Digital Commons Network^™

Investigating Parental Roles In Developing Preschool-Aged Children’S Emergent Literacy In English, Their Second Language, Through Storybook Reading In A Sample Of Kuwaiti Homes, Fajr M. Alkouz

Dissertations

Using a convergent mixed methods design, this study explored home emergent literacy environments actualized by six mothers of young preschool-aged children living in Kuwait. It investigated the role of these Kuwaiti mothers in developing their bilingual preschool-aged children’s print knowledge, oral language, and phonological awareness, as three areas associated with Emergent Literacy (EL). In particular, the study explored the influence of parental storybook reading on the development of bilingual children’s EL skills in English, their Second Language (L2). Employing purposive sampling, this case study obtained statistical quantitative results from parents who responded to a questionnaire about their home literacy experiences …

The Important Role Of System Dynamics Investigation On Business Model, Industry And Performance Management, Lina Gozali, Teuku Yuri M. Zagloel, Togar Mangihut Simatupang, Wahyudi Sutopo, Aldy Gunawan, Yun-Chia Liang, Bernardo Nugroho Yahya, Jose Arturo Garza-Reyes, Agustinus Purna Irawan, Yuliani Suseno

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose: This research studies the development of the evolving dynamic system model and explores the important elements or factors and what detailed attributes are the main influences model in achieving the success of a business, industry and management. It also identifies the real and major differences between static and dynamic business management models and the detailed factors that influence them. Later, this research investigates the benefits/advantages and limitations/disadvantages of some research studies. The studies conducted in this research put more emphasis on the capabilities of system dynamics (SD) in modeling and the ability to measure, analyse and capture problems in …

Continual Normalization: Rethinking Batch Normalization For Online Continual Learning, Quang Pham, Chenghao Liu, Steven Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing continual learning methods use Batch Normalization (BN) to facilitate training and improve generalization across tasks. However, the non-i.i.d and non-stationary nature of continual learning data, especially in the online setting, amplify the discrepancy between training and testing in BN and hinder the performance of older tasks. In this work, we study the cross-task normalization effect of BN in online continual learning where BN normalizes the testing data using moments biased towards the current task, resulting in higher catastrophic forgetting. This limitation motivates us to propose a simple yet effective method that we call Continual Normalization (CN) to facilitate training …

Extracting Relevant Test Inputs From Bug Reports For Automatic Test Case Generation, Wendkuuni C. Ouédraogo, Laura Plein, Kader Kaboré, Andrew Habib, Jacques Klein, David Lo, Tegawende F. Bissyandé

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The pursuit of automating software test case generation, particularly for unit tests, has become increasingly important due to the labor-intensive nature of manual test generation [6]. However, a significant challenge in this domain is the inability of automated approaches to generate relevant inputs, which compromises the efficacy of the tests [6].

Unleashing The Power Of Clippy In Real-World Rust Projects, Chunmiao Li, Yijun Yu, Haitao Wu, Luca Carlig, Shijie Nie, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The error messages generated by the Rust compiler (rustc) are useful for developers to identify and diagnose suspicious code segments. Complementing the compiler, linters can also play an important role in promoting the adherence to certain coding style conventions and best practices. Prominent linters utilized in the Rust ecosystem include Clippy [1] and Rustfmt [2]. Among them, the Rust community particularly emphasizes on the importance of heeding the warnings provided by Clippy to mitigate common errors and promote the adoption of idiomatic conventions. Clippy provides a set of more than 600 lints in addition to the built-in rustc lints. These …

Bidirectional Paper-Repository Tracing In Software Engineering, Daniel Garijo, Miguel Arroyo, Esteban González Guardia, Christoph Treude, Nicola Tarocco

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While computer science papers frequently include their associated code repositories, establishing a clear link between papers and their corresponding implementations may be challenging due to the number of code repositories used in research publications. In this paper we describe a lightweight method for effectively identifying bidirectional links between papers and repositories from both LaTeX and PDF sources. We have used our approach to analyze more than 14000 PDF and Latex files in the Software Engineering category of Arxiv, generating a dataset of more than 1400 paper-code implementations and assessing current citation practices on it.

