Computer Sciences Commons^™

Graph Learning Assisted Multi-Objective Integer Programming, Yaoxin Wu, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang, Abhishek Gupta, Mingyan Simon Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Objective-space decomposition algorithms (ODAs) are widely studied for solvingmulti-objective integer programs. However, they often encounter difficulties inhandling scalarized problems, which could cause infeasibility or repetitive nondominatedpoints and thus induce redundant runtime. To mitigate the issue, we presenta graph neural network (GNN) based method to learn the reduction rule in the ODA.We formulate the algorithmic procedure of generic ODAs as a Markov decisionprocess, and parameterize the policy (reduction rule) with a novel two-stage GNNto fuse information from variables, constraints and especially objectives for betterstate representation. We train our model with imitation learning and deploy it ona state-of-the-art ODA. Results show that …

Degree Doesn't Matter: Identifying The Drivers Of Interaction In Software Development Ecosystem, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Subhajit Datta, Subhashis Majumder

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large scale software development ecosystems represent one of the most complex human enterprises. In such settings, developers are embedded in a web of shared concerns, responsibilities, and objectives at individual and collective levels. A deep understanding of the factors that influence developers to connect with one another is crucial in appreciating the challenges of such ecosystems as well as formulating strategies to overcome those challenges. We use real world data from multiple software development ecosystems to construct developer interaction networks and examine the mechanisms of such network formation using statistical models to identify developer attributes that have maximal influence on …

Adadeep: A Usage-Driven, Automated Deep Model Compression Framework For Enabling Ubiquitous Intelligent Mobiles, Sicong Liu, Junzhao Du, Kaiming Nan, Zimu Zhou, Hui Liu, Zhangyang Wang, Yingyan Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent breakthroughs in deep neural networks (DNNs) have fueled a tremendously growing demand for bringing DNN-powered intelligence into mobile platforms. While the potential of deploying DNNs on resource-constrained platforms has been demonstrated by DNN compression techniques, the current practice suffers from two limitations: 1) merely stand-alone compression schemes are investigated even though each compression technique only suit for certain types of DNN layers; and 2) mostly compression techniques are optimized for DNNs’ inference accuracy, without explicitly considering other application-driven system performance (e.g., latency and energy cost) and the varying resource availability across platforms (e.g., storage and processing capability). To this …

Imon: Appearance-Based Gaze Tracking System On Mobile Devices, Sinh Huynh, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Jeonggil Ko

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gaze tracking is a key building block used in many mobile applications including entertainment, personal productivity, accessibility, medical diagnosis, and visual attention monitoring. In this paper, we present iMon, an appearance-based gaze tracking system that is both designed for use on mobile phones and has significantly greater accuracy compared to prior state-of-the-art solutions. iMon achieves this by comprehensively considering the gaze estimation pipeline and then overcoming three different sources of errors. First, instead of assuming that the user's gaze is fixed to a single 2D coordinate, we construct each gaze label using a probabilistic 2D heatmap gaze representation input to …

Building Action Sets In A Deep Reinforcement Learner, Yongzhao Wang, Arunesh Sinha, Sky C.H. Wang, Michael P. Wellman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many policy-learning applications, the agent may execute a set of actions at each decision stage. Choosing among an exponential number of alternatives poses a computational challenge, and even representing actions naturally expressed as sets can be a tricky design problem. Building upon prior approaches that employ deep neural networks and iterative construction of action sets, we introduce a reward-shaping approach to apportion reward to each atomic action based on its marginal contribution within an action set, thereby providing useful feedback for learning to build these sets. We demonstrate our method in two environments where action spaces are combinatorial. Experiments …

The Development Of Qmms: A Case Study For Reliable Online Quiz Maker And Management System, Mohamed Abdelmoneim Elshafey Dr., Tarek Said Ghoniemy Dr.

