Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Data: The Good, The Bad And The Ethical, John D. Kelleher, Filipe Cabral Pinto, Luis M. Cortesao

Articles

It is often the case with new technologies that it is very hard to predict their long-term impacts and as a result, although new technology may be beneficial in the short term, it can still cause problems in the longer term. This is what happened with oil by-products in different areas: the use of plastic as a disposable material did not take into account the hundreds of years necessary for its decomposition and its related long-term environmental damage. Data is said to be the new oil. The message to be conveyed is associated with its intrinsic value. But as in …

On The Generation, Structure, And Semantics Of Grammar Patterns In Source Code Identifiers, Christian D. Newman,, Reem S. Alsuhaibani, Michael J. Decker, Anthony Peruma, Dishant Kaushik, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Emily Hill

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Identifier names are the atoms of program comprehension. Weak identifier names decrease developer productivity and degrade the performance of automated approaches that leverage identifier names in source code analysis; threatening many of the advantages which stand to be gained from advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Therefore, it is vital to support developers in naming and renaming identifiers. In this paper, we extend our prior work, which studies the primary method through which names evolve: rename refactorings. In our prior work, we contextualize rename changes by examining commit messages and other refactorings. In this extension, we further consider data …

Exploring The Potential Of Defeasible Argumentation For Quantitative Inferences In Real-World Contexts: An Assessment Of Computational Trust, Lucas Rizzo, Pierpaolo Dondio, Luca Longo

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Argumentation has recently shown appealing properties for inference under uncertainty and conflicting knowledge. However, there is a lack of studies focused on the examination of its capacity of exploiting real-world knowledge bases for performing quantitative, case-by-case inferences. This study performs an analysis of the inferential capacity of a set of argument-based models, designed by a human reasoner, for the problem of trust assessment. Precisely, these models are exploited using data from Wikipedia, and are aimed at inferring the trustworthiness of its editors. A comparison against non-deductive approaches revealed that these models were superior according to values inferred to recognised trustworthy …

Lightgwas: A Novel Machine Learning Procedure For Genome-Wide Association Study, Ambrozio Bruno, Luca Longo, Lucas Rizzo

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This paper proposes a novel machine learning procedure for genome-wide association study (GWAS), named LightGWAS. It is based on the LightGBM framework, in addition to being a single, resilient, autonomous and scalable solution to address common limitations of GWAS implementations found in the literature. These include reliance on massive manual quality control steps and specific GWAS methods for each type of dataset morphology and size. Through this research, LightGWAS has been contrasted against PLINK2, one of the current state-of-the-art for GWAS implementations based on general linear model with support to firth regularisation. The mean differences measured upon standard classification metrics, …

A Comparative Analysis Of Rule-Based, Model-Agnostic Methods For Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Giulia Vilone, Lucas Rizzo, Luca Longo

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The ultimate goal of Explainable Artificial Intelligence is to build models that possess both high accuracy and degree of explainability. Understanding the inferences of such models can be seen as a process that discloses the relationships between their input and output. These relationships can be represented as a set of inference rules which are usually not explicit within a model. Scholars have proposed several methods for extracting rules from data-driven machine-learned models. However, limited work exists on their comparison. This study proposes a novel comparative approach to evaluate and compare the rulesets produced by four post-hoc rule extractors by employing …

A Hybrid Agent-Based And Equation Based Model For The Spread Of Infectious Diseases, Elizabeth Hunter, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Articles

Both agent-based models and equation-based models can be used to model the spread of an infectious disease. Equation-based models have been shown to capture the overall dynamics of a disease outbreak while agent-based models are able to capture heterogeneous characteristics of agents that drive the spread of an outbreak. However, agent-based models are computationally intensive. To capture the advantages of both the equation-based and agent-based models, we create a hybrid model where the disease component of the hybrid model switches between agent-based and equation-based. The switch is determined using the number of agents infected. We first test the model at …

Comparing Variable Importance In Prediction Of Silence Behaviours Between Random Forest And Conditional Inference Forest Models., Stephen Barrett Dr, Geraldine Gray Dr, Colm Mcguinness Dr, Michael Knoll Dr.

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This paper explores variable importance metrics of Conditional Inference Trees (CIT) and classical Classification And Regression Trees (CART) based Random Forests. The paper compares both algorithms variable importance rankings and highlights why CIT should be used when dealing with data with different levels of aggregation. The models analysed explored the role of cultural factors at individual and societal level when predicting Organisational Silence behaviours.

