Software Engineering Commons^™

Five Challenges In Cloud-Enabled Intelligence And Control, Tarek Abdelzaher, Yifan Hao, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Archan Misra, Per Skarin, Shuochao Yao, Dulanga Kaveesha Weerakoon Weerakoon Mudiyanselage, Karl-Erik Arzen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The proliferation of connected embedded devices, or the Internet of Things (IoT), together with recent advances in machine intelligence, will change the profile of future cloud services and introduce a variety of new research problems, both in cloud applications and infrastructure layers. These problems are centered around empowering individually resource-limited devices to exhibit intelligent behavior, both in sensing and control, thanks to a judicious utilization of cloud resources. Cloud services will enable learning from data, performing inference, and executing control, all with assurances on outcomes. The paper discusses such emerging services and outlines five resulting new research directions towards enabling …

Automated Deprecated-Api Usage Update For Android Apps: How Far Are We?, Ferdian Thung, Stefanus Agus Haryono, Lucas Serrano, Gilles Muller, Julia Lawall, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the Android API evolves, some API methods may be deprecated, to be eventually removed. App developers face the challenge of keeping their apps up-to-date, to ensure that the apps work in both older and newer Android versions. Currently, AppEvolve is the state-of-the-art approach to automate such updates, and it has been shown to be quite effective. Still, the number of experiments reported is moderate, involving only API usage updates in 41 usage locations. In this work, we replicate the evaluation of AppEvolve and assess whether its effectiveness is generalizable. Given the set of APIs on which AppEvolve has been …

Stealthy And Efficient Adversarial Attacks Against Deep Reinforcement Learning, Jianwen Sun, Tianwei Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Yan Zheng, Kangjie Chen, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adversarial attacks against conventional Deep Learning (DL) systems and algorithms have been widely studied, and various defenses were proposed. However, the possibility and feasibility of such attacks against Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) are less explored. As DRL has achieved great success in various complex tasks, designing effective adversarial attacks is an indispensable prerequisite towards building robust DRL algorithms. In this paper, we introduce two novel adversarial attack techniques to stealthily and efficiently attack the DRL agents. These two techniques enable an adversary to inject adversarial samples in a minimal set of critical moments while causing the most severe damage to …

Mcdpc: Multi‐Center Density Peak Clustering, Yizhang Wang, Di Wang, Xiaofeng Zhang, Wei Pang, Chunyan Miao, Ah-Hwee Tan, You Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Density peak clustering (DPC) is a recently developed density-based clustering algorithm that achieves competitive performance in a non-iterative manner. DPC is capable of effectively handling clusters with single density peak (single center), i.e., based on DPC’s hypothesis, one and only one data point is chosen as the center of any cluster. However, DPC may fail to identify clusters with multiple density peaks (multi-centers) and may not be able to identify natural clusters whose centers have relatively lower local density. To address these limitations, we propose a novel clustering algorithm based on a hierarchical approach, named multi-center density peak clustering (McDPC). …

Distinguishing Similar Design Pattern Instances Through Temporal Behavior Analysis, Renhao Xiong, David Lo, Bixin Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Design patterns (DPs) encapsulate valuable design knowledge of object-oriented systems. Detecting DP instances helps to reveal the underlying rationale, thus facilitates the maintenance of legacy code. Resulting from the internal similarity of DPs, implementation variants, and missing roles, approaches based on static analysis are unable to well identify structurally similar instances. Existing approaches further employ dynamic techniques to test the runtime behaviors of candidate instances. Automatically verifying the runtime behaviors of DP instances is a challenging task in multiple aspects. This paper presents an approach to improve the verification process of existing approaches. To exercise the runtime behaviors of DP …

Saga: Efficient And Large-Scale Detection Of Near-Miss Clones With Gpu Acceleration, Guanhua Li, Yijian Wu, Chanchal K. Roy, Jun Sun, Xin Peng, Nanjie Zhan, Bin Hu, Jingyi Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Clone detection on large code repository is necessary for many big code analysis tasks. The goal is to provide rich information on identical and similar code across projects. Detecting near-miss code clones on big code is challenging since it requires intensive computing and memory resources as the scale of the source code increases. In this work, we propose SAGA, an efficient suffix-array based code clone detection tool designed with sophisticated GPU optimization. SAGA not only detects Type-l and Type-2 clones but also does so for cross-project large repositories and for the most computationally expensive Type-3 clones. Meanwhile, it also works …