Future Computing and Informatics Journal

The e-learning and assessment systems became a dominant technology nowadays and distribute across the globe. With severe consequences of COVID19-like crises, the key importance of such technology appeared in which courses, quizzes and questionnaires have to be conducted remotely. Moreover, the use of Learning Management Systems (LMSs), such as blackboard, eCollege, and Moodle, has been sanctioned in all respects of education. This paper presents an open-source interactive Quiz Maker and Management System (QMMS) that suits the research, education (under-grad, grad, or post-grad), and industrial organizations to perform distant quizzes, training and questionnaires with an integration facility with other LMS tools …

Comparing The Popularity Of Testing Careers Among Canadian, Indian, Chinese, And Malaysian Students, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Pradeep Waychal, Jingdong Jia, Shuib Basri

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

This study attempts to understand motivators and de-motivators that influence the decisions of software students to take up and sustain software testing careers across four different countries, Canada, India, China, and Malaysia. Towards that end, we have developed a cross-sectional, but simple, survey-based instrument. In this study we investigated how software engineering and computer science students perceive and value what they do and their environmental settings. This study found that very few students are keen to take up software testing careers - why is this happening with such an important task in the software life cycle? The common advantages of …

On Lexicographic Proof Rules For Probabilistic Termination, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady, Petr Novotný, Jiří Zárevucký, Dorde Zikelic

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider the almost-sure (a.s.) termination problem for probabilistic programs, which are a stochastic extension of classical imperative programs. Lexicographic ranking functions provide a sound and practical approach for termination of non-probabilistic programs, and their extension to probabilistic programs is achieved via lexicographic ranking supermartingales (LexRSMs). However, LexRSMs introduced in the previous work have a limitation that impedes their automation: all of their components have to be non-negative in all reachable states. This might result in LexRSM not existing even for simple terminating programs. Our contributions are twofold: First, we introduce a generalization of LexRSMs which allows for some components …

Where2change: Change Request Localization For App Reviews, Tao Zhang, Jiachi Chen, Xian Zhan, Xiapu Luo, David Lo, He Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Million of mobile apps have been released to the market. Developers need to maintain these apps so that they can continue to benefit end users. Developers usually extract useful information from user reviews to maintain and evolve mobile apps. One of the important activities that developers need to do while reading user reviews is to locate the source code related to requested changes. Unfortunately, this manual work is costly and time consuming since: (1) an app can receive thousands of reviews, and (2) a mobile app can consist of hundreds of source code files. To address this challenge, Palomba et …

Can We Make It Better? Assessing And Improving Quality Of Github Repositories, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The code hosting platform GitHub has gained immense popularity worldwide in recent years, with over 200 million repositories hosted as of June 2021. Due to its popularity, it has great potential to facilitate widespread improvements across many software projects. Naturally, GitHub has attracted much research attention, and the source code in the various repositories it hosts also provide opportunity to apply techniques and tools developed by software engineering researchers over the years. However, much of existing body of research applicable to GitHub focuses on code quality of the software projects and ways to improve them. Fewer work focus on potential …

Automating Developer Chat Mining, Shengyi Pan, Lingfeng Bao, Xiaoxue Ren, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online chatrooms are gaining popularity as a communication channel between widely distributed developers of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. Most discussion threads in chatrooms follow a Q&A format, with some developers (askers) raising an initial question and others (respondents) joining in to provide answers. These discussion threads are embedded with rich information that can satisfy the diverse needs of various OSS stakeholders. However, retrieving information from threads is challenging as it requires a thread-level analysis to understand the context. Moreover, the chat data is transient and unstructured, consisting of entangled informal conversations. In this paper, we address this challenge by …

Patchnet: Hierarchical Deep Learning-Based Stable Patch Identification For The Linux Kernel, Thong Hoang, Julia Lawall, Yuan Tian, Richard J. Oentaryo, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Linux kernel stable versions serve the needs of users who value stability of the kernel over new features. The quality of such stable versions depends on the initiative of kernel developers and maintainers to propagate bug fixing patches to the stable versions. Thus, it is desirable to consider to what extent this process can be automated. A previous approach relies on words from commit messages and a small set of manually constructed code features. This approach, however, shows only moderate accuracy. In this paper, we investigate whether deep learning can provide a more accurate solution. We propose PatchNet, a hierarchical …