Going Viral: Case Studies On The Impact Of Protestware, Youmei Fan, Dong Wang, Supastsara Wattanakriengkrai, Hathaichanok Damrongsiri, Christoph Treude, Hideaki Hata, Raula Gaikovina Kula

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Maintainers are now self-sabotaging their work in order to take political or economic stances, a practice referred to as "protestware". In this poster, we present our approach to understand how the discourse about such an attack went viral, how it is received by the community, and whether developers respond to the attack in a timely manner. We study two notable protestware cases, i.e., Colors.js and es5-ext, comparing with discussions of a typical security vulnerability as a baseline, i.e., Ua-parser, and perform a thematic analysis of more than two thousand protest-related posts to extract the different narratives when discussing protestware.

Enhancing Source Code Representations For Deep Learning With Static Analysis, Xueting Guan, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning techniques applied to program analysis tasks such as code classification, summarization, and bug detection have seen widespread interest. Traditional approaches, however, treat programming source code as natural language text, which may neglect significant structural or semantic details. Additionally, most current methods of representing source code focus solely on the code, without considering beneficial additional context. This paper explores the integration of static analysis and additional context such as bug reports and design patterns into source code representations for deep learning models. We use the Abstract Syntax Tree-based Neural Network (ASTNN) method and augment it with additional context information …

Minimon: Minimizing Android Applications With Intelligent Monitoring-Based Debloating, Jiakun Liu, Zicheng Zhang, Xing Hu, Thung Ferdian, Shahar Maoz, Debin Gao, Eran Toch, Zhipeng Zhao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The size of Android applications is getting larger to fulfill the requirements of various users. However, not all the features of the applications are needed and desired by a specific user. The unnecessary and non-desired features can increase the attack surface and consume system resources such as storage and memory. To address this issue, we propose a framework, MiniMon, to debloat unnecessary features from an Android app based on the logs of specific users' interactions with the app.However, rarely used features may not be recorded during the data collection, and users' preferences may change slightly over time. To address these …

Assessing Ai Detectors In Identifying Ai-Generated Code: Implications For Education, Wei Hung Pan, Ming Jie Chok, Jonathan Leong Shan Wong, Yung Xin Shin, Yeong Shian Poon, Zhou Yang, Chun Yong Chong, David Lo, Mei Kuan Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Educators are increasingly concerned about the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT in programming education, particularly regarding the potential exploitation of imperfections in Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) Detectors for academic misconduct.In this paper, we present an empirical study where the LLM is examined for its attempts to bypass detection by AIGC Detectors. This is achieved by generating code in response to a given question using different variants. We collected a dataset comprising 5,069 samples, with each sample consisting of a textual description of a coding problem and its corresponding human-written Python solution codes. These samples were …

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: Better Automatic Vulnerability Repair By Broadening Input Ranges And Sources, Xin Zhou, Kisub Kim, Bowen Xu, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The advances of deep learning (DL) have paved the way for automatic software vulnerability repair approaches, which effectively learn the mapping from the vulnerable code to the fixed code. Nevertheless, existing DL-based vulnerability repair methods face notable limitations: 1) they struggle to handle lengthy vulnerable code, 2) they treat code as natural language texts, neglecting its inherent structure, and 3) they do not tap into the valuable expert knowledge present in the expert system. To address this, we propose VulMaster, a Transformer-based neural network model that excels at generating vulnerability repairs by comprehensively understanding the entire vulnerable code, irrespective of …

Coca: Improving And Explaining Graph Neural Network-Based Vulnerability Detection Systems, Sicong Cao, Xiaobing Sun, Xiaoxue Wu, David Lo, Lili Bo, Bin Li, Wei Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based vulnerability detection systems have achieved remarkable success. However, the lack of explainability poses a critical challenge to deploy black-box models in security-related domains. For this reason, several approaches have been proposed to explain the decision logic of the detection model by providing a set of crucial statements positively contributing to its predictions. Unfortunately, due to the weakly-robust detection models and suboptimal explanation strategy, they have the danger of revealing spurious correlations and redundancy issue.In this paper, we propose Coca, a general framework aiming to 1) enhance the robustness of existing GNN-based vulnerability detection models to …

