Computer Sciences Commons^™

Biker: A Tool For Bi-Information Source Based Api Method Recommendation, Liang Cai, Haoye Wang, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, Zhenchang Xing, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Answerbot: An Answer Summary Generation Tool Based On Stack Overflow, Liang Cai, Haoye Wang, Bowen Xu, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Zhenchang Xing

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The prevalence of questions and answers on domainspecific Q&A sites like Stack Overflow constitutes a core knowledge asset for software engineering domain. Although search engines can return a list of questions relevant to a user query of some technical question, the abundance of relevant posts and the sheer amount of information in them makes it difficult for developers to digest them and find the most needed answers to their questions. In this work, we aim to help developers who want to quickly capture the key points of several answer posts relevant to a technical question before they read the details …

How Does Machine Learning Change Software Development Practices?, Zhiyuan Wan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Gail C. Murphy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adding an ability for a system to learn inherently adds uncertainty into the system. Given the rising popularity of incorporating machine learning into systems, we wondered how the addition alters software development practices. We performed a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies with 14 interviewees and 342 survey respondents from 26 countries across four continents to elicit significant differences between the development of machine learning systems and the development of non-machine-learning systems. Our study uncovers significant differences in various aspects of software engineering (e.g., requirements, design, testing, and process) and work characteristics (e.g., skill variety, problem solving and task identity). …

A Survey On Bluetooth 5.0 And Mesh: New Milestones Of Iot, Juenjie Yin, Zheng Yang, Hao Cao, Tongtong Liu, Zimu Zhou, Chenshu Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Enhancing Multi-Hop Sensor Calibration With Uncertainty Estimates, Balz Maag, Zimu Zhou, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Low-cost sensors, installed on mobile vehicles, provide a cost-effective way for fine-grained urban air pollution monitoring. However, frequent calibration is crucial for lowcost sensors to consistently deliver accurate measurements. Multi-hop calibration is a common practice to calibrate mobile sensor deployments, but is prone to severe error accumulation over hops. Prior research mitigates error accumulation by designing special calibration models, which only apply to linear models. In this paper, we propose an orthogonal approach by selecting reliable measurements for calibration at each hop. We analyze the impact of different data-induced uncertainties on calibration errors and devise a scheme to estimate these …

Sar: Learning Cross-Language Api Mappings With Little Knowledge, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui, Yijun Yu, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To save effort, developers often translate programs from one programming language to another, instead of implementing it from scratch. Translating application program interfaces (APIs) used in one language to functionally equivalent ones available in another language is an important aspect of program translation. Existing approaches facilitate the translation by automatically identifying the API mappings across programming languages. However, these approaches still require large amount of parallel corpora, ranging from pairs of APIs or code fragments that are functionally equivalent, to similar code comments. To minimize the need of parallel corpora, this paper aims at an automated approach that can map …

Multiagent Decision Making And Learning In Urban Environments, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our increasingly interconnected urban environments provide several opportunities to deploy intelligent agents—from self-driving cars, ships to aerial drones—that promise to radically improve productivity and safety. Achieving coordination among agents in such urban settings presents several algorithmic challenges—ability to scale to thousands of agents, addressing uncertainty, and partial observability in the environment. In addition, accurate domain models need to be learned from data that is often noisy and available only at an aggregate level. In this paper, I will overview some of our recent contributions towards developing planning and reinforcement learning strategies to address several such challenges present in largescale urban …

Formally Designing And Implementing Cyber Security Mechanisms In Industrial Control Networks., Mehdi Sabraoui

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation describes progress in the state-of-the-art for developing and deploying formally verified cyber security devices in industrial control networks. It begins by detailing the unique struggles that are faced in industrial control networks and why concepts and technologies developed for securing traditional networks might not be appropriate. It uses these unique struggles and examples of contemporary cyber-attacks targeting control systems to argue that progress in securing control systems is best met with formal verification of systems, their specifications, and their security properties. This dissertation then presents a development process and identifies two technologies, TLA+ and seL4, that can be …

Blocks' Network: Redesign Architecture Based On Blockchain Technology, Moataz Hanif

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The Internet is a global network that uses communication protocols. It is considered the most important system reached by humanity, which no one can abandon. However, this technology has become a weapon that threatens the privacy of users, especially in the client-server model, where data is stored and managed privately. Additionally, users have no power over their data that store in a private server, which means users’ data may interrupt by government or might be sold via service provider for-profit purposes. Furthermore, blockchain is a technology that we can rely on to solve issues related to client-server model if appropriately …

Suitability Of Finite State Automata To Model String Constraints In Probablistic Symbolic Execution, Andrew Harris

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Probabilistic Symbolic Execution (PSE) extends Symbolic Execution (SE), a path-sensitive static program analysis technique, by calculating the probabilities with which program paths are executed. PSE relies on the ability of the underlying symbolic models to accurately represent the execution paths of the program as the collection of input values following these paths. While researchers established PSE for numerical data types, PSE for complex data types such as strings is a novel area of research.