Figcps: Effective Failure-Inducing Input Generation For Cyber-Physical Systems With Deep Reinforcement Learning, Shaohua Zhang, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Yuqi Chen, Wenzhi Huang, Jinyi Liu, Jian Liu, Jianye Hao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are composed of computational control logic and physical processes, that intertwine with each other. CPSs are widely used in various domains of daily life, including those safety-critical systems and infrastructures, such as medical monitoring, autonomous vehicles, and water treatment systems. It is thus critical to effectively test them. However, it is not easy to obtain test cases which can fail the CPS. In this work, we propose a failure-inducing input generation approach FIGCPS for CPS, which requires no knowledge of the CPS under test or any history logs of the CPS which are usually hard to obtain. …

Binary Classifiers For Noisy Datasets: A Comparative Study Of Existing Quantum Machine Learning Frameworks And Some New Approaches, Nikolaos Schetakis, Davit Aghamalyan, Paul Robert Griffin, Michael Boguslavsky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This technology offer is a quantum machine learning algorithm applied to binary classification models for noisy datasets which are prevalent in financial and other datasets. By combining hybrid-neural networks, quantum parametric circuits, and data re-uploading we have improved the classification of non-convex 2-dimensional figures by understanding learning stability as noise increases in the dataset. The metric we use for assessing the performance of our quantum classifiers is the area under the receiver operator curve (ROC AUC). We are interested to collaborate with partners with use cases for binary classification of noisy data. Also, as quantum technology is still insufficient for …

From Community Search To Community Understanding: A Multimodal Community Query Engine, Zhao Li, Pengcheng Zou, Xia Chen, Shichang Hu, Peng Zhang, Yumou Zhou, Bingsheng He, Yuchen Li, Xing Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we present an online multi-modal community query engine (MQE1 ) on Alibaba’s billion-scale heterogeneous network. MQE has two distinct features in comparison with existing community query engines. Firstly, MQE supports multimodal community search on heterogeneous graphs with keyword and image queries. Secondly, to facilitate community understanding in real business scenarios, MQE generates natural language descriptions for the retrieved community in combination with other useful demographic information. The distinct features of MQE benefit many downstream applications in Alibaba’s e-commerce platform like recommendation. Our experiments confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of MQE on graphs with billions of edges.

Pruning Meta-Trained Networks For On-Device Adaptation, Dawei Gao, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Yongxin Tong, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adapting neural networks to unseen tasks with few training samples on resource-constrained devices benefits various Internet-of-Things applications. Such neural networks should learn the new tasks in few shots and be compact in size. Meta-learning enables few-shot learning, yet the meta-trained networks can be overparameterised. However, naive combination of standard compression techniques like network pruning with meta-learning jeopardises the ability for fast adaptation. In this work, we propose adaptation-aware network pruning (ANP), a novel pruning scheme that works with existing meta-learning methods for a compact network capable of fast adaptation. ANP uses weight importance metric that is based on the sensitivity …

Automating User Notice Generation For Smart Contract Functions, Xing Hu, Zhipeng Gao, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts have obtained much attention and are crucial for automatic financial and business transactions. For end-users who have never seen the source code, they can read the user notice shown in end-user client to understand what a transaction does of a smart contract function. However, due to time constraints or lack of motivation, user notice is often missing during the development of smart contracts. For endusers who lack the information of the user notices, there is no easy way for them to check the code semantics of the smart contracts. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new approach …

Sofi: Reflection-Augmented Fuzzing For Javascript Engines, Xiaoyu He, Xiaofei Xie, Yuekang Li, Jianwen Sun, Feng Li, Wei Zou, Yang Liu, Lei Yu, Jianhua Zhou, Wenchang Shi, Wei Huo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

