Computer Sciences Commons^™

Neural Network Semantic Backdoor Detection And Mitigation: A Causality-Based Approach, Bing Sun, Jun Sun, Wayne Koh, Jie Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Different from ordinary backdoors in neural networks which are introduced with artificial triggers (e.g., certain specific patch) and/or by tampering the samples, semantic backdoors are introduced by simply manipulating the semantic, e.g., by labeling green cars as frogs in the training set. By focusing on samples with rare semantic features (such as green cars), the accuracy of the model is often minimally affected. Since the attacker is not required to modify the input sample during training nor inference time, semantic backdoors are challenging to detect and remove. Existing backdoor detection and mitigation techniques are shown to be ineffective with respect …

A New Hope: Contextual Privacy Policies For Mobile Applications And An Approach Toward Automated Generation, Shidong Pan, Zhen Tao, Thong Hoang, Dawen Zhang, Tianshi Li, Zhenchang Xing, Xiwei Xu, Mark Staples, Thierry Rakotoarivelo, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy policies have emerged as the predominant approach to conveying privacy notices to mobile application users. In an effort to enhance both readability and user engagement, the concept of contextual privacy policies (CPPs) has been proposed by researchers. The aim of CPPs is to fragment privacy policies into concise snippets, displaying them only within the corresponding contexts within the application’s graphical user interfaces (GUIs). In this paper, we first formulate CPP in mobile application scenario, and then present a novel multimodal framework, named SEEPRIVACY, specifically designed to automatically generate CPPs for mobile applications. This method uniquely integrates vision-based GUI understanding …

Vysion Software, Isaias Hernandez-Dominguez Jr, Chander Luderman Miller

2024 Symposium

Vision loss presents significant challenges in daily life. Existing solutions for blind and visually impaired individuals are often limited in functionality, expensive, or complex to use. Vysion Software addresses this gap by developing a user-friendly, all-in-one AI companion app that provides features including text summarization, real-time audio descriptions, and AI-enhanced navigation. This project details the development plan, initial functionalities, and future vision for Vysion Software.

Microservices Architecture: Evolution, Realizing Benefits, And Addressing Challenges In The Modern Software Era -A Systematic Literature Review, Linah M. Elnaghi, Ramadan Moawad

Future Computing and Informatics Journal

This paper explores the world of modern software development and the rising popularity of microservices architecture. Microservices, a modern approach, brings benefits like scalability, Reusability, and fault tolerance. challenging traditional monolithic approaches.This survey involves a detailed comparison, unraveling the motivations behind the wide usage of microservices. This paper extracts insights from a diverse range of studies, presenting a clear and accessible synthesis of the key benefits and challenges associated with microservices architecture. Through a methodical analysis of these factors, the study aims to discern the most pivotal advantages and challenges within the domain of microservices. Steering away from complicated terminology, …

Peatmoss: A Dataset And Initial Analysis Of Pre-Trained Models In Open-Source Software, Wenxin Jiang, Jerin Yasmin, Jason Jones, Nicholas Synovic, Jiashen Kuo, Nathaniel Bielanski, Yuan Tian, George K. Thiruvathukal, James C. Davis

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The development and training of deep learning models have become increasingly costly and complex. Consequently, software engineers are adopting pre-trained models (PTMs) for their downstream applications. The dynamics of the PTM supply chain remain largely unexplored, signaling a clear need for structured datasets that document not only the metadata but also the subsequent applications of these models. Without such data, the MSR community cannot comprehensively understand the impact of PTM adoption and reuse. This paper presents the PeaTMOSS dataset, which comprises metadata for 281,638 PTMs and detailed snapshots for all PTMs with over 50 monthly downloads (14,296 PTMs), along with …

The Impacts Of Dimensionality, Diffusion, And Directedness On Intrinsic Cross-Model Simulation In Tile-Based Self-Assembly, Daniel Hader, Matthew J. Patitz