Ppt4j: Patch Presence Test For Java Binaries, Zhiyuan Pan, Xing Hu, Xin Xia, Xian Zhan, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The number of vulnerabilities reported in open source software has increased substantially in recent years. Security patches provide the necessary measures to protect software from attacks and vulnerabilities. In practice, it is difficult to identify whether patches have been integrated into software, especially if we only have binary files. Therefore, the ability to test whether a patch is applied to the target binary, a.k.a. patch presence test, is crucial for practitioners. However, it is challenging to obtain accurate semantic information from patches, which could lead to incorrect results.In this paper, we propose a new patch presence test framework named Ppt4J …

Exploiting Library Vulnerability Via Migration-Based Automated Test Generation, Zirui Chen, Xing Hu, Xin Xia, Yi Gao, Tongtong Xu, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In software development, developers extensively utilize third-party libraries to avoid implementing existing functionalities. When a new third-party library vulnerability is disclosed, project maintainers need to determine whether their projects are affected by the vulnerability, which requires developers to invest substantial effort in assessment. However, existing tools face a series of issues: static analysis tools produce false alarms, dynamic analysis tools require existing tests and test generation tools have low success rates when facing complex vulnerabilities.Vulnerability exploits, as code snippets provided for reproducing vulnerabilities after disclosure, contain a wealth of vulnerability-related information. This study proposes a new method based on vulnerability …

Mut: Human-In-The-Loop Unit Test Migration, Yi Gao, Xing Hu, Tongtong Xu, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Test migration, which enables the reuse of test cases crafted with knowledge and creativity by testers across various platforms and programming languages, has exhibited effectiveness in mobile app testing. However, unit test migration at the source code level has not garnered adequate attention and exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-language and cross-platform test migration methodology, named MUT, which consists of four modules: code mapping, test case filtering, test case translation, and test case adaptation. MUT initially calculates code mappings to establish associations between source and target projects, and identifies suitable unit tests for migration from the source …

Curiosity-Driven Testing For Sequential Decision-Making Process, Junda He, Zhou Yang, Jieke Shi, Chengran Yang, Kisub Kim, Bowen Xu, Xin Zhou, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sequential decision-making processes (SDPs) are fundamental for complex real-world challenges, such as autonomous driving, robotic control, and traffic management. While recent advances in Deep Learning (DL) have led to mature solutions for solving these complex problems, SDMs remain vulnerable to learning unsafe behaviors, posing significant risks in safety-critical applications. However, developing a testing framework for SDMs that can identify a diverse set of crash-triggering scenarios remains an open challenge. To address this, we propose CureFuzz, a novel curiosity-driven black-box fuzz testing approach for SDMs. CureFuzz proposes a curiosity mechanism that allows a fuzzer to effectively explore novel and diverse scenarios, …

Towards Speedy Permission-Based Debloating For Android Apps, Thung Ferdian, Jiakun Liu, Pattarakrit Rattanukul, Shahar Maoz, Eran Toch, Debin Gao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android apps typically include many functionalities that not all users require. These result in software bloat that increases possible attack surface and app size. Common functionalities that users may not require are related to permissions that they intend to disallow in the first place. As these permissions are disallowed, their related code would never be executed and therefore can be safely removed. Existing work has proposed a solution to debloat Android apps according to the disallowed permissions. However, for large and complex applications, the debloating process could take hours, typically due the long time that may be needed to construct …

Concretely Mapped Symbolic Memory Locations For Memory Error Detection, Haoxin Tu, Lingxiao Jiang, Jiaqi Hong, Xuhua Ding, He Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Memory allocation is a fundamental operation for managing memory objects in many programming languages. Misusing allocated memory objects (e.g., buffer overflow and use-after-free) can lead to catastrophic consequences. Symbolic execution-based approaches are often used to detect such memory errors, leveraging their capabilities in automatic path exploration and test case generation. However, existing symbolic execution engines face significant limitations in modeling dynamic memory layouts. These engines either represent memory object locations as concrete addresses, limiting analyses to specific address layouts and missing errors that occur at special addresses, or represent locations as simple symbolic variables without sufficient constraints, resulting in memory …

Adaptive Content-Aware Influence Maximization Via Online Learning To Rank, Konstantinos Theocharidis, Panagiotis Karras, Manolis Terrovitis, Spiros Skiadopoulos, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