Cleanpage: Fast And Clean Document And Whiteboard Capture, Jane Courtney

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The move from paper to online is not only necessary for remote working, it is also significantly more sustainable. This trend has seen a rising need for the high-quality digitization of content from pages and whiteboards to sharable online material. However, capturing this information is not always easy nor are the results always satisfactory. Available scanning apps vary in their usability and do not always produce clean results, retaining surface imperfections from the page or whiteboard in their output images. CleanPage, a novel smartphone-based document and whiteboard scanning system, is presented. CleanPage requires one button-tap to capture, identify, crop, and …

Increasing The Trust In Refactoring Through Visualization, Alex Bogart, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Ali Ouni

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In software development, maintaining good design is essential. The process of refactoring enables developers to improve this design during development without altering the program’s existing behavior. However, this process can be time-consuming, introduce semantic errors, and be difficult for developers inexperienced with refactoring or unfamiliar with a given code base. Automated refactoring tools can help not only by applying these changes, but by identifying opportunities for refactoring. Yet, developers have not been quick to adopt these tools due to a lack of trust between the developer and the tool. We propose an approach in the form of a visualization to …

On The Relationship Between Developer Experience And Refactoring: An Exploratory Study And Preliminary Results, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Anthony Peruma, Christian D. Newman, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Ali Ouni

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Refactoring is one of the means of managing technical debt and maintaining a healthy software structure through enforcing best design practices, or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that these code restructurings are mainly executed by developers who have sufficient knowledge of the system’s design, and disposing of leadership roles in their development teams. However, these surveys were mainly limited to specific projects and companies. In this paper, we explore the generalizability of the previous results though analyzing 800 open-source projects. We mine their refactoring activities, and we identify their corresponding contributors. Then, we associate an expertise …

Modulation Of Medical Condition Likelihood By Patient History Similarity, Jonathan Turner, Dympna O'Sullivan, Jon Bird

Articles

Introduction: We describe an analysis that modulates the simple population prevalence derived likelihood of a particular condition occurring in an individual by matching the individual with other individuals with similar clinical histories and determining the prevalence of the condition within the matched group.

Methods: We have taken clinical event codes and dates from anonymised longitudinal primary care records for 25,979 patients with 749,053 recorded clinical events. Using a nearest neighbour approach, for each patient, the likelihood of a condition occurring was adjusted from the population prevalence to the prevalence of the condition within those patients with the closest matching clinical …

An Application Of Machine Learning To Explore Relationships Between Factors Of Organisational Silence And Culture, With Specific Focus On Predicting Silence Behaviours, Stephen Barrett Dr

Articles

Research indicates that there are many individual reasons why people do not speak up when confronted with situations that may concern them within their working environment. One of the areas that requires more focused research is the role culture plays in why a person may remain silent when such situations arise. The purpose of this study is to use data science techniques to explore the patterns in a data set that would lead a person to engage in organisational silence. The main research question the thesis asks is: Is Machine Learning a tool that Social Scientists can use with respect …

An Exploratory Study On How Software Reuse Is Discussed In Stack Overflow, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Jiaqian Liu, Ali Ouni, Christian D. Newman, Diego Barinas

Articles

Software reuse is an important and crucial quality attribute in modern software engineering, where almost all software projects, open source or commercial, no matter small or ultra-large, source code reuse in one way or another. Although software reuse has experienced an increased adoption throughout the years with the exponentially growing number of available third-party libraries, frameworks and APIs, little knowledge exists to investigate what aspects of code reuse developers discuss. In this study, we look into bridging this gap by examining Stack Overflow to understand the challenges developers encounter when trying to reuse code. Using the Stack Overflow tags “code-reuse” …

How We Refactor And How We Document It? On The Use Of Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms To Classify Refactoring Documentation, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Anthony Peruma, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Christian D. Newman, Marouane Kessentini, Ali Ouni

Articles

Refactoring is the art of improving the structural design of a software system without altering its external behavior. Today, refactoring has become a well-established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research presuming that refactoring is primarily motivated by the need to improve system structures. However, recent studies have shown that developers may incorporate refactoring strategies in other development-related activities that go beyond improving the design especially with the emerging challenges in contemporary software engineering. Unfortunately, these studies are limited to developer interviews and a reduced set of projects. To cope with the above-mentioned limitations, …

Toward The Automatic Classification Of Self-Affirmed Refactoring, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Ali Ouni

Articles

The concept of Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR) was introduced to explore how developers document their refactoring activities in commit messages, i.e., developers explicit documentation of refactoring operations intentionally introduced during a code change. In our previous study, we have manually identified refactoring patterns and defined three main common quality improvement categories including internal quality attributes, external quality attributes, and code smells, by only considering refactoring-related commits. However, this approach heavily depends on the manual inspection of commit messages. In this paper, we propose a two-step approach to first identify whether a commit describes developer-related refactoring events, then to classify it according …

How Do Developers Refactor Code To Improve Code Reusability?, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Philip T. Rodriguez, Jordan Bowman, Tianjia Wang, Benjamin Adepoju, Kevin Lopez, Christian D. Newman, Ali Ouni, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

