be increasingly challenging to stand out from the enormous competitors and become prevalent among users. Good user experience and well-designed functionalities are the keys to a successful app. To achieve this, popular apps usually schedule their updates frequently. If we can capture the critical app issues faced by users in a timely and accurate manner, developers can make timely updates, and good user experience can be ensured. There exist prior studies on analyzing reviews for detecting emerging …


Post2vec: Learning Distributed Representations Of Stack Overflow Posts, Bowen Xu, Thong Hoang, Abhishek Sharma, Chengran Yang, Xin Xia, David Lo Feb 2022

Post2vec: Learning Distributed Representations Of Stack Overflow Posts, Bowen Xu, Thong Hoang, Abhishek Sharma, Chengran Yang, Xin Xia, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Past studies have proposed solutions that analyze Stack Overflow content to help users find desired information or aid various downstream software engineering tasks. A common step performed by those solutions is to extract suitable representations of posts; typically, in the form of meaningful vectors. These vectors are then used for different tasks, for example, tag recommendation, relatedness prediction, post classification, and API recommendation. Intuitively, the quality of the vector representations of posts determines the effectiveness of the solutions in performing the respective tasks. In this work, to aid existing studies that analyze Stack Overflow posts, we propose a specialized deep …


Broken External Links On Stack Overflow, Jiakun Liu, Xin Xia, David Lo, Haoxiang Zhang, Ying Zou, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li Feb 2022

Broken External Links On Stack Overflow, Jiakun Liu, Xin Xia, David Lo, Haoxiang Zhang, Ying Zou, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow hosts valuable programming-related knowledge with 11,926,354 links that reference to the third-party websites. The links that reference to the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow websites extend the Stack Overflow knowledge base substantially. However, with the rapid development of programming-related knowledge, many resources hosted on the Internet are not available anymore. Based on our analysis of the Stack Overflow data that was released on Jun. 2, 2019, 14.2 percent of the links on Stack Overflow are broken links. The broken links on Stack Overflow can obstruct viewers from obtaining desired programming-related knowledge, and potentially damage the reputation of …


Field Study In Deploying Restless Multi-Armed Bandits: Assisting Non-Profits In Improving Maternal And Child Health, Aditya Mate, Lovish Madan, Aparna Taneja, Neha Madhiwalla, Shresth Verma, Gargi Singh, Aparna Hegde, Pradeep Varakantham, Milind Tambe Feb 2022

Field Study In Deploying Restless Multi-Armed Bandits: Assisting Non-Profits In Improving Maternal And Child Health, Aditya Mate, Lovish Madan, Aparna Taneja, Neha Madhiwalla, Shresth Verma, Gargi Singh, Aparna Hegde, Pradeep Varakantham, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread availability of cell phones has enabled non-profits to deliver critical health information to their beneficiaries in a timely manner. This paper describes our work to assist non-profits that employ automated messaging programs to deliver timely preventive care information to beneficiaries (new and expecting mothers) during pregnancy and after delivery. Unfortunately, a key challenge in such information delivery programs is that a significant fraction of beneficiaries drop out of the program. Yet, non-profits often have limited health-worker resources (time) to place crucial service calls for live interaction with beneficiaries to prevent such engagement drops. To assist non-profits in optimizing …


Multiscale Generative Models: Improving Performance Of A Generative Model Using Feedback From Other Dependent Generative Models, Changyu Chen, Avinandan Bose, Shih-Fen Cheng, Arunesh Sinha Feb 2022

Multiscale Generative Models: Improving Performance Of A Generative Model Using Feedback From Other Dependent Generative Models, Changyu Chen, Avinandan Bose, Shih-Fen Cheng, Arunesh Sinha

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Realistic fine-grained multi-agent simulation of real-world complex systems is crucial for many downstream tasks such as reinforcement learning. Recent work has used generative models (GANs in particular) for providing high-fidelity simulation of real-world systems. However, such generative models are often monolithic and miss out on modeling the interaction in multi-agent systems. In this work, we take a first step towards building multiple interacting generative models (GANs) that reflects the interaction in real world. We build and analyze a hierarchical set-up where a higher-level GAN is conditioned on the output of multiple lower-level GANs. We present a technique of using feedback …


