Computer Sciences Commons^™

Safe And Reliable Software And The Formal Verification Of Prim's Algorithm In Spark, Brian S. Wheelhouse

Theses and Dissertations

Despite evidence that formal verification helps produce highly reliable and secure code, formal methods, i.e., mathematically based tools and approaches for software and hardware verification, are not commonly used in software and hardware development. The limited emphasis on formal verification in software education and training suggests that many developers have never considered the benefits of formal verification. Despite the challenging nature of their mathematical roots, software verification tools have improved; making it easier than ever to verify software. SPARK, a programming language and a formal verification toolset, is of particular interest for the AFRL, and will be a primary focus …

Ghostparty Video Game, Tyler Remlinger Hart

Computer Science and Software Engineering

GhostParty is a Unity game that uses a MongoDB database to store players' gameplay values. These values are used to create "Ghosts" that players can compete with in various mini-games. I found that this form of multiplayer using ghosts can create a good gameplay experience without live multiplayer interactions.

Heart: Motion-Resilient Heart Rate Monitoring With In-Ear Microphones, Kayla-Jade Butkow, Ting Dang, Andrea Ferlini, Dong Ma, Mascolo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the soaring adoption of in-ear wearables, the research community has started investigating suitable in-ear heart rate (HR) detection systems. HR is a key physiological marker of cardiovascular health and physical fitness. Continuous and reliable HR monitoring with wearable devices has therefore gained increasing attention in recent years. Existing HR detection systems in wearables mainly rely on photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors, however, these are notorious for poor performance in the presence of human motion. In this work, leveraging the occlusion effect that enhances low-frequency bone-conducted sounds in the ear canal, we investigate for the first time in-ear audio-based motion-resilient HR monitoring. …

Specification-Based Autonomous Driving System Testing, Yuan Zhou, Yang Sun, Yun Tang, Yuqi Chen, Jun Sun, Christopher M. Poskitt, Yang Liu, Zijiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autonomous vehicle (AV) systems must be comprehensively tested and evaluated before they can be deployed. High-fidelity simulators such as CARLA or LGSVL allow this to be done safely in very realistic and highly customizable environments. Existing testing approaches, however, fail to test simulated AVs systematically, as they focus on specific scenarios and oracles (e.g., lane following scenario with the "no collision" requirement) and lack any coverage criteria measures. In this paper, we propose AVUnit, a framework for systematically testing AV systems against customizable correctness specifications. Designed modularly to support different simulators, AVUnit consists of two new languages for specifying dynamic …

The Vehicle Routing Problem With Simultaneous Pickup And Delivery And Occasional Drivers, Vincent F. Yu, Grace Aloina, Panca Jodiawan, Aldy Gunawan, Tsung-C. Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research addresses the Vehicle Routing Problem with Simultaneous Pickup and Delivery and Occasional Drivers (VRPSPDOD), which is inspired from the importance of addressing product returns and the emerging notion of involving available crowds to perform pickup and delivery activities in exchange for some compensation. At the depot, a set of regular vehicles is available to deliver and/or pick up customers’ goods. A set of occasional drivers, each defined by their origin, destination, and flexibility, is also able to help serve the customers. The objective of VRPSPDOD is to minimize the total traveling cost of operating regular vehicles and total …

Multi-Modal Api Recommendation, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Ting Zhang, Ferdian Thung, Kisub Kim, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Too many options can be a problem, which is the case for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). As there are many such APIs, with many more being introduced periodically, it raises the problem of choosing which API to be recommended. Furthermore, numerous APIs are commonly used together with other complementary third-party APIs. It can be challenging for developers to understand how to use each API and to remember all the complementary APIs for the API they want to use. Therefore, an accurate API recommendation approach can improve developers' efficiency in implementing certain functionality. Several approaches have been developed to automatically recommend …

An Exploratory Study On Museum Visitor Ship Trends In Singapore, Aldy Gunawan, Chentao Liu, Heranshan S/O Subramaniam, Melissa Tan, Ranice Tan, Clarence Tay, Tasaporn. Visawameteekul

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The COVID-19 outbreak has unpredictably disrupted the operations of numerous museums. Museum visitor experience has a physical, personal, and social context, which are not achievable during the pandemic. Despite the depreciation during the Circuit Breaker period, the disruption also presents an opportunity for local museums to develop new strategies of audience engagement to accommodate the altered audience behavior. This exploratory study analyses data from six Singapore-based museums to understand the visitorship patterns across different ages and genders. The impact of COVID-19 is also analysed. Using R-studio and relevant packages, we conducted statistical tests such as hypothesis testing, Chi-square testing and …