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Motivated by applications in DNA-nanotechnology, theoretical investigations in algorithmic tile-assembly have blossomed into a mature theory. In addition to computational universality, the abstract Tile Assembly Model (aTAM) was shown to be intrinsically universal (FOCS 2012), a strong notion of completeness where a single tile set is capable of simulating the full dynamics of all systems within the model; however, this construction fundamentally required non-deterministic tile attachments. This was confirmed necessary when it was shown that the class of directed aTAM systems, those where all possible sequences of tile attachments result in the same terminal assembly, is not intrinsically universal (FOCS …

Prioritising Github Priority Labels, James Caddy, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Communities on GitHub often use issue labels as a way of triaging issues by assigning them priority ratings based on how urgently they should be addressed. The labels used are determined by the repository contributors and notstandardisedbyGitHub.Thismakes it difficult for priority-related reasoning across repositories for both researchers and contributors. Previous work shows interest in how issues are labelled and what the consequences for those labels are. For instance, some previous work has used clustering models and natural language processing to categorise labels without a particular emphasis on priority. With this publication, we introduce a unique data set of 812 manually …

Generative Ai For Pull Request Descriptions: Adoption, Impact, And Developer Interventions, Tao Xiao, Hideaki Hata, Christoph Treude, Kenichi Matsumoto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

GitHub's Copilot for Pull Requests (PRs) is a promising service aiming to automate various developer tasks related to PRs, such as generating summaries of changes or providing complete walkthroughs with links to the relevant code. As this innovative technology gains traction in the Open Source Software (OSS) community, it is crucial to examine its early adoption and its impact on the development process. Additionally, it offers a unique opportunity to observe how developers respond when they disagree with the generated content. In our study, we employ a mixed-methods approach, blending quantitative analysis with qualitative insights, to examine 18,256 PRs in …

Certified Robust Accuracy Of Neural Networks Are Bounded Due To Bayes Errors, Ruihan Zhang, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adversarial examples pose a security threat to many critical systems built on neural networks. While certified training improves robustness, it also decreases accuracy noticeably. Despite various proposals for addressing this issue, the significant accuracy drop remains. More importantly, it is not clear whether there is a certain fundamental limit on achieving robustness whilst maintaining accuracy. In this work, we offer a novel perspective based on Bayes errors. By adopting Bayes error to robustness analysis, we investigate the limit of certified robust accuracy, taking into account data distribution uncertainties. We first show that the accuracy inevitably decreases in the pursuit of …

On The Sustainability Of Deep Learning Projects: Maintainers' Perspective, Junxiao Han, Jiakun Liu, David Lo, Chen Zhi, Yishan Chen, Shuiguang Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning (DL) techniques have grown in leaps and bounds in both academia and industry over the past few years. Despite the growth of DL projects, there has been little study on how DL projects evolve, whether maintainers in this domain encounter a dramatic increase in workload and whether or not existing maintainers can guarantee the sustained development of projects. To address this gap, we perform an empirical study to investigate the sustainability of DL projects, understand maintainers' workloads and workloads growth in DL projects, and compare them with traditional open-source software (OSS) projects. In this regard, we first investigate …

Transformer Models With Explainability For It Telemetry And Business Events, Shiau Hong Lim, Laura Wynter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Temporal event data are commonly encountered in software applications across a wide range of domains, from IT telemetry and system logs to business process automation. Temporal event data in software applications carry information in various forms: both structured and unstructured, and with both regular and irregular occurrence frequency, making the representation of temporal event data challenging. Further chal-lenges come from the diversity in terms of the scale and volume of events that need to be summarized by the representation. We propose a general and unified approach to handle temporal event data for the purpose of learning a predictive transformer model. …

Reproducibility Debt: Challenges And Future Pathways, Zara Hassan, Christoph Treude, Michael Norrish, Graham Williams, Alex Potanin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reproducibility of scientic computation is a critical factor in validating its underlying process, but it is often elusive. Complexity and continuous evolution in software systems have introduced new challenges for reproducibility across a myriad of computational sciences, resulting in growing debt. This requires a comprehensive domain-agnostic study to dene and asses Reproducibility Debt (RpD) in scientic software, thus uncovering and classifying all underlying factors attributed towards its emergence and identication i.e., causes and eects. Moreover, an organised map of prevention strategies is imperative to guide researchers for its proactive management. This vision paper highlights the challenges that hinder eective management …