Articles

. Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While there has been several studies proposing refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns and removing design defects, little is known about how developers actually refactor their code to improve its reuse. Therefore, we extract, from 1,828 open source projects, a set of refactorings which were intended to improve the software reusability. We analyze the impact of reusability refactorings on state-of-the-art reusability metrics, and we compare the distribution of reusability refactoring types, with the distribution of the remaining mainstream refactorings. Overall, we found that the distribution of …

A Model For The Spread Of Infectious Diseases In A Region, Elizabeth Hunter, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Articles

In understanding the dynamics of the spread of an infectious disease, it is important to understand how a town’s place in a network of towns within a region will impact how the disease spreads to that town and from that town. In this article, we take a model for the spread of an infectious disease in a single town and scale it up to simulate a region containing multiple towns. The model is validated by looking at how adding additional towns and commuters influences the outbreak in a single town. We then look at how the centrality of a town …

Smart Cities At Play: Technology And Emerging Forms Of Playfulness, Konstantinos Papangelis, Michael Saker, Catherine Jones

Articles

Editorial. No abstract is available.

Capturing The City’S Heritage On-The-Go: Design Requirements For Mobile Crowdsourced Cultural Heritage, Bas Hannewijk, Federica Lucia Vinella, Vassilis-Javed Khan, Ioanna Lykourentzou, Konstantinos Papangelis, Judith Masthoff

Articles

Intangible Cultural Heritage is at a continuous risk of extinction. Where historical artefacts engine the machinery of intercontinental mass-tourism, socio-technical changes are reshaping the anthropomorphic landscapes everywhere on the globe, at an unprecedented rate. There is an increasing urge to tap into the hidden semantics and the anecdotes surrounding people, memories and places. The vast cultural knowledge made of testimony, oral history and traditions constitutes a rich cultural ontology tying together human beings, times, and situations. Altogether, these complex, multidimensional features make the task of data-mapping of intangible cultural heritage a problem of sustainability and preservation. This paper addresses a …

Beyond Reasonable Doubt: A Proposal For Undecidedness Blocking In Abstract Argumentation, Pierpaolo Dondio, Luca Longo

Articles

In Dung’s abstract semantics, the label undecided is always propagated from the attacker to the attacked argument, unless the latter is also attacked by an accepted argument. In this work we propose undecidedness blocking abstract argumentation semantics where the undecided label is confined to the strong connected component where it was generated and it is not propagated to the other parts of the argumentation graph. We show how undecidedness blocking is a fundamental reasoning pattern absent in abstract argumentation but present in similar fashion in the ambiguity blocking semantics of Defeasible logic, in the beyond reasonable doubt legal principle or …

Preface To The Special Issue On Advances In Argumentation In Artificial Intelligence, Pierpaolo Dondio, Luca Longo, Stefano Bistarelli

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Now at the forefront of automated reasoning, argumentation has become a key research topic within Artificial Intelligence. It involves the investigation of those activities for the production and exchange of arguments, where arguments are attempts to persuade someone of something by giving reasons for accepting a particular conclusion or claim as evident. The study of argumentation has been the focus of attention of philosophers and scholars, from Aristotle and classical rhetoric to the present day. The computational study of arguments has emerged as a field of research in AI in the last two decades, mainly fuelled by the interest from …

In Their Shoes: A Structured Analysis Of Job Demands, Resources, Work Experiences, And Platform Commitment Of Crowdworkers In China, Yihong Wang, Konstantinos Papangelis, Ioanna Lykourentzou, Hai-Ning Liang, Irwyn Sadien, Evangelia Demerouti, Vassilis-Javed Khan

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Despite the growing interest in crowdsourcing, this new labor model has recently received severe criticism. The most important point of this criticism is that crowdworkers are often underpaid and overworked. This severely affects job satisfaction and productivity. Although there is a growing body of evidence exploring the work experiences of crowdworkers in various countries, there have been a very limited number of studies to the best of our knowledge exploring the work experiences of Chinese crowdworkers. In this paper we aim to address this gap. Based on a framework of well-established approaches, namely the Job Demands-Resources model, the Work Design …

Nis2 As A Broadband Saturable Absorber For Ultrafast Pulse Lasers, Pengfei Wang, Han Zhang, Yu Yin, Qiuyun Ouyang, Yujin Chen, Elfed Lewis, Gerald Farrell, Masaki Tokurakawa, Sulaiman Wadi Harun, Cong Wang, Shi Li

