Computer Sciences Commons^™

A Tool For Rejuvenating Feature Logging Levels Via Git Histories And Degree Of Interest, Yiming Tang, Allan Spektor, Raffi Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh

Publications and Research

Logging is a significant programming practice. Due to the highly transactional nature of modern software applications, a massive amount of logs are generated every day, which may overwhelm developers. Logging information overload can be dangerous to software applications. Using log levels, developers can print the useful information while hiding the verbose logs during software runtime. As software evolves, the log levels of logging statements associated with the surrounding software feature implementation may also need to be altered. Maintaining log levels necessitates a significant amount of manual effort. In this paper, we demonstrate an automated approach that can rejuvenate feature log …

Gauging The State-Of-The-Art For Foresight Weight Pruning On Neural Networks, Noah James

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The state-of-the-art for pruning neural networks is ambiguous due to poor experimental practices in the field. Newly developed approaches rarely compare to each other, and when they do, their comparisons are lackluster or contain errors. In the interest of stabilizing the field of pruning, this paper initiates a dive into reproducing prominent pruning algorithms across several architectures and datasets. As a first step towards this goal, this paper shows results for foresight weight pruning across 6 baseline pruning strategies, 5 modern pruning strategies, random pruning, and one legacy method (Optimal Brain Damage). All strategies are evaluated on 3 different architectures …

Demonstration Of Cyberattacks And Mitigation Of Vulnerabilities In A Webserver Interface For A Cybersecure Power Router, Benjamin Allen

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cyberattacks are a threat to critical infrastructure, which must be secured against them to ensure continued operation. A defense-in-depth approach is necessary to secure all layers of a smart-grid system and contain the impact of any exploited vulnerabilities. In this undergraduate thesis a webserver interface for smart-grid devices communicating over Modbus TCP was developed and exposed to SQL Injection attacks and Cross-Site Scripting attacks. Analysis was performed on Supply-Chain attacks and a mitigation developed for attacks stemming from compromised Content Delivery Networks. All attempted attacks were unable to exploit vulnerabilities in the webserver due to its use of input sanitization …

Using A Bert-Based Ensemble Network For Abusive Language Detection, Noah Ballinger

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the past two decades, online discussion has skyrocketed in scope and scale. However, so has the amount of toxicity and offensive posts on social media and other discussion sites. Despite this rise in prevalence, the ability to automatically moderate online discussion platforms has seen minimal development. Recently, though, as the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) continue to improve, the potential of AI-based detection of harmful internet content has become a real possibility. In the past couple years, there has been a surge in performance on tasks in the field of natural language processing, mainly due to the development of …

Side-Channel Analysis On Post-Quantum Cryptography Algorithms, Tristen Teague

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The advancements of quantum computers brings us closer to the threat of our current asymmetric cryptography algorithms being broken by Shor's Algorithm. NIST proposed a standardization effort in creating a new class of asymmetric cryptography named Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). These new algorithms will be resistant against both classical computers and sufficiently powerful quantum computers. Although the new algorithms seem mathematically secure, they can possibly be broken by a class of attacks known as side-channels attacks (SCA). Side-channel attacks involve exploiting the hardware that the algorithm runs on to figure out secret values that could break the security of the system. …

A Study Of Software Development Methodologies, Kendra Risener

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Software development methodologies are often overlooked by software engineers as aspects of development that are handled by project managers alone. However, if every member of the team better understood the development methodology being used, it increases the likelihood that the method is properly implemented and ultimately used to complete the project more efficiently. Thus, this paper seeks to explore six common methodologies: the Waterfall Model, the Spiral Model, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming. These are discussed in two main sections in the paper. In the first section, the frameworks are isolated and viewed by themselves. The histories, unique features, …

Data And Algorithmic Modeling Approaches To Count Data, Andraya Hack

Honors College Theses

Various techniques are used to create predictions based on count data. This type of data takes the form of a non-negative integers such as the number of claims an insurance policy holder may make. These predictions can allow people to prepare for likely outcomes. Thus, it is important to know how accurate the predictions are. Traditional statistical approaches for predicting count data include Poisson regression as well as negative binomial regression. Both methods also have a zero-inflated version that can be used when the data has an overabundance of zeros. Another procedure is to use computer algorithms, also known as …