How can we adapt the composition of a post over a series of rounds to make it more appealing in a social network? Techniques that progressively learn how to make a fixed post more influential over rounds have been studied in the context of the Influence Maximization (IM) problem, which seeks a set of seed users that maximize a post’s influence. However, there is no work on progressively learning how a post’s features affect its influence. In this article, we propose and study the problem of Adaptive Content-Aware Influence Maximization (ACAIM), which calls to find k features to form a …

Filter-Based Stance Network For Rumor Verification, Jun Li, Yi Bin, Yunshan Ma, Yang Yang, Zi Huang, Tat‑Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rumor verification on social media aims to identify the truth value of a rumor, which is important to decreasethe detrimental public effects. A rumor might arouse heated discussions and replies, conveying differentstances of users that could be helpful in identifying the rumor. Thus, several works have been proposedto verify a rumor by modelling its entire stance sequence in the time domain. However, these works ignorethat such a stance sequence could be decomposed into controversies with different intensities, which could beused to cluster the stance sequences with the same consensus. In addition, the existing stance extractors fail toconsider both the impact …

Enhancing Health Analytics: Secure And Private Federated Learning Solutions, Nisha Thorakkattu Madathil

Dissertations

Federated Learning (FL) is a collaborative method allowing individuals to train a model jointly without sharing their local datasets. It utilizes decentralized data sources to protect privacy, making it particularly promising in medical contexts where data confidentiality is paramount. FL facilitates the use of diverse datasets from various healthcare organizations while upholding patient confidentiality. It also plays a crucial role in advancing medical research and healthcare services while adhering to data distribution and compliance requirements. The primary challenges within federated healthcare encompass privacy preservation among sensitive distributed data, ensuring efficient communication, addressing data heterogeneity, and ultimately guaranteeing model accuracy. To …

Graphene 2d Heterostructures For Thz Applications, Omnia Samy Shaaban

Dissertations

THz technology is a promising field that has various applications in communication, medical imaging and diseases’ detection, scanning, and the food industry. Since THz technology is still in its early stages, there is a lot of work to be done to obtain devices that work efficiently in the THz range. One of these devices is THz absorbers that are the basic building blocks for the next generation THz systems whether in communication systems, imaging or shielding. THz absorbers are structures that can absorb electromagnetic waves in the THz range (0.1-10 THz). THz absorbers can be wideband (absorb a wide range …

The Influence Of Texting On Perceived Warmth: The Role Of Punctuation And Emoji, Elizabeth Mathews

Senior Honors Theses

Technology Mediated Communication (TMC) has become an essential part of interpersonal communication. Punctuation and emoji are major vessels of nonverbal communication in texting. The impact of punctuation and emoji use on perceptions of warmth was tested with 291 residential undergraduate students at Liberty University who were at least 18 years old. Through an online questionnaire, participants read a series of text messages with a randomly assigned condition of having either punctuation and emoji, punctuation and no emoji, no punctuation and emoji, or no punctuation and no emoji. Results indicated a significant main effect for the presence of emoji on perceived …

Artificial General Intelligence And The Mind-Body Problem: Exploring The Computability Of Simulated Human Intelligence In Light Of The Immaterial Mind, Caleb Parks

Senior Honors Theses

In this thesis I explore whether achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) through simulating the human brain is theoretically possible. Because of the scientific community’s predominantly physicalist outlook on the mind-body problem, AGI research may be limited by erroneous foundational presuppositions. Arguments from linguistics and mathematics demonstrate that the human intellect is partially immaterial, opening the door for novel analysis of the mind’s simulability. I categorize mind-body problem philosophies in a manner relevant to computer science based upon state transitions, and determine their ramifications on mind-simulation. Finally, I demonstrate how classical architectures cannot resolve so-called Gödel statements, discuss why this inability …

Automated Glacier Classification In High Mountain Asia Using Machine Learning And A Random Forest Classifier, Victoria Elizabeth Halvorson

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

High Mountain Asia (HMA) is home to the largest mass of glaciers and ice outside the north and south polar regions. HMA glaciers are projected to experience accelerated mass loss from higher greenhouse gas emissions through the end of the century. Many studies of glacier mass balance and mass loss in HMA obtain glacier area from the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI). However, the RGI is designed to show glacier area across the world that is accurate to the year 2000 and, as a result, is not an accurate representation of the current state of glacier area in HMA. Additionally, glacier …