JavaScript engines have been shown prone to security vulnerabilities, which can lead to serious consequences due to their popularity. Fuzzing is an effective testing technique to discover vulnerabilities. The main challenge of fuzzing JavaScript engines is to generate syntactically and semantically valid inputs such that deep functionalities can be explored. However, due to the dynamic nature of JavaScript and the special features of different engines, it is quite challenging to generate semantically meaningful test inputs.We observed that state-of-the-art semantic-aware JavaScript fuzzers usually require manually written rules to analyze the semantics for a JavaScript engine, which is labor-intensive, incomplete and engine-specific. …

Probablistic Verification Of Neural Networks Against Group Fairness, Bing Sun, Jun Sun, Ting Dai, Lijun Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fairness is crucial for neural networks which are used in applications with important societal implication. Recently, there have been multiple attempts on improving fairness of neural networks, with a focus on fairness testing (e.g., generating individual discriminatory instances) and fairness training (e.g., enhancing fairness through augmented training). In this work, we propose an approach to formally verify neural networks against fairness, with a focus on independence-based fairness such as group fairness. Our method is built upon an approach for learning Markov Chains from a user-provided neural network (i.e., a feed-forward neural network or a recurrent neural network) which is guaranteed …

Behind The Scenes: On The Relationship Between Developer Experience And Refactoring, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Anthony Peruma, Christian D. Newman, Ali Ouni

Articles

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices, or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that code refactoring activities 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 by analyzing 800 open-source projects. We mine their refactoring activities, and we identify their corresponding contributors. Then, …

Eveloping A Suitability Assessment Criteria For Software Developers: Behavioral Assessment Using Psychometric Test, Jayati Gulati, Bharti Suri, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Bimlesh Wadhwa, Anu Singh Lather

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

A suitability assessment instrument for software developers was created using a psychometric criteria that identify the impact of behavior on the performance of software engineers. The instrument uses a questionnaire to help both individuals and IT recruiters to identify the psychological factors that affect the working performance of software engineers. Our study identifies the relationship between the behavioral drivers and the programming abilities of the subjects. In order to evaluate the instrument, a total of 100 respondents were compared on the basis of their programming skills and nine behavioral drivers. It was concluded that there is a direct relationship between …

Preparing School Leaders To Advance Equity In Computer Science Education, Julie Flapan, Jean J. Ryoo, Roxana Hadad, Joel Knudson

Journal of Computer Science Integration

Background and Context: Most large-scale statewide initiatives of the Computer Science for All (CS for All) movement have focused on the classroom level. Critical questions remain about building school and district leadership capacity to support teachers while implementing equitable computer science education that is scalable and sustainable.

Objective: This statewide research-practice partnership, involving university researchers and school leaders from 14 local education agencies (LEA) from district and county offices, addresses the following research question: What do administrators identify as most helpful for understanding issues related to equitable computer science implementation when engaging with a guide and workshop we …

Quantum Computing: Computational Excellence For Society 5.0, Paul R. Griffin, Michael Boguslavsky, Junye Huang, Robert J. Kauffman, Brian R. Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this chapter, we consider which general business problems may be suitable for exploring the utilization of quantum computing and provide a framework for applying quantum computing. The characteristics of quantum computing systems are mapped into business problems to show the potential advantages of quantum computing. The framework shows how quantum computing can be applied in general, and a use case is offered for quantum machine learning (QML) related to the credit ratings of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs).