For string data types SE tools commonly utilize finite state automata to represent a symbolic string model. Thus, PSE inherits from SE automata-based symbolic string models …

Industry 4.0: Ethical And Moral Predicaments, W. Wang, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The advancements in software technology and data science are enabling Industry 4.0, aka the Fourth Industrial Revolution or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). While the first three industrial revolutions have brought about immense change, the impact of Industry 4.0 will be much wider and far greater, especially with regard to the easily overlooked ethical and moral aspects. Widening wealth gaps between countries and among classes of people within countries, a potential growing unemployment rate, data privacy and accessibility issues, and the treatment of intelligent agents (e.g., military robots) present new and complex ethical and moral dilemmas. In this article, …

Deviant: A Mutation Testing Tool For Solidity Smart Contracts, Patrick Chapman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Blockchain in recent years has exploded in popularity with Ethereum being one of the leading blockchain platforms. Solidity is a widely used scripting language for creating smart contracts in Ethereum applications. Quality assurance in Solidity contracts is of critical importance because bugs or vulnerabilities can lead to a considerable loss of financial assets. However, it is unclear what level of quality assurance is provided in many of these applications.

Mutation testing is the process of intentionally injecting faults into a target program and then running the provided test suite against the various injected faults. Mutation testing is used to evaluate …

Synthetic, Yet Natural: Properties Of Wordnet Random Walk Corpora And The Impact Of Rare Words On Embedding Performance, Filip Klubicka, Alfredo Maldonado, Abhijit Mahalunkar, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Creating word embeddings that reflect semantic relationships encoded in lexical knowledge resources is an open challenge. One approach is to use a random walk over a knowledge graph to generate a pseudo-corpus and use this corpus to train embeddings. However, the effect of the shape of the knowledge graph on the generated pseudo-corpora, and on the resulting word embeddings, has not been studied. To explore this, we use English WordNet, constrained to the taxonomic (tree-like) portion of the graph, as a case study. We investigate the properties of the generated pseudo-corpora, and their impact on the resulting embeddings. We find …

Safe Automated Refactoring For Intelligent Parallelization Of Java 8 Streams, Raffi Khatchadourian, Yiming Tang, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Syed Ahmed

Publications and Research

Streaming APIs are becoming more pervasive in mainstream Object-Oriented programming languages and platforms. For example, the Stream API introduced in Java 8 allows for functional-like, MapReduce-style operations in processing both finite, e.g., collections, and infinite data structures. However, using this API efficiently involves subtle considerations such as determining when it is best for stream operations to run in parallel, when running operations in parallel can be less efficient, and when it is safe to run in parallel due to possible lambda expression side-effects. Also, streams may not run all operations in parallel depending on particular collectors used in reductions. In …

Tests As Maintainable Assets Via Auto-Generated Spies: A Case Study Involving The Scala Collections Library's Iterator Trait, Konstantin Läufer, John O'Sullivan, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In testing stateful abstractions, it is often necessary to record interactions, such as method invocations, and express assertions over these interactions. Following the Test Spy design pattern, we can reify such interactions programmatically through additional mutable state. Alternatively, a mocking framework, such as Mockito, can automatically generate test spies that allow us to record the interactions and express our expectations in a declarative domain-specific language. According to our study of the test code for Scala’s Iterator trait, the latter approach can lead to a significant reduction of test code complexity in terms of metrics such as code size (in some …

Practical And Effective Sandboxing For Linux Containers, Zhiyuan Wan, David Lo, Xin Xia, Liang Cai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A container is a group of processes isolated from other groups via distinct kernel namespaces and resource allocation quota. Attacks against containers often leverage kernel exploits through the system call interface. In this paper, we present an approach that mines sandboxes and enables fine-grained sandbox enforcement for containers. We first explore the behavior of a container by running test cases and monitor the accessed system calls including types and arguments during testing. We then characterize the types and arguments of system call invocations and translate them into sandbox rules for the container. The mined sandbox restricts the container’s access to …