Exploring And Repairing Gender Fairness Violations In Word Embedding-Based Sentiment Analysis Model Through Adversarial Patches, Lin Sze Khoo, Jia Qi Bay, Ming Lee Kimberly Yap, Mei Kuan Lim, Chun Yong Chong, Zhou Yang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advancement of sentiment analysis (SA) models and their incorporation into our daily lives, fairness testing on these models is crucial, since unfair decisions can cause discrimination to a large population. Nevertheless, some challenges in fairness testing include the unknown oracle, the difficulty in generating suitable test inputs, and the lack of a reliable way of fixing the issues. To fill in these gaps, BiasRV, a tool based on metamorphic testing (MT), was introduced and succeeded in uncovering fairness issues in a transformer-based model. However, the extent of unfairness in other SA models has not been thoroughly investigated. Our …

Automatic Identification Of Crash-Inducing Smart Contracts, Chao Ni, Cong Tian, Kaiwen Yang, David Lo, Jiachi Chen, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contract, a special software code running on and resided in the blockchain, enlarges the general application of blockchain and exchanges assets without dependence of external parties. With blockchain's characteristic of immutability, they cannot be modified once deployed. Thus, the contract and the records are persisted on the blockchain forever, including failed transactions that are caused by runtime errors and result in the waste of computation, storage, and fees. In this paper, we refer to smart contracts which will cause runtime errors as crash-inducing smart contracts. However, automatic identification of crash-inducing smart contracts is limited investigated in the literature. The …

Detecting C++ Compiler Front-End Bugs Via Grammar Mutation And Differential Testing, Haoxin Tu, He Jiang, Zhide Zhou, Yixuan Tang, Zhilei Ren, Lei Qiao, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

C++ is a widely used programming language and the C++ front-end is a critical part of a C++ compiler. Although many techniques have been proposed to test compilers, few studies are devoted to detecting bugs in C++ compiler. In this study, we take the first step to detect bugs in C++ compiler front-ends. To do so, two main challenges need to be addressed, namely, the acquisition of test programs that are more likely to trigger bugs in compiler front-ends and the bug identification from complicated compiler outputs. In this article, we propose a novel framework named Ccoft to detect bugs …

Demystifying Performance Regressions In String Solvers, Yao Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Yi Li, Yi Lin, Sen Chen, Yang Liu, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past few years, SMT string solvers have found their applications in an increasing number of domains, such as program analyses in mobile and Web applications, which require the ability to reason about string values. A series of research has been carried out to find quality issues of string solvers in terms of its correctness and performance. Yet, none of them has considered the performance regressions happening across multiple versions of a string solver. To fill this gap, in this paper, we focus on solver performance regressions (SPRs), i.e., unintended slowdowns introduced during the evolution of string solvers. To …

Blockscope: Detecting And Investigating Propagated Vulnerabilities In Forked Blockchain Projects, Xiao Yi, Yuzhou Fang, Daoyuan Wu, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the open-source nature of the blockchain ecosystem, it is common for new blockchains to fork or partially reuse the code of classic blockchains. For example, the popular Dogecoin, Litecoin, Binance BSC, and Polygon are all variants of Bitcoin/Ethereum. These “forked” blockchains thus could encounter similar vulnerabilities that are propagated from Bitcoin/Ethereum during forking or subsequently commit fetching. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of detecting and investigating the propagated vulnerabilities in forked blockchain projects. To facilitate this study, we propose BlockScope, a novel tool that can effectively and efficiently detect multiple types of cloned vulnerabilities given …

Identification Of Students At Risk Of Low Performance By Combining Rule-Based Models, Enhanced Machine Learning, And Knowledge Graph Techniques, Balqis Mubarak Al Braiki

Dissertations

Technologies and online learning platforms have changed the contemporary educational paradigm, giving institutions more alternatives in a complex and competitive environment. Online learning platforms, learning-based analytics, and data mining tools are increasingly complementing and replacing traditional education techniques. However, academic underachievement, graduation delays, and student dropouts remain common problems in educational institutions. One potential method of preventing these issues is by predicting student performance through the use of institution data and advanced technologies. However, to date, scholars have yet to develop a module that can accurately predict students’ academic achievement and commitment. This dissertation attempts to bridge that gap by …