Itss: Interactive Web-Based Authoring And Playback Integrated Environment For Programming Tutorials, Eng Lieh Ouh, Benjamin Gan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video-based programming tutorials are a popular form of tutorial used by authors to guide learners to code. Still, the interactivity of these videos is limited primarily to control video flow. There are existing works with increased interactivity that are shown to improve the learning experience. Still, these solutions require setting up a custom recording environment and are not well-integrated with the playback environment. This paper describes our integrated ITSS environment and evaluates the ease of authoring and playback of our interactive programming tutorials. Our environment is designed to run within the browser sandbox and is less intrusive to record interactivity …

Translate-Train Embracing Translationese Artifacts, Sicheng Yu, Qianru Sun, Hao Zhang, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Translate-train is a general training approach to multilingual tasks. The key idea is to use the translator of the target language to generate training data to mitigate the gap between the source and target languages. However, its performance is often hampered by the artifacts in the translated texts (translationese). We discover that such artifacts have common patterns in different languages and can be modeled by deep learning, and subsequently propose an approach to conduct translate-train using Translationese Embracing the effect of Artifacts (TEA). TEA learns to mitigate such effect on the training data of a source language (whose original and …

Graphcode2vec: Generic Code Embedding Via Lexical And Program Dependence Analyses, Wei Ma, Mengjie Zhao, Ezekiel Soremekun, Qiang Hu, Jie M. Zhang, Mike Papadakis, Maxime Cordy, Xiaofei Xie, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code embedding is a keystone in the application of machine learning on several Software Engineering (SE) tasks. To effectively support a plethora of SE tasks, the embedding needs to capture program syntax and semantics in a way that is generic. To this end, we propose the first self-supervised pre-training approach (called Graphcode2vec) which produces task-agnostic embedding of lexical and program dependence features. Graphcode2vec achieves this via a synergistic combination of code analysis and Graph Neural Networks. Graphcode2vec is generic, it allows pre-training, and it is applicable to several SE downstream tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of Graphcode2vec on four (4) …

Exploring And Adapting Chinese Gpt To Pinyin Input Method, Minghuan Tan, Yong Dai, Duyu Tang, Zhangyin Feng, Guoping Huang, Jing Jiang, Jiwei Li, Shuming Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While GPT has become the de-facto method for text generation tasks, its application to pinyin input method remains unexplored. In this work, we make the first exploration to leverage Chinese GPT for pinyin input method. We find that a frozen GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on perfect pinyin. However, the performance drops dramatically when the input includes abbreviated pinyin. A reason is that an abbreviated pinyin can be mapped to many perfect pinyin, which links to even larger number of Chinese characters. We mitigate this issue with two strategies, including enriching the context with pinyin and optimizing the training process to …

On The Influence Of Biases In Bug Localization: Evaluation And Benchmark, Ratnadira Widyasari, Stefanus Agus Haryono, Ferdian Thung, Jieke Shi, Constance Tan, Fiona Wee, Jack Phan, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug localization is the task of identifying parts of thesource code that needs to be changed to resolve a bug report.As this task is difficult, automatic bug localization tools havebeen proposed. The development and evaluation of these toolsrely on the availability of high-quality bug report datasets. In2014, Kochhar et al. identified three biases in datasets used toevaluate bug localization techniques: (1) misclassified bug report,(2) already localized bug report, and (3) incorrect ground truthfile in a bug report. They reported that already localized bugreports statistically significantly and substantially impact buglocalization results, and thus should be removed. However, theirevaluation is still limited, …

Learning Program Semantics With Code Representations: An Empirical Study, Jing Kai Siow, Shangqing Liu, Xiaofei Xie, Guozhu Meng, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Program semantics learning is the core and fundamental for various code intelligent tasks e.g., vulnerability detection, clone detection. A considerable amount of existing works propose diverse approaches to learn the program semantics for different tasks and these works have achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, currently, a comprehensive and systematic study on evaluating different program representation techniques across diverse tasks is still missed. From this starting point, in this paper, we conduct an empirical study to evaluate different program representation techniques. Specifically, we categorize current mainstream code representation techniques into four categories i.e., Feature-based, Sequence-based, Tree-based, and Graph-based program representation technique and …