Are The Code Snippets What We Are Searching For? A Benchmark And An Empirical Study On Code Search With Natural-Language Queries, Shuhan Yan, Hang Yu, Yuting Chen, Beijun Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code search methods, especially those that allow programmers to raise queries in a natural language, plays an important role in software development. It helps to improve programmers' productivity by returning sample code snippets from the Internet and/or source-code repositories for their natural-language queries. Meanwhile, there are many code search methods in the literature that support natural-language queries. Difficulties exist in recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of each method and choosing the right one for different usage scenarios, because (1) the implementations of those methods and the datasets for evaluating them are usually not publicly available, and (2) some methods leverage …

Ausearch: Accurate Api Usage Search In Github Repositories With Type Resolution, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, developers use APIs to implement their applications. To know how to use an API, developers may search for code examples that use the API in repositories such as GitHub. Although code search engines have been developed to help developers perform such search, these engines typically only accept a query containing the description of the task that needs to be implemented or the names of the APIs that the developer wants to use without the capability for the developer to specify particular search constraints, such as the class and parameter types that the relevant API should take. These engines are …

Learning-Guided Network Fuzzing For Testing Cyber-Physical System Defences, Yuqi Chen, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun, Sridhar Adepu, Fan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The threat of attack faced by cyber-physical systems (CPSs), especially when they play a critical role in automating public infrastructure, has motivated research into a wide variety of attack defence mechanisms. Assessing their effectiveness is challenging, however, as realistic sets of attacks to test them against are not always available. In this paper, we propose smart fuzzing, an automated, machine learning guided technique for systematically finding 'test suites' of CPS network attacks, without requiring any knowledge of the system's control programs or physical processes. Our approach uses predictive machine learning models and metaheuristic search algorithms to guide the fuzzing of …

Migrating From Monoliths To Cloud-Based Microservices: A Banking Industry Example, Alan Megargel, Venky Shankararaman, David K. Walker

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As more organizations are placing cloud computing at the heart of their digital transformation strategy, it is important that they adopt appropriate architectures and development methodologies to leverage the full benefits of the cloud. A mere “lift and move” approach, where traditional monolith applications are moved to the cloud will not support the demands of digital services. While, monolithic applications may be easier to develop and control, they are inflexible to change and lack the scalability needed for cloud environments. Microservices architecture, which adopts some of the concepts and principles from service-oriented architecture, provides a number of benefits when developing …

Practical Server-Side Indoor Localization: Tackling Cardinality Outlier Challenges, Anuradha Ravi, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In spite of many advances in indoor localization techniques, practical implementation of robust device independent, server-side Wi-Fi localization (i.e., without any active participation of client devices) remains a challenge. This work utilizes an operationally-deployed Wi-Fi based indoor location infrastructure, based on the classical RADAR algorithm, to tackle two such practical challenges: (a) low cardinality, whereby only the associated AP generates sufficient RSSI reports and (b) outlier identification, which requires explicit identification of mobile clients that are attached to the Wi-Fi network but outside the fingerprinted region. To tackle the low-cardinality problem, we present a technique that uses cardinality changes to …

Remote Communication In Wilderness Search And Rescue: Implications For The Design Of Emergency Distributed-Collaboration Tools For Network-Sparse Environments, Brennan Jones, Anthony Tang, Carman Neustaedter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wilderness search and rescue (WSAR) requires careful communication between workers in different locations. To understand the contexts from which WSAR workers communicate and the challenges they face, we interviewed WSAR workers and observed a mock-WSAR scenario. Our findings illustrate that WSAR workers face challenges in maintaining a shared mental model. This is primarily done through distributed communication using two-way radios and cell phones for text and photo messaging; yet both implicit and explicit communication suffer. WSAR workers send messages for various reasons and share different types of information with varying levels of urgency. This warrants the use of multiple communication …