Large-Scale Identification And Analysis Of Factors Impacting Simple Bug Resolution Times In Open Source Software Repositories, Elia Eiroa-Lledo, Rao Hamza Ali, Gabriela Pinto, Jillian Anderson, Erik Linstead

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

One of the most prominent issues the ever-growing open-source software community faces is the abundance of buggy code. Well-established version control systems and repository hosting services such as GitHub and Maven provide a checks-and-balances structure to minimize the amount of buggy code introduced. Although these platforms are effective in mitigating the problem, it still remains. To further the efforts toward a more effective and quicker response to bugs, we must understand the factors that affect the time it takes to fix one. We apply a custom traversal algorithm to commits made for open source repositories to determine when “simple stupid …

Comparing Boys’ And Girls’ Attitudes Toward Computer Science, Danielle Scott, Amiee Zou, Sharin Rawhiya Jacob, Debra Richardson, Mark Warschauer

Journal of Computer Science Integration

Women are severely underrepresented in computer science (CS) degrees and careers. While student interest is a key predictor of success, little is known about how elementary students from underserved groups, such as girls, develop their interest in CS. To address this issue, we examined the differences in attitudes between upper elementary girls and boys towards CS after participating in a yearlong, inquiry-based CS curriculum designed for diverse learners. Pre-and-post surveys on students’ attitudes towards CS (n = 108) were delivered before and after student participation in the curriculum. Results from the survey showed only two demonstrated significant differences between boys …

Lightweight And Non-Invasive User Authentication On Earables, Changshuo Hu, Xiao Ma, Dong Ma, Ting Dang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread adoption of wireless earbuds has advanced the developments in earable-based sensing in various domains like entertainment, human-computer interaction, and health monitoring. Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in user authentication using earables. Despite the successes witnessed in acoustic probing and speech based authentication systems, this paper proposed a lightweight and non-invasive ambient sound based user authentication scheme. It employs the difference between the in-ear and out-ear sounds to estimate the individual-specific occluded ear canal transfer function (OECTF). Specifically, the {out-ear, in-ear} scaling factors at different frequency bands are captured via linear regression and treated as the OECTF …

An Enhanced Cloud-Native Deep Learning Pipeline For The Classification Of Network Traffic, Ahmed Sobhy Elkenawy

Theses and Dissertations

In a rapidly changing world, the way of solving real-world problems has changed to leverage the power of the advancements in multiple fields. Cloud-native computing approaches can be utilized with deep learning techniques to provide solutions in several important areas. For instance, with the emergence of the pandemic, much dependence on modern technologies came out as a replacement for face-to-face interaction. Deep learning can reach a high level of accuracy, which makes it very effective in the support of modern services and technologies. However, there are some challenging issues because deep learning requires many large-scale experiments, which demand a lot …

Fa3: Fine-Grained Android Application Analysis, Yan Lin, Weng Onn Wong, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding Android applications' behavior is essential to many security applications, e.g., malware analysis. Although many systems have been proposed to perform such dynamic analysis, they are limited by their applicable analysis environment (on device vs. emulator), transparency to subject apps, applicable runtime (Dalvik vs. ART), applicable system stack, or granularity. In this paper, we propose FA3 (Fine-Grained Android Application Analysis), a novel on-device, non-invasive, and fine-grained analysis platform by leveraging existing profiling mechanisms in the Android Runtime (ART) and kernel to inspect method invocations and control-flow transfers for both Java methods and third-party native libraries. FA3 embeds its tracing capability …

Web Apis: Features, Issues, And Expectations: A Large-Scale Empirical Study Of Web Apis From Two Publicly Accessible Registries Using Stack Overflow And A User Survey, Neng Zhang, Ying Zou, Xin Xia, David Lo, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the increasing adoption of services-oriented computing and cloud computing technologies, web APIs have become the fundamental building blocks for constructing software applications. Web APIs are developed and published on the internet. The functionality of web APIs can be used to facilitate the development of software applications. There are numerous studies on retrieving and recommending candidate web APIs based on user requirements from a large set of web APIs. However, there are very limited studies on the features of web APIs that make them more likely to be used and the issues of using web APIs in practice. Moreover, users' …