Modeling, Characterization, And Machine Learning Algorithm For Rectangular Choke Horn Antennas, Ibrahim N. Alquaydheb, Saleh A. Alfawaz, Amirreza Ghadimi Avval, Sara Ghayouraneh, Samir M. El-Ghazaly

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this work, we present the design and modeling of a new type of choke horn antenna. It incorporates a rectangular waveguide and a rectangular choke acting as a parasitic element. The four-sided geometry of the antenna is applicable to systems that utilize rectangular waveguides. Also, it can overcome the need for rectangular-to-circular transition of transmission line or mode conversion. The main objective of this paper is to develop a model that calculates the far field radiation characteristics of the proposed antenna (analytical part) and to incorporate a finite element method (FEM) solver that adds to the theoretical solution (empirical …

Quantitative Comparison Of Tddft-Calculated High Harmonic Generation Yields In Ringshaped Organic Molecules, Stephanie Armond

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Potential Impact Of Annual Vaccination With Reformulated Covid-19 Vaccines: Lessons From The Us Covid-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, Sung-Mok Jung, Sara L Loo, Emily Howerton, Lucie Contamin, Claire P Smith, Erica C Carcelén, Katie Yan, Samantha J Bents, John Levander, Jessi Espino, Joseph C Lemaitre, Koji Sato, Clifton D Mckee, Alison L Hill, Matteo Chinazzi, Jessica T Davis, Kunpeng Mu, Alessandro Vespignani, Erik T Rosenstrom, Sebastian A Rodriguez-Cartes, Julie S Ivy, Maria E Mayorga, Julie L Swann, Guido España, Sean Cavany, Sean M Moore, T Alex Perkins, Shi Chen, Rajib Paul, Daniel Janies, Jean-Claude Thill, Ajitesh Srivastava, Majd Al Aawar, Kaiming Bi, Shraddha Ramdas Bandekar, Anass Bouchnita, Spencer J Fox, Lauren Ancel Meyers, Przemyslaw Porebski, Srini Venkatramanan, Aniruddha Adiga, Benjamin Hurt, Brian Klahn, Joseph Outten, Jiangzhuo Chen, Henning Mortveit, Amanda Wilson, Stefan Hoops, Parantapa Bhattacharya, Dustin Machi, Anil Vullikanti, Bryan Lewis, Madhav Marathe, Harry Hochheiser, Michael C Runge, Katriona Shea, Shaun Truelove, Cécile Viboud, Justin Lessler

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to cause significant hospitalizations and deaths in the United States. Its continued burden and the impact of annually reformulated vaccines remain unclear. Here, we present projections of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in the United States for the next 2 years under 2 plausible assumptions about immune escape (20% per year and 50% per year) and 3 possible CDC recommendations for the use of annually reformulated vaccines (no recommendation, vaccination for those aged 65 years and over, vaccination for all eligible age groups based on FDA approval).

METHODS AND FINDINGS: The COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub …

The Impact Of Using Embedded Learning Assistants In Mathematics Courses, Lyyne Y. O'Dell

Doctor of Education (Ed.D)

This study’s purpose was to determine whether the use of course-embedded learning assistants compared to sections that did not use course-embedded learning assistants in intermediate algebra courses impacted student performance at a community college. The sample was composed of 5,738 students who were enrolled in an intermediate algebra course between fall 2016 and fall 2019. The study’s research methodology was considered causal-comparative, and a non-probability, convenient, and purposive sampling technique was used for all students using archived pre and post-test scores for all participants, then by student demographics African American and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Statistically significant treatment effects were observed …

Robot Proficiency Self-Assessment Using Assumption-Alignment Tracking, Xuan Cao

Theses and Dissertations

A robot is proficient if its performance for its task(s) satisfies a specific standard. While the design of autonomous robots often emphasizes such proficiency, another important attribute of autonomous robot systems is their ability to evaluate their own proficiency. A robot should be able to conduct proficiency self-assessment (PSA), i.e. assess how well it can perform a task before, during, and after it has attempted the task. We propose the assumption-alignment tracking (AAT) method, which provides time-indexed assessments of the veracity of robot generators' assumptions, for designing autonomous robots that can effectively evaluate their own performance. AAT can be considered …