Automatically Categorizing Software Technologies, Mathieu Nassif, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Informal language and the absence of a standard taxonomy for software technologies make it difficult to reliably analyze technology trends on discussion forums and other on-line venues. We propose an automated approach called Witt for the categorization of software technologies (an expanded version of the hypernym discovery problem). Witt takes as input a phrase describing a software technology or concept and returns a general category that describes it (e.g., integrated development environment), along with attributes that further qualify it (commercial, php, etc.). By extension, the approach enables the dynamic creation of lists of all technologies of a given type (e.g., …

Deepdrawing: A Deep Learning Approach To Graph Drawing, Yong Wang, Zhihua Jin, Qianwen Wang, Weiwei Cui, Tengfei Ma, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Node-link diagrams are widely used to facilitate network explorations. However, when using a graph drawing technique to visualize networks, users often need to tune different algorithm-specific parameters iteratively by comparing the corresponding drawing results in order to achieve a desired visual effect. This trial and error process is often tedious and time-consuming, especially for non-expert users. Inspired by the powerful data modelling and prediction capabilities of deep learning techniques, we explore the possibility of applying deep learning techniques to graph drawing. Specifically, we propose using a graph-LSTM-based approach to directly map network structures to graph drawings. Given a set of …

Towards Automated Infographic Design: Deep Learning-Based Auto-Extraction Of Extensible Timeline, Zhutian Chen, Yun Wang, Qianwen Wang, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Designers need to consider not only perceptual effectiveness but also visual styles when creating an infographic. This process can be difficult and time consuming for professional designers, not to mention non-expert users, leading to the demand for automated infographics design. As a first step, we focus on timeline infographics, which have been widely used for centuries. We contribute an end-to-end approach that automatically extracts an extensible timeline template from a bitmap image. Our approach adopts a deconstruction and reconstruction paradigm. At the deconstruction stage, we propose a multi-task deep neural network that simultaneously parses two kinds of information from a …

Emoco: Visual Analysis Of Emotion Coherence In Presentation Videos, Haipeng Zeng, Xingbo Wang, Aoyu Wu, Yong Wang, Quan Li, Alex Endert, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Emotions play a key role in human communication and public presentations. Human emotions are usually expressed through multiple modalities. Therefore, exploring multimodal emotions and their coherence is of great value for understanding emotional expressions in presentations and improving presentation skills. However, manually watching and studying presentation videos is often tedious and time-consuming. There is a lack of tool support to help conduct an efficient and in-depth multi-level analysis. Thus, in this paper, we introduce EmoCo, an interactive visual analytics system to facilitate efficient analysis of emotion coherence across facial, text, and audio modalities in presentation videos. Our visualization system features …

A Survey Of Spatial Crowdsourcing, Yongxin Tong, Zimu Zhou, Yuxiang Zeng, Lei Chen, Cyrus Shahabi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Crowdsourcing is a computing paradigm where humans are actively involved in a computing task, especially for tasks that are intrinsically easier for humans than for computers. Spatial crowdsourcing (SC) is an increasing popular category of crowdsourcing in the era of mobile Internet and sharing economy, where tasks are spatiotemporal and must be completed at a specific location and time. In fact, spatial crowdsourcing has stimulated a series of recent industrial successes including sharing economy for urban services (Uber and Gigwalk) and spatiotemporal data collection (OpenStreetMap and Waze). This survey dives deep into the challenges and techniques brought by the unique …

Planningvis: A Visual Analytics Approach To Production Planning In Smart Factories, Dong Sun, Renfei Huang, Yuanzhe Chen, Yong Wang, Jia Zeng, Mingxuan Yuan, Ting-Chuen Pong, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Production planning in the manufacturing industry is crucial for fully utilizing factory resources (e.g., machines, raw materials and workers) and reducing costs. With the advent of industry 4.0, plenty of data recording the status of factory resources have been collected and further involved in production planning, which brings an unprecedented opportunity to understand, evaluate and adjust complex production plans through a data-driven approach. However, developing a systematic analytics approach for production planning is challenging due to the large volume of production data, the complex dependency between products, and unexpected changes in the market and the plant. Previous studies only provide …