Human-Centered Ai For Software Engineering: Requirements, Reflection, And Road Ahead, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Since its inception in the 2000s, AI for Software Engineering (AI4SE) has grown rapidly. AI in its different forms, e.g., data mining, information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, etc., has been demonstrated to be able to produce good results for automating many tasks, including specification mining, bug and vulnerability discovery, bug localization, duplicate bug report identification, failure detection, program repair, technical question answering, code search, and many more. AI4SE has much potential to improve software engineers’ productivity and software quality. Due to its potential, it is currently one of the most popular research areas in the software engineering field.To …

An Empirical Study Of Package Management Issues Via Stack Overflow, Syful Islam, Raula Kula, Christoph Treude, Bodin Chinthanet, Takashi Ishio, Kenichi Matsumoto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The package manager (PM) is crucial to most technology stacks, acting as a broker to ensure that a verified dependency package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to dozens of PMs with various features. While our recent study indicates that package management features of PM are related to end-user experiences, it is unclear what those issues are and what information is required to resolve them. In this paper, we have investigated PM issues faced by end-users through an empirical study of content on Stack Overflow (SO). We carried out a qualitative …

Snapshot Metrics Are Not Enough: Analyzing Software Repositories With Longitudinal Metrics, Nicholas Synovic, Matt Hyattt, Rohan Sethi, Sohini Thota, Shilpika, Allan J. Miller, Wenxin Jiang, Emmanuel S. Amobi, Austin Pinderski, Konstantin Läufer, Nicholas J. Hayward, Neil Klingensmith, James C. Davis, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Software metrics capture information about software development processes and products. These metrics support decision-making, e.g., in team management or dependency selection. However, existing metrics tools measure only a snapshot of a software project. Little attention has been given to enabling engineers to reason about metric trends over time -- longitudinal metrics that give insight about process, not just product. In this work, we present PRiME (PRocess MEtrics), a tool for computing and visualizing process metrics. The currently-supported metrics include productivity, issue density, issue spoilage, and bus factor. We illustrate the value of longitudinal data and conclude with a research agenda. …

Csc 71010/Csci 77100: Programming Languages/Software Engineering, Raffi Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Raffi Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Working With Control-Flow Graphs, Raffi Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Reengineering And Refactoring, Raffi Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Building An Ast Eclipse Plug-In, Raffi Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

Complete the Building an AST Eclipse Plug-in assignment. Once it works, find a medium-sized open-source Java project to run your plugin on. You may want to explore GitHub. Import the project into Eclipse and run your plug-in on it. Report on the following, which may require you to change some of the source code so that it is convenient:

1. Project name.
2. Project URL.
3. Project description.
4. The number of classes in the project.
5. The number of user-defined methods in the project.
6. For each class, the number of method calls.
7. Statistics about the method calls:
   1. The total number of method calls …

Wala Quick Start, Raffi Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

Setting up and trying the TJ Watson Library for Analysis (WALA).

Evaluation Of Scalable Quantum And Classical Machine Learning For Particle Tracking Classification In Nuclear Physics, Polykarpos Thomadakis, Emmanuel Billias, Nikos Chrisochoides

The Graduate School Posters

Future particle accelerators will exceed by far the current data size (10¹⁵) per experiment, and high- luminosity program(s) will produce more than 300 times as much data. Classical Machine Learning (ML) likely will benefit from new tools based on quantum computing. Particle track reconstruction is the most computationally intensive process in nuclear physics experiments. A combinatorial approach exhaustively tests track measurements (“hits”), represented as images, to identify those that form an actual particle trajectory, which is then used to reconstruct track parameters necessary for the physics experiment. Quantum Machine Learning (QML) could improve this process in multiple ways, …

Scalable Quantum Edge Detection Method For D-Nisq Imaging Simulations: Use Cases From Nuclear Physics And Medical Image Computing, Emmanuel Billias, Nikos Chrisochoides

The Graduate School Posters

Edge Detection is one of the computationally intensive modules in image analysis. It is used to find important landmarks by identifying a significant change (or “edge”) between pixels and voxels. We present a hybrid Quantum Edge Detection method by improving three aspects of an existing widely referenced implementation, which for our use cases generates incomprehensible results for the type and size of images we are required to process. Our contributions are in the pre- and post-processing (i.e., classical phase) and a quantum edge detection circuit: (1) we use space- filling curves to eliminate image artifacts introduced by the image decomposition, …