Hierarchical Damage Correlations For Old Photo Restoration, Weiwei Cai, Xuemiao Xu, Jiajia Xu, Huaidong Zhang, Haoxin Yang, Kun Zhang, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Restoring old photographs can preserve cherished memories. Previous methods handled diverse damages within the same network structure, which proved impractical. In addition, these methods cannot exploit correlations among artifacts, especially in scratches versus patch-misses issues. Hence, a tailored network is particularly crucial. In light of this, we propose a unified framework consisting of two key components: ScratchNet and PatchNet. In detail, ScratchNet employs the parallel Multi-scale Partial Convolution Module to effectively repair scratches, learning from multi-scale local receptive fields. In contrast, the patch-misses necessitate the network to emphasize global information. To this end, we incorporate a transformer-based encoder and decoder …

Microkarta: Visualising Microservice Architectures, Oscar Manglaras, Alex Farkas, Peter Fule, Christoph Treude, Markus Wagner

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conceptualising and debugging a microservice architecture can be a challenge for developers due to the complex topology of inter-service communication, which may only apparent when viewing the architecture as a whole. In this paper, we present MicroKarta, a dashboard containing three types of network diagram that visualise complex microservice architectures, and that are designed to address problems faced by developers of these architectures. Initial feedback from industry developers has been positive. This dashboard can be used by developers to explore and debug microservice architectures, and can be used to compare the effectiveness of different types of network visualisation for assisting …

Toward Effective Secure Code Reviews: An Empirical Study Of Security-Related Coding Weaknesses, Wachiraphan Charoenwet, Patanamon Thongtanunam, Thuan Pham, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a software development cycle. However, existing code review studies often focus on known vulnerabilities, neglecting coding weaknesses, which can introduce real-world security issues that are more visible through code review. The practices of code reviews in identifying such coding weaknesses are not yet fully investigated. To better understand this, we conducted an empirical case study in two large open-source projects, OpenSSL and PHP. Based on 135,560 code …

Partial Solution Based Constraint Solving Cache In Symbolic Execution, Ziqi Shuai, Zhenbang Chen, Kelin Ma, Kunlin Liu, Yufeng Zhang, Jun Sun, Ji Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Constraint solving is one of the main challenges for symbolic execution. Caching is an effective mechanism to reduce the number of the solver invocations in symbolic execution and is adopted by many mainstream symbolic execution engines. However, caching can not perform well on all programs. How to improve caching’s effectiveness is challenging in general. In this work, we propose a partial solution-based caching method for improving caching’s effectiveness. Our key idea is to utilize the partial solutions inside the constraint solving to generate more cache entries. A partial solution may satisfy other constraints of symbolic execution. Hence, our partial solution-based …

How Do Preservice Teachers Learn To Teach Integrated Computational Thinking?: Evidence From Planning, Enactment, And Reflection, Rachael Dektor, Samuel Severance, Kip Téllez

Journal of Computer Science Integration

This study examines pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) beliefs and understandings about computational thinking (CT) integration and lesson implementation over time. Utilizing a design-based research approach, 3 PSTs led the co-design of integrated CT lessons with support from researchers and enacted these CT integrated lessons with K-5 students. All PSTs participated in a whole-group CT workshop and engaged in one-on-one lesson design sessions with a researcher. We utilized a grounded theory approach to qualitatively analyze pre-surveys, semi-structured interviews, and video data of three PSTs enacting their lessons. We found that PSTs’ initial beliefs about CT instruction – including the importance of it …