Jscsp: A Novel Policy-Based Xss Defense Mechanism For Browsers, Guangquan Xu, Xiaofei Xie, Shuhan Huang, Jun Zhang, Lei Pan, Wei Lou, Kaitai Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To mitigate cross-site scripting attacks (XSS), the W3C group recommends web service providers to employ a computer security standard called Content Security Policy (CSP). However, less than 3.7 percent of real-world websites are equipped with CSP according to Google’s survey. The low scalability of CSP is incurred by the difficulty of deployment and non-compatibility for state-of-art browsers. To explore the scalability of CSP, in this article, we propose JavaScript based CSP (JSCSP), which is able to support most of real-world browsers but also to generate security policies automatically. Specifically, JSCSP offers a novel self-defined security policy which enforces essential confinements …

Integrating Web Applications Into Popular Survey Platforms For Online Experiments, Benjamin Carter, Alessandro Del Ponte

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

Research using custom-made web applications is burgeoning as scholars increasingly conduct their experiments online. We show how researchers can integrate their web applications into popular survey software such as Qualtrics in five simple steps and provide the full JavaScript code and screenshots. This procedure allows participants to seamlessly switch from Qualtrics to their web applications without leaving the survey platform. This integration has two benefits: (1) it eliminates the risk that participants inadvertently drop out of the survey while switching from the survey software to the web application and vice versa; and (2) it saves researchers the fees charged by …

The Effect Of Using The Gamification Strategy On Academic Achievement And Motivation Towards Learning Problem-Solving Skills In Computer And Information Technology Course Among Tenth Grade Female Students, Mazyunah Almutairi, Prof. Ahmad Almassaad

International Journal for Research in Education

Abstract

This study aimed to identify the effect of using the gamification strategy on academic achievement and motivation towards learning problem-solving skills in computer and information technology course. A quasi-experimental method was adopted. The study population included tenth-grade female students in Al-Badi’ah schools in Riyadh. The sample consisted of 54 students divided into two equal groups: control group and experimental group. The study tools comprised an achievement test and the motivation scale. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences between the two groups in the academic achievement test in favor of the experimental group, with a large effect …

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 …

Eclipse, Osgi, And The Java Model, Raffi Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Abstract Syntax Trees (Asts) And The Visitor Pattern, Raffi Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Evaluating A Peer Assisted Learning Programme For Mature Access Foundation Students Undertaking Computer Programming At An Irish University, Nevan Bermingham, Frances Boylan, Barry J. Ryan

Articles

Access Foundation Programmes are a widening-participation initiative designed to encourage engagement in higher education among under-represented groups. This includes socioeconomic and educational disadvantage. Mature students in particular enrolled on these programmes experience greater difficulties making the transition to tertiary education, especially when they opt to study disciplines traditionally considered difficult. Computer programming is perceived as a traditionally difficult subject with lower pass rates and progression rates typically than other subjects.

This paper describes the first of a three-cycle action research study examining the perceived effects of a structured Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) Programme for mature students enrolled on a computer …

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 …

Exploiting Input Sanitization For Regex Denial Of Service, Efe Barlas, Xin Du, James C. Davis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Web services use server-side input sanitization to guard against harmful input. Some web services publish their sanitization logic to make their client interface more usable, e.g., allowing clients to debug invalid requests locally. However, this usability practice poses a security risk. Specifically, services may share the regexes they use to sanitize input strings — and regex-based denial of service (ReDoS) is an emerging threat. Although prominent service outages caused by ReDoS have spurred interest in this topic, we know little about the degree to which live web services are vulnerable to ReDoS.