Network-Clustered Multi-Modal Bug Localization, Thong Hoang, Richard J. Oentaryo, Tien-Duy B. Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers often spend much effort and resources to debug a program. To help the developers debug, numerous information retrieval (IR)-based and spectrum-based bug localization techniques have been devised. IR-based techniques process textual information in bug reports, while spectrum-based techniques process program spectra (i.e., a record of which program elements are executed for each test case). While both techniques ultimately generate a ranked list of program elements that likely contain a bug, they only consider one source of information—either bug reports or program spectra— which is not optimal. In light of this deficiency, this paper presents a new approach dubbed Network-clustered …

Towards Lakosian Multilingual Software Design Principles, Damian Lyons, Saba Zahra, Thomas Marshall

Faculty Publications

Large software systems often comprise programs written in different programming languages. In the case when cross-language interoperability is accomplished with a Foreign Function Interface (FFI), for example pybind11, Boost.Python, Emscripten, PyV8, or JNI, among many others, common software engineering tools, such as call-graph analysis, are obstructed by the opacity of the FFI. This complicates debugging and fosters potential inefficiency and security problems. One contributing issue is that there is little rigorous software design advice for multilingual software. In this paper, we present our progress towards a more rigorous design approach to multilingual software. The approach is based on the existing …

An Empirical Study Of User Support Tools In Open Source Software, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Shuib Basri

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

End users’ positive response is essential for the success of any software. This is true for both commercial and Open Source Software (OSS). OSS is popular not only because of its availability, which is usually free but due to the user support it provides, generally through public platforms. The study model of this research establishes a relationship between OSS user support and available support tools. To conduct this research, we used a dataset of 100 OSS projects in different categories and examined five user support tools provided by different OSS projects. The results show that project trackers, user mailing lists, …

Deephunter: A Coverage-Guided Fuzz Testing Framework For Deep Neural Networks, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Felix Juefei-Xu, Minhui Xue, Hongxu Chen, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao, Bo Li, Jianxiong Yin, Simon See

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The past decade has seen the great potential of applying deep neural network (DNN) based software to safety-critical scenarios, such as autonomous driving. Similar to traditional software, DNNs could exhibit incorrect behaviors, caused by hidden defects, leading to severe accidents and losses. In this paper, we propose DeepHunter, a coverage-guided fuzz testing framework for detecting potential defects of general-purpose DNNs. To this end, we first propose a metamorphic mutation strategy to generate new semantically preserved tests, and leverage multiple extensible coverage criteria as feedback to guide the test generation. We further propose a seed selection strategy that combines both diversity-based …

Toward Human-Like Summaries Generated From Heterogeneous Software Artefacts, Mahfouth Alghamdi, Christoph Treude, Markus Wagner

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic text summarisation has drawn considerable interest in the field of software engineering. It can improve the efficiency of software developers, enhance the quality of products, and ensure timely delivery. In this paper, we present our initial work towards automatically generating human-like multi-document summaries from heterogeneous software artefacts. Our analysis of the text properties of 545 human-written summaries from 15 software engineering projects will ultimately guide heuristics searches in the automatic generation of human-like summaries.

Towards Understanding Android System Vulnerabilities: Techniques And Insights, Daoyuan Wu, Debin Gao, Eric K. T. Cheng, Yichen Cao, Jintao Jiang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a common platform for pervasive devices, Android has been targeted by numerous attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in its apps and the operating system. Compared to app vulnerabilities, systemlevel vulnerabilities in Android, however, were much less explored in the literature. In this paper, we perform the first systematic study of Android system vulnerabilities by comprehensively analyzing all 2,179 vulnerabilities on the Android Security Bulletin program over about three years since its initiation in August 2015. To this end, we propose an automatic analysis framework, upon a hierarchical database structure, to crawl, parse, clean, and analyze vulnerability reports and their publicly …

Resilient Collaborative Intelligence For Adversarial Iot Environments, Dulanga Weerakoon, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Randy Tandriansyah, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many IoT networks, including for battlefield deployments, involve the deployment of resource-constrained sensors with varying degrees of redundancy/overlap (i.e., their data streams possess significant spatiotemporal correlation). Collaborative intelligence, whereby individual nodes adjust their inferencing pipelines to incorporate such correlated observations from other nodes, can improve both inferencing accuracy and performance metrics (such as latency and energy overheads). Using realworld data from a multicamera deployment, we first demonstrate the significant performance gains (up to 14% increase in accuracy) from such collaborative intelligence, achieved through two different approaches: (a) one involving statistical fusion of outputs from different nodes, and (b) another involving …