Henna Chatbot Capstone Review, Kobe Norcross

University Honors Theses

This thesis reviews the development of the Henna Chatbot, an AI-powered DEI consultant designed to provide personalized feedback to organizations. Sponsored by DEI consultant Arsh Haque, the project aims to address gaps in current DEI software, which often lacks team-specific feedback. The Henna Chatbot leverages GPT-3.5 Turbo to create an affordable SaaS platform where organizations can train Henna with their DEI values, and Henna will help organizations stay aligned with those values. The project spanned twenty weeks and was completed by a team of eight computer science students at Portland State University. The development process followed Agile methodologies, emphasizing effective …

Trust, Transparency, And Transport: The Impact Of Privacy Protection On The Acceptance Of Last-Mile Drone Delivery, Jurgen Heinz Famula

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A common set of problems commercial delivery companies face is finding ways to increase the efficiency and reliability of the “last mile” of a package’s journey, all while reducing operating costs. This need for efficiency has driven many companies to explore using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, to get packages to their final destination. Although UAVs have great potential to help increase efficiency in commercial package delivery, this comes at a potential cost to the privacy of people who intersect the flight paths of these unmanned vehicles. This thesis explores the effect of a mobile phone application for commercial …

Evaluating The Effect Of Domain-Specific Large Language Models On Question And Response, Phillip D. Crippen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Large Language Models have emerged to great fanfare in the Information Technology market. Business and Information Technology leaders are currently exploring ways to apply these models to assist their organizations in executing business processes and generating innovation. Software vendors, consultants, and academics promote various approaches to making Large Language Models work effectively for business. However, little academic literature is available today that quantifies the degree of improvement possible with these domain-specific approaches over the standard capabilities of generalized Large Language Models.

The study seeks to quantify the benefits of one approach, Retrieval Augmented Generation. The study uses a collection of …

The Institutional Challenges Of A Quantified Self Study: An Attempt To Ascertain How Data Collected From A Mobile Device Can Be An Indicator Of Personal Mental Health Over Time, Julian Lazaras

University Honors Theses

The adoption of an application of new technology always comes with a bias, this is never more true for the case of human behavioral analytics within higher education. While movements such as the quantified self movement make strides to reinterpret the realm of data analytics, psychology, and computer science, there are inevitably limitations to the adoption and application of such approaches within the standard realm of research. Herein is presented a case where an effort to evaluate the prospect of use of mobile phone data as secondary indicators of personal mental health through the lens of data analysis was put …

Cards With Class: Formalizing A Simplified Collectible Card Game, Dan Ha

University Honors Theses

Collectible card games (CCGs) have been a wildly popular game genre since the release of Wizards of the Coast's Magic: The Gathering. These games revolve around their thousands of cards and the hundreds of thousands of interactions they can create with their many effects. For designers, it is an incredibly demanding task to ensure that every single card works properly and that each card's text unambiguously conveys its intended behavior in all cases. The task only grows more difficult over time as the number of cards in the game grows and card effects become more complex or experimental. If the …

The Robot On The Hill, James Ryan

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

“The Robot on the Hill” is a rogue-like autobattler that procedurally models the state of the individual in the information age. The game abruptly transitions between diverse framings - a hill, a bedroom, a pond, a chessboard, the void - in order to highlight the disjointedness that is present in the informationalizing of self and reality. It dialogues with Byung Chul Han and Heidegger to portray what Han describes as a ‘narrative crisis’ in modernity and the devaluation of experience. When the value of experience diminishes and disintegrates, “all that is left is bare life, a kind of survival.” …

Exporting Sysml Designs To Simulink, Drew Q. Broadbent

Theses and Dissertations

Various software systems have been developed to aid a systems engineer in evaluating system requirements, such as Dassault’s Magic System of Systems Architect (MSOSA) and MathWorks’ Simulink. Both software packages have different strengths; therefore, it is beneficial to export models from one software package to another. MSOSA provides a built-in tool that facilitates this transfer, built upon the Extension for Physical Interaction and Signal Flow Simulation (SysPhS) standard. However, the process is often unreliable and error prone and online documentation is largely lacking. This research used extensive trial and error to fill in the documentation gaps and create a method …

