Computer Sciences Commons^™

Mining And Managing Big Data Refactoring For Design Improvement: Are We There Yet?, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Ali Ouni

Articles

Refactoring is a set of code changes applied to improve the internal structure of a program, without altering its external behavior. With the rise of continuous integration and the awareness of the necessity of managing technical debt, refactoring has become even more popular in recent software builds. Recent studies indicate that developers often perform refactorings. If we consider all refactorings performed across all projects, this consists of the refactoring knowledge that represents a rich source of information that can be useful for both developers and practitioners to better understand how refactoring is being applied in practice. However, mining, processing, and …

Refactoring Practices In The Context Of Modern Code Review: An Industrial Case Study At Xerox, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Hussein Alrubaye, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Ali Ouni, Marouane Kessentini

Articles

Modern code review is a common and essential 2 practice employed in both industrial and open-source projects 3 to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure con4 formance with coding standards. During code review, developers 5 may inspect and discuss various changes including refactoring 6 activities before merging code changes in the code base. To date, 7 code review has been extensively studied to explore its general 8 challenges, best practices and outcomes, and socio-technical 9 aspects. However, little is known about how refactoring activities 10 are being reviewed, perceived, and practiced. 11 This study aims to reveal insights into …

Finding The Needle In A Haystack: On The Automatic Identification Of Accessibility User Reviews, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Wajdi Aljedaani, Murtaza Tamjeed, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Yasime Elglaly

Articles

In recent years, mobile accessibility has become an important trend with the goal of allowing all users the possibility of using any app without many limitations. User reviews include insights that are useful for app evolution. However, with the increase in the amount of received reviews, manually analyzing them is tedious and time-consuming, especially when searching for accessibility reviews. The goal of this paper is to support the automated identification of accessibility in user reviews, to help technology professionals in prioritizing their handling, and thus, creating more inclusive apps. Particularly, we design a model that takes as input accessibility user …

Implementation Of Uniform Interpolationalgorithms, Jose A. Castellanos Joo

Computer Science ETDs

This thesis discusses algorithms for the uniform interpolation problem and presents their implementation for the following theories: (quantifier-free) equality with uninterpreted functions (EUF), unit two-variable per inequality (UTVPI), and theoretic aspects for the combination of the two previous theories. The uniform interpolation algorithms implemented in this thesis were originally proposed in \cite{KAPUR2017}. Refutational proof-based solutions are the usual approach of many interpolation algorithms \cite{10.1007/978-3-642-00768-2_34, mcmillan2011interpolants, 10.1007/978-3-540-24730-2_2}. The approach taken in \cite{KAPUR2017} relies on quantifier-elimination heuristics to construct a uniform interpolant using one of the two formulas involved in the interpolation problem. The latter makes it possible to study the complexity …

Research Artifact: The Potential Of Meta-Maintenance On Github, Hideaki Hata, Raula Kula, Takashi Ishio, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This is a research artifact for the paper “Same File, Different Changes: The Potential of Meta-Maintenance on GitHub”. This artifact is a data repository including a list of studied 32,007 repositories on GitHub, a list of targeted 401,610,677 files, the results of the qualitative analysis for RQ2, RQ3, and RQ4, the results of the quantitative analysis for RQ5, and survey material for RQ6. The purpose of this artifact is enabling researchers to replicate our mixed-methods results of the paper, and to reuse the results of our exploratory study for further software engineering research. This research artifact is available at https://github.com/NAIST-SE/MetaMaintenancePotential …

Low-Power Downlink For The Internet Of Things Using Ieee 802.11-Compliant Wake-Up Receivers, Johannes Blobel, Vu Huy Tran, Archan Misra, Falko Dressler

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ultra-low power communication is critical for supporting the next generation of battery-operated or energy harvesting battery-less Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Duty cycling protocols and wake-up receiver (WuRx) technologies, and their combinations, have been investigated as energy-efficient mechanisms to support selective, event-driven activation of devices. In this paper, we go one step further and show how WuRx can be used for an efficient and multi-purpose low power downlink (LPD) communication channel. We demonstrate how to (a) extend the wake-up signal to support low-power flexible and extensible unicast, multicast, and broadcast downlink communication and (b) utilize the WuRx-based LPD to also …