Automated Reverse Engineering Of Role-Based Access Control Policies Of Web Applications, Ha Thanh Le, Lwin Khin Shar, Domenico Bianculli, Lionel C. Briand, Cu Duy Nguyen Feb 2022

Automated Reverse Engineering Of Role-Based Access Control Policies Of Web Applications, Ha Thanh Le, Lwin Khin Shar, Domenico Bianculli, Lionel C. Briand, Cu Duy Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Access control (AC) is an important security mechanism used in software systems to restrict access to sensitive resources. Therefore, it is essential to validate the correctness of AC implementations with respect to policy specifications or intended access rights. However, in practice, AC policy specifications are often missing or poorly documented; in some cases, AC policies are hard-coded in business logic implementations. This leads to difficulties in validating the correctness of policy implementations and detecting AC defects.In this paper, we present a semi-automated framework for reverse-engineering of AC policies from Web applications. Our goal is to learn and recover role-based access …


A Deep Dive Into The Impact Of Covid-19 On Software Development, Paulo Anselmo Da Mota Silveira Neto, Umme Ayda Mannan, Eduardo Santana De Almeida, Nachiappan Nagappan, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Cuiyun Gao, Iftekhar Ahmed Feb 2022

A Deep Dive Into The Impact Of Covid-19 On Software Development, Paulo Anselmo Da Mota Silveira Neto, Umme Ayda Mannan, Eduardo Santana De Almeida, Nachiappan Nagappan, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Cuiyun Gao, Iftekhar Ahmed

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The COVID-19 pandemic is considered as the most crucial global health calamity of the century. It has impacted different business sectors around the world and software development is not an exception. This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 on software projects and software development professionals. We conducted a mining software repository study based on 100 GitHub projects developed in Java using ten different metrics. Next, we surveyed 279 software development professionals for better understanding the impact of COVID-19 on daily activities and wellbeing. We identified 12 observations related to productivity, code quality, and wellbeing. Our findings highlight that the impact …


Seqseg: A Sequential Method To Achieve Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Segmentation Free From Background Dominance, Guihua Tao, Haojiang Li, Jiabin Huang, Chu Han, Jiazhou Chen, Guangying Ruan, Wenjie Huang, Yu Hu, Tingting Dan, Bin Zhang, Shengfeng He Feb 2022

Seqseg: A Sequential Method To Achieve Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Segmentation Free From Background Dominance, Guihua Tao, Haojiang Li, Jiabin Huang, Chu Han, Jiazhou Chen, Guangying Ruan, Wenjie Huang, Yu Hu, Tingting Dan, Bin Zhang, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reliable nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) segmentation plays an important role in radiotherapy planning. However, recent deep learning methods fail to achieve satisfactory NPC segmentation in magnetic resonance (MR) images, since NPC is infiltrative and typically has a small or even tiny volume with indistinguishable border, making it indiscernible from tightly connected surrounding tissues from immense and complex backgrounds. To address such background dominance problems, this paper proposes a sequential method (SeqSeg) to achieve accurate NPC segmentation. Specifically, the proposed SeqSeg is devoted to solving the problem at two scales: the instance level and feature level. At the instance level, SeqSeg is …


Scriptchecker: To Tame Third-Party Script Execution With Task Capabilities, Wu Luo, Xuhua Ding, Pengfei Wu, Xiaolei Zhang, Qingni Shen, Zhonghai Wu Feb 2022

Scriptchecker: To Tame Third-Party Script Execution With Task Capabilities, Wu Luo, Xuhua Ding, Pengfei Wu, Xiaolei Zhang, Qingni Shen, Zhonghai Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present ScriptChecker, a novel browser-based framework to effectively and efficiently restrict third-party script execution according to the host web page’s directives. Different from all existing schemes functioning at the JavaScript layer, ScriptChecker holistically harnesses context separation and the browser’s security monitors to enforce on-demand access controls upon tasks executing untrusted code. The host page can flexibly assign resource-access capabilities to tasks upon their creation. Reaping the benefits of the task capability approach, ScriptChecker outperforms existing techniques in security, usability and performance. We have implemented a prototype of ScriptChecker on Chrome and rigorously evaluated its security against 1373 malicious scripts …