Memory And Resource Leak Defects And Their Repairs In Java Projects, Mohammadreza Ghanavati, Diego Costa, Janos Seboek, David Lo, Artur Andrzejak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite huge software engineering efforts and programming language support, resource and memory leaks are still a troublesome issue, even in memory-managed languages such as Java. Understanding the properties of leak-inducing defects, how the leaks manifest, and how they are repaired is an essential prerequisite for designing better approaches for avoidance, diagnosis, and repair of leak-related bugs. We conduct a detailed empirical study on 452 issues from 10 large opensource Java projects. The study proposes taxonomies for the leak types, for the defects causing them, and for the repair actions. We investigate, under several aspects, the distributions within each taxonomy and …

Optimal Management Of Virtual Infrastructures Under Flexible Cloud Service Agreements, Zhiling Guo, Jin Li, Ram Ramesh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A cloud service agreement entails the provisioning of a required set of virtual infrastructure resources at a specified level of availability to a client. The agreement also lays out the price charged to the client and a penalty to the provider when the assured availability is not met. The availability assurance involves backup resource provisioning, and the provider needs to allocate backups cost-effectively by balancing the resource-provisioning costs with the potential penalty costs. We develop stochastic dynamic optimization models of the backup resource-provisioning problem, leading to cost-effective resource-management policies in different practical settings. We present two sets of dynamic provisioning …

Multimodal Mobile Sensing Systems For Physiological And Psychological Assessment, Nguyen Phan Sinh Huynh

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Sensing systems for monitoring physiological and psychological states have been studied extensively in both academic and industry research for different applications across various domains. However, most of the studies have been done in the lab environment with controlled and complicated sensor setup, which is only suitable for serious healthcare applications in which the obtrusiveness and immobility can be compromised in a trade-off for accurate clinical screening or diagnosing. The recent substantial development of mobile devices with embedded miniaturized sensors are now allowing new opportunities to adapt and develop such sensing systems in the mobile context. The ability to sense physiological …

Enhanced Gesture Sensing Using Battery-Less Wearable Motion Trackers, Huy Vu Tran

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Wearable devices are gaining in popularity, but are presently used primarily for productivity-related functions (such as calling people or discreetly receiving notifications) or for physiological sensing. However, wearable devices are still not widely used for a wider set of sensing-based applications, even though their potential is enormous. Wearable devices can enable a variety of novel applications. For example, wrist-worn and/or finger-worn devices could be viable controllers for real-time AR/VR games and applications, and can be used for real-time gestural tracking to support rehabilitative patient therapy or training of sports personnel. There are, however, a key set of impediments towards realizing …

Twenty Years Of Open Source Software: From Skepticism To Mainstream, Gregorio Robles, Igor Steinmacher, Paul Adams, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open source software (OSS) has conquered the software world. You can see it nearly everywhere, from Internet infrastructure to mobile phones to the desktop. In addition to that, although many OSS practices were viewed with skepticism 20 years ago, several have become mainstream in software engineering today: from development tools such as Git to practices such as modern code reviews.

Gesture-Based Profiling Of Commonplace Lifestyle And Physical Activity Behaviors, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The widespread availability of sensors on personal devices (e.g., smartphones, smartwatches) and other cheap, commoditized IoT devices in the environment has opened up the opportunity for developing applications that capture and enhance various lifestyle-driven daily activities of individuals. Moreover, there is a growing trend of leveraging ubiquitous computing technologies to improve physical health and wellbeing. Several of the lifestyle monitoring applications rely primarily on the capability of recognizing contextually relevant human movements, actions and gestures. As such, gesture recognition techniques, and gesture-based analytics have emerged as a fundamental component for realizing personalized lifestyle applications.