Sguard: Towards Fixing Vulnerable Smart Contracts Automatically, Tai D. Nguyen, Long H. Pham, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are distributed, self-enforcing programs executing on top of blockchain networks. They have the potential to revolutionize many industries such as financial institutes and supply chains. However, smart contracts are subject to code-based vulnerabilities, which casts a shadow on its applications. As smart contracts are unpatchable (due to the immutability of blockchain), it is essential that smart contracts are guaranteed to be free of vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, smart contract languages such as Solidity are Turing-complete, which implies that verifying them statically is infeasible. Thus, alternative approaches must be developed to provide the guarantee. In this work, we develop an approach …

Androevolve: Automated Update For Android Deprecated-Api Usages, Stefanus A. Haryono, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Julia Lawall, Hong Jin Kang, Lucas Serrano, Gilles Muller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Android operating system (OS) is often updated, where each new version may involve API deprecation. Usages of deprecated APIs in Android apps need to be updated to ensure the apps' compatibility with the old and new versions of the Android OS. In this work, we propose AndroEvolve, an automated tool to update usages of deprecated Android APIs, that addresses the limitations of the state-of-the-art tool, CocciEvolve. AndroEvolve utilizes data flow analysis to solve the problem of out-of-method-boundary variables, and variable denormalization to remove the temporary variables introduced by CocciEvolve. We evaluated the accuracy of AndroEvolve using a dataset of …

Oidpr: Optimized Insulin Dosage Via Privacy‐Preserving Reinforcement Learning, Zuobin Ying, Yun Zhang, Shuanglong Cao, Shengmin Xu, Maode Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The precision of insulin dosage is essential in the process of diabetes treatment. The fact is providing precise dosage is almost impossible for clinicians since blood sugar levels are dynamically affected by many factors. Even though some auxiliary dosing systems have been proposed, the required real‐time physical data about the health situation of diabetics is still hard to synchronize to the end‐devices instantly. The traditional personalized drug delivery frameworks for accurate dosing of insulin always collect and transmit medical data in cleartext, which raises privacy problems. In this article, we propose a framework for an optimized insulin dosage via privacy‐preserving …

Deeplight: Robust And Unobtrusive Real-Time Screen-Camera Communication For Real-World Displays, Vu Huy Tran, Gihan Jayatilaka, Ashwin Ashok, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The paper introduces a novel, holistic approach for robust Screen-Camera Communication (SCC), where video content on a screen is visually encoded in a human-imperceptible fashion and decoded by a camera capturing images of such screen content. We first show that state-of-the-art SCC techniques have two key limitations for in-the-wild deployment: (a) the decoding accuracy drops rapidly under even modest screen extraction errors from the captured images, and (b) they generate perceptible flickers on common refresh rate screens even with minimal modulation of pixel intensity. To overcome these challenges, we introduce DeepLight, a system that incorporates machine learning (ML) models in …

Robot: Robustness-Oriented Testing For Deep Learning Systems, Jingyi Wang, Jialuo Chen, Youcheng Sun, Xingjun Ma, Dongxia Wang, Jun Sun, Peng Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, there has been a significant growth of interest in applying software engineering techniques for the quality assurance of deep learning (DL) systems. One popular direction is deep learning testing, where adversarial examples (a.k.a. bugs) of DL systems are found either by fuzzing or guided search with the help of certain testing metrics. However, recent studies have revealed that the commonly used neuron coverage metrics by existing DL testing approaches are not correlated to model robustness. It is also not an effective measurement on the confidence of the model robustness after testing. In this work, we address this gap by …

Retrieval-Augmented Generation For Code Summarization Via Hybrid Gnn, Shangqing Liu, Yu Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Jingkai Siow, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Source code summarization aims to generate natural language summaries from structured code snippets for better understanding code functionalities. However, automatic code summarization is challenging due to the complexity of the source code and the language gap between the source code and natural language summaries. Most previous approaches either rely on retrieval-based (which can take advantage of similar examples seen from the retrieval database, but have low generalization performance) or generation-based methods (which have better generalization performance, but cannot take advantage of similar examples). This paper proposes a novel retrieval-augmented mechanism to combine the benefits of both worlds. Furthermore, to mitigate …

Automatic Web Testing Using Curiosity-Driven Reinforcement Learning, Yan Zheng, Yi Liu, Xiaofei Xie, Yepang Liu, Lei Ma, Jianye Hao, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web testing has long been recognized as a notoriously difficult task. Even nowadays, web testing still heavily relies on manual efforts while automated web testing is far from achieving human-level performance. Key challenges in web testing include dynamic content update and deep bugs hiding under complicated user interactions and specific input values, which can only be triggered by certain action sequences in the huge search space. In this paper, we propose WebExplor, an automatic end-to-end web testing framework, to achieve an adaptive exploration of web applications. WebExplor adopts curiosity-driven reinforcement learning to generate high-quality action sequences (test cases) satisfying temporal …