Deep Graph-Level Anomaly Detection By Glocal Knowledge Distillation, Rongrong Ma, Guansong Pang, Ling Chen, Anton Van Den Hengel Feb 2022

Deep Graph-Level Anomaly Detection By Glocal Knowledge Distillation, Rongrong Ma, Guansong Pang, Ling Chen, Anton Van Den Hengel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graph-level anomaly detection (GAD) describes the problem of detecting graphs that are abnormal in their structure and/or the features of their nodes, as compared to other graphs. One of the challenges in GAD is to devise graph representations that enable the detection of both locally- and globally-anomalous graphs, i.e., graphs that are abnormal in their fine-grained (node-level) or holistic (graph-level) properties, respectively. To tackle this challenge we introduce a novel deep anomaly detection approach for GAD that learns rich global and local normal pattern information by joint random distillation of graph and node representations. The random distillation is achieved by …


Crowdtc: Crowd-Powered Learning For Text Classification, Keyu Yang, Yunjun Gao, Lei Liang, Song Bian, Lu Chen, Baihua Zheng Feb 2022

Crowdtc: Crowd-Powered Learning For Text Classification, Keyu Yang, Yunjun Gao, Lei Liang, Song Bian, Lu Chen, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Text classification is a fundamental task in content analysis. Nowadays, deep learning has demonstrated promising performance in text classification compared with shallow models. However, almost all the existing models do not take advantage of the wisdom of human beings to help text classification. Human beings are more intelligent and capable than machine learning models in terms of understanding and capturing the implicit semantic information from text. In this article, we try to take guidance from human beings to classify text. We propose Crowd-powered learning for Text Classification (CrowdTC for short). We design and post the questions on a crowdsourcing platform …


Including Everyone, Everywhere: Understanding Opportunities And Challenges Of Geographic Gender-Inclusion In Oss, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Denae Ford, Ayushi Rastogi, David Lo, Rahul Purandare, Nachiappan Nagappan Feb 2022

Including Everyone, Everywhere: Understanding Opportunities And Challenges Of Geographic Gender-Inclusion In Oss, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Denae Ford, Ayushi Rastogi, David Lo, Rahul Purandare, Nachiappan Nagappan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The gender gap is a significant concern facing the software industry as the development becomes more geographically distributed. Widely shared reports indicate that gender differences may be specific to each region. However, how complete can these reports be with little to no research reflective of the Open Source Software (OSS) process and communities software is now commonly developed in? Our study presents a multi-region geographical analysis of gender inclusion on GitHub. This mixed-methods approach includes quantitatively investigating differences in gender inclusion in projects across geographic regions and investigate these trends over time using data from contributions to 21,456 project repositories. …


Defectchecker: Automated Smart Contract Defect Detection By Analyzing Evm Bytecode, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy, Xiapu Luo, Ting Chen Feb 2022

Defectchecker: Automated Smart Contract Defect Detection By Analyzing Evm Bytecode, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy, Xiapu Luo, Ting Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs running on the blockchain. They are immutable and cannot be modified, even when bugs are detected. Therefore, ensuring smart contracts are bug-free and well-designed before deploying them to the blockchain is extremely important. 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. Detecting and removing contract defects can avoid potential bugs and make programs more robust. Our previous work defined 20 contract defects for smart contracts and divided them into five impact levels. According to …


Face To Purchase: Predicting Consumer Choices With Structured Facial And Behavioral Traits Embedding, Zhe Liu, Xianzhi Wang, Lina Yao, Jake An, Lei Bai, Ee-Peng Lim Jan 2022