This thesis explores how such wealth …

Compositional Verification Of Heap-Manipulating Programs Through Property-Guided Learning, Long H. Pham, Jun Sun, Quang Loc Le

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Analyzing and verifying heap-manipulating programs automatically is challenging. A key for fighting the complexity is to develop compositional methods. For instance, many existing verifiers for heap-manipulating programs require user-provided specification for each function in the program in order to decompose the verification problem. The requirement, however, often hinders the users from applying such tools. To overcome the issue, we propose to automatically learn heap-related program invariants in a property-guided way for each function call. The invariants are learned based on the memory graphs observed during test execution and improved through memory graph mutation. We implemented a prototype of our approach …

Treecaps: Tree-Structured Capsule Networks For Program Source Code Processing, Vinoj Jayasundara, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Program comprehension is a fundamental task in software development and maintenance processes. Software developers often need to understand a large amount of existing code before they can develop new features or fix bugs in existing programs. Being able to process programming language code automatically and provide summaries of code functionality accurately can significantly help developers to reduce time spent in code navigation and understanding, and thus increase productivity. Different from natural language articles, source code in programming languages often follows rigid syntactical structures and there can exist dependencies among code elements that are located far away from each other through …

Finding Needles In A Haystack: Leveraging Co-Change Dependencies To Recommend Refactorings, Marcos César De Oliveira, Davi Freitas, Rodrigo Bonifacio, Gustavo Pinto, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A fine-grained co-change dependency arises when two fine-grained source-code entities, e.g., a method,change frequently together. This kind of dependency is relevant when considering remodularization efforts (e.g., to keep methods that change together in the same class). However, existing approaches forrecommending refactorings that change software decomposition (such as a move method) do not explorethe use of fine-grained co-change dependencies. In this paper we present a novel approach for recommending move method and move field refactorings, which removes co-change dependencies and evolutionary smells, a particular type of dependency that arise when fine-grained entities that belong to different classes frequently change together. First …

Pieces Of Contextual Information Suitable For Predicting Co-Changes? An Empirical Study, Igor Scaliante Wiese, Rodrigo Takashi Kuroda, Igor Steinmacher, Gustavo A. Oliva, Reginaldo Ré, Christoph Treude, Marco Aurélio Gerosa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Models that predict software artifact co-changes have been proposed to assist developers in altering a software system and they often rely on coupling. However, developers have not yet widely adopted these approaches, presumably because of the high number of false recommendations. In this work, we conjecture that the contextual information related to software changes, which is collected from issues (e.g., issue type and reporter), developers’ communication (e.g., number of issue comments, issue discussants and words in the discussion), and commit metadata (e.g., number of lines added, removed, and modified), improves the accuracy of co-change prediction. We built customized prediction models …

Salience-Aware Adaptive Resonance Theory For Large-Scale Sparse Data Clustering, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sparse data is known to pose challenges to cluster analysis, as the similarity between data tends to be ill-posed in the high-dimensional Hilbert space. Solutions in the literature typically extend either k-means or spectral clustering with additional steps on representation learning and/or feature weighting. However, adding these usually introduces new parameters and increases computational cost, thus inevitably lowering the robustness of these algorithms when handling massive ill-represented data. To alleviate these issues, this paper presents a class of self-organizing neural networks, called the salience-aware adaptive resonance theory (SA-ART) model. SA-ART extends Fuzzy ART with measures for cluster-wise salient feature modeling. …

Guest Editorial: Special Issue On Software Engineering For Mobile Applications, Sebastiano Panichella, Fabio Palomba, David Lo, Meiyappan Nagappan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As Andreessen stated “software is eating the world” (Andreessen 2011). Most of todays industries, from engineering, manufacturing, logistics to health, are run on enterprise software applications and can efficiently automate the analysis and manipulation of several, heterogeneous types of data. One of the most prominent examples of such software diffusion is represented by the widespread adoption of mobile applications. Indeed, during the recent years, the Global App Economy experienced unprecedented growth, driven by the increasing usage of apps and by the greater adoption of mobile devices (e.g., smartphone) around the globe. This mobile application market, which is expected in few …