Automatic Solution Summarization For Crash Bugs, Haoye Wang, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The causes of software crashes can be hidden anywhere in the source code and development environment. When encountering software crashes, recurring bugs that are discussed on Q&A sites could provide developers with solutions to their crashing problems. However, it is difficult for developers to accurately search for relevant content on search engines, and developers have to spend a lot of manual effort to find the right solution from the returned results. In this paper, we present CRASOLVER, an approach that takes into account both the structural information of crash traces and the knowledge of crash-causing bugs to automatically summarize solutions …

Infercode: Self-Supervised Learning Of Code Representations By Predicting Subtrees, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui, Yijun Yu, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning code representations has found many uses in software engineering, such as code classification, code search, code comment generation, and bug prediction. Although representations of code in tokens, syntax trees, dependency graphs, paths in trees, or the combinations of their variants have been proposed, existing learning techniques have a major limitation that these models are often trained on datasets labeled for specific downstream tasks, and the code representations may not be suitable for other tasks. Even though some techniques generate representations from unlabeled code, they are far from satisfactory when applied to downstream tasks. To overcome the limitation, this paper …

An Empirical Study Of The Landscape Of Open Source Projects In Baidu, Alibaba, And Tencent, Junxiao Han, Shuiguang Deng, David Lo, Chen Zhi, Jianwei Yin, Xin Xia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open source software has drawn more and more attention from researchers, developers and companies nowadays. Meanwhile, many Chinese technology companies are embracing open source and choosing to open source their projects. Nevertheless, most previous studies are concentrated on international companies such as Microsoft or Google, while the practical values of open source projects of Chinese technology companies remain unclear. To address this issue, we conduct a mixed-method study to investigate the landscape of projects open sourced by three large Chinese technology companies, namely Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT). We study the categories and characteristics of open source projects, the developer's …

Automated Query Reformulation For Efficient Search Based On Query Logs From Stack Overflow, Kaibo Cao, Chunyang Chen, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, Xiang Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a popular Q&A site for programming, Stack Overflow is a treasure for developers. However, the amount of questions and answers on Stack Overflow make it difficult for developers to efficiently locate the information they are looking for. There are two gaps leading to poor search results: the gap between the user's intention and the textual query, and the semantic gap between the query and the post content. Therefore, developers have to constantly reformulate their queries by correcting misspelled words, adding limitations to certain programming languages or platforms, etc. As query reformulation is tedious for developers, especially for novices, we …

How Do Software Developers Use Github Actions To Automate Their Workflows?, Timothy Kinsman, Mairieli Wessel, Marco Gerosa, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated tools are frequently used in social coding repositories to perform repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing automated work-flows for repository maintainers. Although several Actions have been built and used by practitioners, relatively little has been done to evaluate them. Understanding and anticipating the effects of adopting such kind of technology is important for planning and management. Our research is the first to investigate how developers use Actions and how several activity indicators change after their adoption. Our results indicate that, although only a small subset of …

Same File, Different Changes: The Potential Of Meta-Maintenance On Github, Hideaki Hata, Raula Kula, Takashi Ishio, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is important, especially for keeping the most up-to-date version of reused code. Different to related work, we propose the concept of meta-maintenance-i.e., tracking how the same files evolve in different repositories with the aim to provide useful maintenance opportunities to those files. We conduct an exploratory study by analyzing repositories from seven different programming languages to explore the potential of meta-maintenance. Our results indicate that a majority of active …

Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization: An Industrial Case Study, Rodrigo Rebouças De Almeida, Rafael Do Nascimento Ribeiro, Christoph Treude, ‪Uirá Kulesza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Incorporating the business perspective into prioritizing technical debt is essential to contribute to decision making in industry. In this paper, we evolve and evaluate a businessdriven approach for technical debt prioritization. The approach was evaluated during a five-months industrial case study with business and technical stakeholders’ active participation. The results show that the approach contributed to aligning business criteria between the business and technical stakeholders. We also observed a downward trend in the amount of technical debt that affects high-value business assets. Moreover, we identified eight business factors that affect the decision making related to the prioritization of technical debt. …

App Development For Wearable Sensors, Connor Pittman, Christopher Chappie, Patrick A. Tetreault