Face To Purchase: Predicting Consumer Choices With Structured Facial And Behavioral Traits Embedding, Zhe Liu, Xianzhi Wang, Lina Yao, Jake An, Lei Bai, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Predicting consumers’ purchasing behaviors is critical for targeted advertisement and sales promotion in e-commerce. Human faces are an invaluable source of information for gaining insights into consumer personality and behavioral traits. However, consumer's faces are largely unexplored in previous research, and the existing face-related studies focus on high-level features such as personality traits while neglecting the business significance of learning from facial data. We propose to predict consumers’ purchases based on their facial features and purchasing histories. We design a semi-supervised model based on a hierarchical embedding network to extract high-level features of consumers and to predict the top-N purchase …


Just-In-Time Defect Prediction On Javascript Projects: A Replication Study, Chao Ni, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang, Ahmed E. Hassan Jan 2022

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 Jan 2022

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 Jan 2022

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 Jan 2022

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 Jan 2022

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 …


Perceptions And Needs Of Artificial Intelligence In Health Care To Increase Adoption: Scoping Review, Han Shi Jocelyn Chew, Palakorn Achananuparp Jan 2022

Perceptions And Needs Of Artificial Intelligence In Health Care To Increase Adoption: Scoping Review, Han Shi Jocelyn Chew, Palakorn Achananuparp

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health care service delivery. However, the perceptions and needs of such systems remain elusive, hindering efforts to promote AI adoption in health care. Objective: This study aims to provide an overview of the perceptions and needs of AI to increase its adoption in health care. Methods: A systematic scoping review was conducted according to the 5-stage framework by Arksey and O’Malley. Articles that described the perceptions and needs of AI in health care were searched across nine databases: ACM Library, CINAHL, Cochrane Central, Embase, IEEE Xplore, …


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 Jan 2022

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 …


Contextual Documentation Referencing On Stack Overflow, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard Jan 2022

Contextual Documentation Referencing On Stack Overflow, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software engineering is knowledge-intensive and requires software developers to continually search for knowledge, often on community question answering platforms such as Stack Overflow. Such information sharing platforms do not exist in isolation, and part of the evidence that they exist in a broader software documentation ecosystem is the common presence of hyperlinks to other documentation resources found in forum posts. With the goal of helping to improve the information diffusion between Stack Overflow and other documentation resources, we conducted a study to answer the question of how and why documentation is referenced in Stack Overflow threads. We sampled and classified …


An Empirical Study Of Developers' Discussions About Security Challenges Of Different Programming Languages, Roland Croft, Yongzheng Xie, Mansooreh Zahedi, Muhammad Ali Babar, Christoph Treude Jan 2022

An Empirical Study Of Developers' Discussions About Security Challenges Of Different Programming Languages, Roland Croft, Yongzheng Xie, Mansooreh Zahedi, Muhammad Ali Babar, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In collaborative software development projects, work items are used as a mechanism to coordinate tasks and track shared development work. In this paper, we explore how “tagging,” a lightweight social computing mechanism, is used to communicate matters of concern in the management of development tasks. We present the results from two empirical studies over 36 and 12 months, respectively, on how tagging has been adopted and what role it plays in the development processes of several professional development projects with more than 1,000 developers in total. Our research shows that the tagging mechanism was eagerly adopted by the teams, and …


Comparison Of The Mental Burden On Nursing Care Providers With And Without Mat-Type Sleep State Sensors At A Nursing Home In Tokyo, Japan: Quasi-Experimental Study, Sakiko Itoh, Hwee-Pink Tan, Kenichi Kudo, Yasuko Ogata Jan 2022

Comparison Of The Mental Burden On Nursing Care Providers With And Without Mat-Type Sleep State Sensors At A Nursing Home In Tokyo, Japan: Quasi-Experimental Study, Sakiko Itoh, Hwee-Pink Tan, Kenichi Kudo, Yasuko Ogata

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: Increasing need for nursing care has led to the increased burden on formal caregivers, with those in nursing homes having to deal with exhausting labor. Although research activities on the use of internet of things devices to support nursing care for older adults exist, there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of these interventions among formal caregivers in nursing homes. Objective: This study aims to investigate whether mat-type sleep state sensors for supporting nursing care can reduce the mental burden of formal caregivers in a nursing home. Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study at a nursing home in Tokyo, …


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 Jan 2022

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 …