Accessible Real-Time Eye-Gaze Tracking For Neurocognitive Health Assessments, A Multimodal Web-Based Approach, Daniel C. Tisdale

Master's Theses

We introduce a novel integration of real-time, predictive eye-gaze tracking models into a multimodal dialogue system tailored for remote health assessments. This system is designed to be highly accessible requiring only a conventional webcam for video input along with minimal cursor interaction and utilizes engaging gaze-based tasks that can be performed directly in a web browser. We have crafted dynamic subsystems that capture high-quality data efficiently and maintain quality through instances of user attrition and incomplete calls. Additionally, these subsystems are designed with the foresight to allow for future re-analysis using improved predictive models, as well as enable the creation …

Crime Prediction Using Agent-Based Modeling, Yifei Gong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crime risk evaluation and crime prediction using agent-based modeling (ABM) have gained popularity in the field of computational criminology in recent years. Traditionally, researchers rely on statistical methods and machine learning models to predict crimes using historical data. ABM generates macro-level crime patterns in a bottom-up fashion by simulating the daily behaviors of autonomous entities, such as citizens and offenders. ABM takes into consideration the non-linear interactions between agents under complex social contexts. Currently, the comprehensive usage of ABM for criminological theory testing and urban policy evaluations calls for a unified software framework. In this research, we introduce CARESim, an …

Communication Challenges In Underwater Wireless Networks: Mac Protocols And Software Solutions, Dmitrii Dugaev

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Underwater wireless networks (UWNs) represent a diverse and intriguing research domain, encompassing a wide array of scientific and industrial applications. This dissertation delves into the communication challenges at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer within UWNs, stemming from the distinctive signal propagation conditions and the harshness of the deployment environment. The manuscript provides comprehensive coverage of key aspects of UWNs, including potential applications, communication protocols, methodologies employed in such networks, and existing software solutions that facilitate simulation, emulation, and real testbed scenarios for underwater research endeavors. Furthermore, this research introduces innovative software and communication solutions designed to facilitate the seamless …

Fish-Eye Camera-Based Real-Time Pedestrian Crossing Predicting System, Mohammed Abdulla Almesafri

Theses

Fisheye cameras are widely used in traffic monitoring for their broad view, yet their distortion challenges deep-learning models in pedestrian detection and tracking. Despite available datasets like FishEye8K, collected in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and the availability of several studies that have delved into pedestrian prediction systems, a notable gap remains: the absence of datasets specifically designed for the cultural context of the UAE. This study aims to address this gap by introducing an in-house fisheye dataset tailored to enhance the prediction and tracking of pedestrians in fisheye footage within the UAE's environment. The present study addresses the development of a Graphical …

Auditory Ace Mobile Application Capstone Review, Layla Smith

University Honors Theses

This paper describes the development process and outcomes of my 2023-2024 Capstone Project, Auditory Ace, a self-directed auditory training mobile application for individuals with cochlear implants. Recognizing the limitations of current market offerings, Dr. Timothy Anderson created a Capstone project proposal to develop an accessible auditory training mobile application. The Capstone team that took on this proposal consisted of Darya Haines, Dustin Huynh, Jordan Nguyen, Nihar Koppolu, Scott Thorkelson, Sienna Day, and myself, Layla Smith. This paper is structured to follow the Agile software development methodology, which we used to develop Auditory Ace, reviewing in detail every major choice we …

Virtual Field Environments Capstone Software Review, Ashton Sawyer

University Honors Theses

This is a review of the Virtual Field Environments computer science capstone project, sponsored by geology professor Rick Hugo. The tool aims to create and render VFEs, interactable 360° environments hosted on the web that are used as virtual field trips for K-12 students. This essay discusses the development process, including understanding requirements, tool and technology selection, problem-solving, and decision-making strategies. It also highlights the differences between the capstone and the other core computer science courses, and how those differences help to prepare students for the workforce. The project was completed over the course of twenty weeks by a team …