Thinking Matters Symposium

The objective of this research project was to create a wearable device that monitors bodily functions for the user to view on their smartphone. Sensor data is processed using the Arduino Nano 33 BLE microcontroller. The sensors used in this project include: proximity, temperature, humidity, heart rate, pressure, and skin impedance. This project takes advantage of the Arduino's Bluetooth low energy (BLE) capabilities so that all the data can be transmitted to a smartphone. This presentation shows the challenges faced during the project and how they were overcome. Some of these challenges include: programming, how heart rate sensors work, and …

A Deep Analysis And Algorithmic Approach To Solving Complex Fitness Issues In Collegiate Student Athletes, Holly N. Puckett

Honors College Theses

Sports are not simply an entertainment source. For many, it creates a sense of community, support, and trust among both fans and athletes alike. In order to continue the sense of community sports provides, athletes must be properly cared for in order to perform at the highest level possible. Thus, their fitness and health must be monitored continuously. In a professional sense, one can expect individualized attention to athletes daily due to an abundance of funding and resources. However, when looking at college communities and student athletes within them, the number of athletes per athletic trainer increases due to both …

Shedding Light On Dark Patterns: A Case Study On Digital Harms, Noreen Y. Whysel

Publications and Research

You’ve been there before. You thought you could trust someone with a secret. You thought it would be safe, but found out later that they blabbed to everyone. Or maybe they didn’t share it, but the way they used it felt manipulative. You gave more than you got and it didn’t feel fair. But now that it’s out there, do you even have control anymore?

Ok. Now imagine that person was your supermarket. Or your bank. Or your boss.

As designers of digital spaces for consumer products and services, how often do we consider the relationship we have with our …

Exploring Ai And Multiplayer In Java, Ronni Kurtzhals

Student Academic Conference

I conducted research into three topics: artificial intelligence, package deployment, and multiplayer servers in Java. This research came together to form my project presentation on the implementation of these topics, which I felt accurately demonstrated the various things I have learned from my courses at Moorhead State University. Several resources were consulted throughout the project, including the work of W3Schools and StackOverflow as well as relevant assignments and textbooks from previous classes. I found this project relevant to computer science and information systems for several reasons, such as the AI component and use of SQL data tables; but it was …

Student Academic Conference, Caitlin Brooks

Student Academic Conference

No abstract provided.

Poker Chip Calculator Application, Ryan Illies

Student Academic Conference

Application to help start up in person poker games with friends.

Non-Hazardous Industrial Solid Waste Tracking System, Justin Tank

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The Olmsted Non-Hazardous Industrial Solid Waste Tracking System allows waste generators of certain materials to electronically have their waste assessments evaluated, approved, and tracked through a simple online process. The current process of manually requesting evaluations, prepopulating tracking forms, and filling them out on triplicate carbonless forms is out of sync with other processes in the department. Complying with audit requirements requires pulling physical copies and providing them physically to fulfill information requests.

Waste generators in Minnesota are required to track their waste disposals for certain types of industrial waste streams. This ensures waste is accounted for at the point …

Automated Evolution Of Feature Logging Statement Levels Using Git Histories And Degree Of Interest, Yiming Tang, Allan Spektor, Raffi Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh

Publications and Research

Logging—used for system events and security breaches to more informational yet essential aspects of software features—is pervasive. Given the high transactionality of today’s software, logging effectiveness can be reduced by information overload. Log levels help alleviate this problem by correlating a priority to logs that can be later filtered. As software evolves, however, levels of logs documenting surrounding feature implementations may also require modification as features once deemed important may have decreased in urgency and vice-versa. We present an automated approach that assists developers in evolving levels of such (feature) logs. The approach, based on mining Git histories and manipulating …

Taiger Ai: Saas Bundling And Unbundling, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Software companies bundle support services with their products as standard practice. Is it possible to be different…and profitable?

Tour: Dynamic Topic And Sentiment Analysis Of User Reviews For Assisting App Release, Tianyi Yang, Cuiyun Gao, Jingya Zang, David Lo, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

App reviews deliver user opinions and emerging issues (e.g., new bugs) about the app releases. Due to the dynamic nature of app reviews, topics and sentiment of the reviews would change along with app release versions. Although several studies have focused on summarizing user opinions by analyzing user sentiment towards app features, no practical tool is released. The large quantity of reviews and noise words also necessitates an automated tool for monitoring user reviews. In this paper, we introduce TOUR for dynamic TOpic and sentiment analysis of User Reviews. TOUR is able to (i) detect and summarize emerging app issues …