In this paper, we conduct the first black-box …

The 4c’S Of Pal – An Evidence-Based Model For Implementing Peer Assisted Learning For Mature Students, Nevan Bermingham, Frances Boylan, Barry J. Ryan

Articles

Peer Assisted Leaning (PAL) programmes have been shown to enhance learner confidence and have an overall positive effect on learner comprehension, particularly in subjects traditionally perceived as difficult. This research describes the findings of a three-cycle Action Research study into the perceived benefits of implementing such a programme for mature students enrolled on a computer science programming module on an Access Foundation Programme in an Irish University. The findings from this study suggest that peer learning programmes offer students a valued support structure that aids transition and acculturation into tertiary education whilst simultaneously improving their subject-matter comprehension and confidence. An …

Poor Man’S Trace Cache: A Variable Delay Slot Architecture, Tino C. Moore

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

We introduce a novel fetch architecture called Poor Man’s Trace Cache (PMTC). PMTC constructs taken-path instruction traces via instruction replication in static code and inserts them after unconditional direct and select conditional direct control transfer instructions. These traces extend to the end of the cache line. Since available space for trace insertion may vary by the position of the control transfer instruction within the line, we refer to these fetch slots as variable delay slots. This approach ensures traces are fetched along with the control transfer instruction that initiated the trace. Branch, jump and return instruction semantics as well 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 …

Jparsec - A Parser Combinator For Javascript, Sida Zhong

Master's Projects

Parser combinators have been a popular parsing approach in recent years. Compared with traditional parsers, a parser combinator has both readability and maintenance advantages.

This project aims to construct a lightweight parser construct library for Javascript called Jparsec. Based on the modular nature of a parser combinator, the implementation uses higher-order functions. JavaScript provides a friendly and simple way to use higher-order functions, so the main construction method of this project will use JavaScript's lambda functions. In practical applications, a parser combinator is mainly used as a tool, such as parsing JSON files.

In order to verify the utility of …

Steps Before Syntax: Helping Novice Programmers Solve Problems Using The Pcdit Framework, Oka Kurniawan, Cyrille Jegourel, Norman Tiong Seng Lee, Matthieu De Mari, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Novice programmers often struggle with problem solving due to the high cognitive loads they face. Furthermore, many introductory programming courses do not explicitly teach it, assuming that problem solving skills are acquired along the way. In this paper, we present 'PCDIT', a non-linear problem solving framework that provides scaffolding to guide novice programmers through the process of transforming a problem specification into an implemented and tested solution for an imperative programming language. A key distinction of PCDIT is its focus on developing concrete cases for the problem early without actually writing test code: students are instead encouraged to think about …

Taming The Data In The Internet Of Vehicles, Shahab Tayeb

Mineta Transportation Institute

As an emerging field, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has a myriad of security vulnerabilities that must be addressed to protect system integrity. To stay ahead of novel attacks, cybersecurity professionals are developing new software and systems using machine learning techniques. Neural network architectures improve such systems, including Intrusion Detection System (IDSs), by implementing anomaly detection, which differentiates benign data packets from malicious ones. For an IDS to best predict anomalies, the model is trained on data that is typically pre-processed through normalization and feature selection/reduction. These pre-processing techniques play an important role in training a neural network to optimize …

The Impact Of Programming Language’S Type On Probabilistic Machine Learning Models, Sherif Elsaid

Master's Projects

Software development is an expensive and difficult process. Mistakes can be easily made, and without extensive review process, those mistakes can make it to the production code and may have unintended disastrous consequences.

This is why various automated code review services have arisen in the recent years. From AWS’s CodeGuro and Microsoft’s Code Analysis to more integrated code assistants, like IntelliCode and auto completion tools. All of which are designed to help and assist the developers with their work and help catch overlooked bugs.

Thanks to recent advances in machine learning, these services have grown tremen- dously in sophistication to …

Markdown To Question & Test Interoperability, Su Kim

Master's Projects

As the classroom setting shifted to a virtual one as a result of Covid-19, numerous software are readily available to accommodate for the change, including Canvas, the online course management system. Canvas has a core feature that allows teachers to generate and administer quizzes for students through their interface, but it does not fully utilize the potential with online exams. The first step to exploring this potential is this project, known as Markdown to Question & Test Interoperability (M2QTI). Based on the QTI specifications, this tool lets users to plan and write quizzes in Markdown format. Combined with Canvas’s ability …