Articles

Nickel disulfide (NiS2) has recently been found to possess strong nonlinear saturable absorption properties. This feature is highly attractive for nonlinear photonics applications. Ultrafast pulse generation is successfully demonstrated in this article for both Ytterbium- and Erbium-doped fibre lasers using micro-fibre deposited nickel disulfide (NiS2) as a saturable absorber (SA). The fabricated SA device has a modulation depth of 23% at 1.06 μm and 30.8% at 1.55 μm. Stable dissipative soliton operation was achieved at 1064.5 nm with a pulse duration of 11.7 ps and another stable conventional soliton pulse train was also obtained at 1560.2 nm with a pulse …

Advancement Of Predictive Modeling Of Zeta Potentials (Ζ) In Metal Oxide Nanoparticles With Correlation Intensity Index (Cii), Andrey A. Toropov, Natalia Sizochenko, Alla P. Toropova, Danuta Leszczynska, Jerzy Leszczynski

Articles

It was expected that index of the ideality of correlation (IIC) and correlation intensity index (CII) could be used as possible tools to improve the predictive power of the quantitative model for zeta potential of nanoparticles. In this paper, we test how the statistical quality of quantitative structure-activity models for zeta potentials (ζ, a common measurement that reflects surface charge and stability of nanomaterial) could be improved with the use of these two indexes. Our hypothesis was tested using the benchmark data set that consists of 87 measurements of zeta potentials in water. We used quasi-SMILES molecular representation to take …

Digital Age Of Consent And Age Verification: Can They Protect Children?, Liliana Pasquale, Paola Zippo, Cliona Curley, Brian O'Neill, Marina Mongiello

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Children are increasingly accessing social media content through mobile devices. Existing data protection regulations have focused on defining the digital age of consent, in order to limit collection of children’s personal data by organizations. However, children can easily bypass the mechanisms adopted by apps to verify their age, and thereby be exposed to privacy and safety threats. We conducted a study to identify how the top 10 social and communication apps among underage users apply age limits in their Terms of Use. We also assess the robustness of the mechanisms these apps put in place to verify the age of …

Expectations Of Artificial Intelligence And The Performativity Of Ethics: Implications For Communication Governance, Aphra Kerr, Marguerite Barry, John D. Kelleher

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This article draws on the sociology of expectations to examine the construction of expectations of ‘ethical AI’ and considers the implications of these expectations for communication governance. We first analyse a range of public documents to identify the key actors, mechanisms and issues which structure societal expectations around artificial intelligence (AI) and an emerging discourse on ethics. We then explore expectations of AI and ethics through a survey of members of the public. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the role of AI in communication gover- nance. We find that, despite societal expectations that we can design …

Finding Common Ground For Citizen Empowerment In The Smart City, John D. Kelleher, Aphra Kerr

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Corporate smart city initiatives are just one example of the contemporary culture of surveillance. They rely on extensive information gathering systems and Big Data analysis to predict citizen behaviour and optimise city services. In this paper we argue that many smart city and social media technologies result in a paradox whereby digital inclusion for the purposes of service provision also results in marginalisation and disempowerment of citizens. Drawing upon insights garnered from a digital inclusion workshop conducted in the Galapagos islands, we propose that critically and creatively unpacking the computational techniques embedded in data services is needed as a first …

Importance Of Data Distribution On Hive-Based Systems For Query Performance: An Experimental Study, Hilmi Egemen Ciritoglu, John Murphy, Christina Thorpe

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SQL-on-Hadoop systems have been gaining popularity in recent years. One popular example of SQL-on-Hadoop systems is Apache Hive; the pioneer of SQL-on-Hadoop systems. Hive is located on the top of big data stack as an application layer. Besides the application layer, the Hadoop Ecosystem is composed of 3 different main layers: storage, the resource manager and processing engine. The demand from industry has led to the development of new efficient components for each layer. As the ecosystem evolves over time, Hive employed different execution engines too. Understanding the strengths of components is very important in order to exploit the full …

An Univariable Approach For Forecasting Workload In The Maintenance Industry, Paulo Silva, Fernando Pérez Téllez, John Cardiff

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The forecasting of the workload in the maintenance industry is of great value to improve human resources allocation and reduce overwork. In this paper, we discuss the problem and the challenges it pertains. We analyze data from a company operating in the industry and present the results of several forecasting models.

Smart Green Communication Protocols Based On Several-Fold Messages Extracted From Common Sequential Patterns In Uavs, Iván García-Magariño, Geraldine Gray, Raquel Lacuesta, Jaime Lloret

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Green communications can be crucial for saving energy in UAVs and enhancing their autonomy. The current work proposes to extract common sequential patterns of communications to gather each common pattern into a single several- fold message with a high-level compression. Since the messages of a pattern are elapsed from each other in time, the current approach performs a machine learning approach for estimating the elapsed times using off-line training. The learned predictive model is applied by each UAV during flight when receiving a several-fold compressed message. We have explored neural networks, linear regression and correlation analyses among others. The current …