Semantic Patches For Java Program Transformation, Hong Jin Kang, Ferdian Thung, Julia Lawall, Gilles Muller, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developing software often requires code changes that are widespread and applied to multiple locations.There are tools for Java that allow developers to specify patterns for program matching and source-to-source transformation. However, to our knowledge, none allows for transforming code based on its control-flow context. We prototype Coccinelle4J, an extension to Coccinelle, which is a program transformation tool designed for widespread changes in C code, in order to work on Java source code. We adapt Coccinelle to be able to apply scripts written in the Semantic Patch Language (SmPL), a language provided by Coccinelle, to Java source files. As a case …

The Impact Of Changes Mislabeled By Szz On Just-In-Time Defect Prediction, Yuanrui Fan, Xin Xia, Daniel A. Costa, David Lo, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Just-in-Time (JIT) defect prediction—a technique which aims to predict bugs at change level—has been paid more attention. JIT defect prediction leverages the SZZ approach to identify bug-introducing changes. Recently, researchers found that the performance of SZZ (including its variants) is impacted by a large amount of noise. SZZ may considerably mislabel changes that are used to train a JIT defect prediction model, and thus impact the prediction accuracy. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the mislabeled changes by different SZZ variants on the performance and interpretation of JIT defect prediction models. We analyze four SZZ variants (i.e., B-SZZ, …

Applying Case-Based Learning For A Postgraduate Software Architecture Course, Eng Lieh Ouh, Yunghans Irawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software architecture remains a difficult subject for learners to grasp and for educators to teach given its level of abstraction. On the other hand, case-based learning (CBL) is a popular teaching approach used across disciplines especially in business, medicine and law where students work in groups apply their knowledge to solve real-world case studies, or scenarios using their reasoning skills and existing theoretical knowledge. In this paper, we provide how we apply case-based learning to address the challenge in teaching a postgraduate software architecture course. Our learners are postgraduate students taking a master’s program in software engineering. We first describe …

Decentralizing Air Traffic Flow Management With Blockchain Based Reinforcement Learning, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Umang Chaudhary, Hong-Linh Truong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose and implement a decentralized, intelligent air traffic flow management (ATFM) solution to improve the efficiency of air transportation in the ASEAN region as a whole. Our system, named BlockAgent, leverages the inherent synergy between multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) for air traffic flow optimization; and the rising blockchain technology for a secure, transparent and decentralized coordination platform. As a result, BlockAgent does not require a centralized authority for effective ATFM operations. We have implemented several novel distributed coordination approaches for RL in BlockAgent. Empirical experiments with real air traffic data concerning regional airports have demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness …

Semantic Patches For Java Program Transformation (Artifact), Hong Jin Kang, Thung Ferdian, Julia Lawall, Gilles Muller, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The program transformation tool Coccinelle is designed for making changes that is required in many locations within a software project. It has been shown to be useful for C code and has been been adopted for use in the Linux kernel by many developers. Over 6000 commits mentioning the use of Coccinelle have been made in the Linux kernel. Our artifact, Coccinelle4J, is an extension to Coccinelle in order for it to apply program transformations to Java source code. This artifact accompanies our experience report “Semantic Patches for Java Program Transformation”, in which we show a case study of applying …

Eugene: Towards Deep Intelligence As A Service, Shuochao Yao, Yifan Hao, Yiran Zhao, Ailing Piao, Huajie Shao, Dongxin Liu, Shengzhong Liu, Shaohan Hu, Dulanga Weerakoon, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Archan Misra, Tarek Abdelzaher

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The paper discusses an emerging suite of machine intelligence services that are of increasing importance in the highly instrumented world of the Internet of Things (IoT). The suite, called Eugene, would offer a form of intelligent behavior (based on deep neural networks) to otherwise simple embedded devices; the clients of the service. These devices would benefit from service resources to learn from data and to perform intelligent inference, classification, prediction, and estimation tasks that they are too limited to carry out on their own. The paper discusses the taxonomy of such services and the state of implementation, as well as …

Resource Constrained Deep Reinforcement Learning, Abhinav Bhatia, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In urban environments, resources have to be constantly matched to the “right” locations where customer demand is present. For instance, ambulances have to be matched to base stations regularly so as to reduce response time for emergency incidents in ERS (Emergency Response Systems); vehicles (cars, bikes among others) have to be matched to docking stations to reduce lost demand in shared mobility systems. Such problems are challenging owing to the demand uncertainty, combinatorial action spaces and constraints on allocation of resources (e.g., total resources, minimum and maximum number of resources at locations and regions). Existing systems typically employ myopic and …