Disambiguating Mentions Of Api Methods In Stack Overflow Via Type Scoping, Kien Luong, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow is one of the most popular venues for developers to find answers to their API-related questions. However, API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow are often ambiguous and thus it could be difficult to find the APIs and learn their usages. Disambiguating these API mentions is not trivial, as an API mention can match with names of APIs from different libraries or even the same one. In this paper, we propose an approach called DATYS to disambiguate API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow using type scoping. With type scoping, we consider API methods …

Assessing Generalizability Of Codebert, Xin Zhou, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pre-trained models like BERT have achieved strong improvements on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, showing their great generalizability. The success of pre-trained models in NLP inspires pre-trained models for programming language. Recently, CodeBERT, a model for both natural language (NL) and programming language (PL), pre-trained on code search dataset, is proposed. Although promising, CodeBERT has not been evaluated beyond its pre-trained dataset for NL-PL tasks. Also, it has only been shown effective on two tasks that are close in nature to its pre-trained data. This raises two questions: Can CodeBERT generalize beyond its pre-trained data? Can it generalize to …

Covid-19 One Year On: Security And Privacy Review Of Contact Tracing Mobile Apps, Wei Yang Ang, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic caused 3.8 million deaths since December 2019. At the current vaccination pace, this global pandemic could persist for several years. Throughout the world, contact tracing (CT) apps were developed, which play a significant role in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. This work examines the current state of security and privacy landscape of mobile CT apps. Our work is the first attempt, to our knowledge, which provides a comprehensive analysis of 70 CT apps used worldwide as of year Q1 2021. Among other findings, we observed that 80% of them may have handled sensitive data without adequate …

Cloud, Edge And Fog Computing: Trends And Case Studies, Eng Lieh Ouh, Stanislaw Jarzabek, Geok Shan Lim, Masayoshi Ogawa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As it is done today, an informal – solely based on experts’ intuition – evaluation of profitability of adopting cloud services is undependable and not scalable as there are many conflicting factors and constraints such evaluation should account for. The revenue from service tenants and the cost of implementing the service architecture are the leading service factors that drive profitability. Cloud service architectures also need to handle a growing number of tenants with increasingly diverse requirements which must be weighed against the capabilities and costs of various service architectures, particularly single- versus multi-tenanted models. We believe a conceptual model enumerating …

Cloudnplay: Resource Optimization For A Cloud-Native Gaming System, Angelus Wibowo, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud gaming enables people playing graphically intensive games from their less powerful, or even outdated computing devices. It is challenging to realize cloud gaming as it requires minimal latency in server-side processing, rendering and streaming, which are expensive in terms of resource requirements, e.g., powerful GPU servers. Commercial gaming providers, e.g., Google Stadia, Amazon Luna, etc., hardly disclose any information on how they optimize gaming performance and cloud cost. In this work, we aim to investigate resource cost optimization for such cloud gaming systems. In contrast to previous work which have been focusing more on theoretical approaches, we deliver a …

Interactive Probing Of Multivariate Time Series Prediction Models: A Case Of Freight Rate Analysis, Haonan Xu, Haotian Li, Yong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present an interactive probing tool to create, modify and analyze what-if scenarios for multivariate time series models. The solution is applied to freight trading, where analysts can carry out sensitivity analysis on freight rates by changing demand and supply-related econometric variables and observing their resultant effects on freight indexes. We utilize various visualization techniques to enable intuitive scenario creation, alteration, and comprehension of time series inputs and model predictions. Our tool proved to be useful to the industry practitioners, demonstrated by a case study where freight traders are given hypothetical market scenarios and successfully generated quantitative freight index projection …

Learning To Adversarially Blur Visual Object Tracking, Qing Guo, Ziyi Cheng, Felix Juefei-Xu, Lei Ma, Xiaofei Xie, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motion blur caused by the moving of the object or camera during the exposure can be a key challenge for visual object tracking, affecting tracking accuracy significantly. In this work, we explore the robustness of visual object trackers against motion blur from a new angle, i.e., adversarial blur attack (ABA). Our main objective is to online transfer input frames to their natural motion-blurred counterparts while misleading the state-of-the-art trackers during the tracking process. To this end, we first design the motion blur synthesizing method for visual tracking based on the generation principle of motion blur, considering the motion information and …