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Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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Full-Text Articles in Software Engineering

Semantic Understanding Of Smart Contracts: Executable Operational Semantics Of Solidity, Jiao Jiao, Shuanglong Kan, Shang Wei Lin, David Sanan, Yang Liu, Jun Sun May 2020

Semantic Understanding Of Smart Contracts: Executable Operational Semantics Of Solidity, Jiao Jiao, Shuanglong Kan, Shang Wei Lin, David Sanan, Yang Liu, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bitcoin has been a popular research topic recently. Ethereum (ETH), a second generation of cryptocurrency, extends Bitcoin's design by offering a Turing-complete programming language called Solidity to develop smart contracts. Smart contracts allow creditable execution of contracts on EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) without third parties. Developing correct and secure smart contracts is challenging due to the decentralized computation nature of the blockchain. Buggy smart contracts may lead to huge financial loss. Furthermore, smart contracts are very hard, if not impossible, to patch once they are deployed. Thus, there is a recent surge of interest in analyzing and verifying smart contracts. …


Chaff From The Wheat: Characterizing And Determining Valid Bug Reports, Yuanrui Fan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ahmed E. Hassan May 2020

Chaff From The Wheat: Characterizing And Determining Valid Bug Reports, Yuanrui Fan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ahmed E. Hassan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers use bug reports to triage and fix bugs. When triaging a bug report, developers must decide whether the bug report is valid (i.e., a real bug). A large amount of bug reports are submitted every day, with many of them end up being invalid reports. Manually determining valid bug report is a difficult and tedious task. Thus, an approach that can automatically analyze the validity of a bug report and determine whether a report is valid can help developers prioritize their triaging tasks and avoid wasting time and effort on invalid bug reports. In this study, motivated by the …


Code Duplication On Stack Overflow, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude May 2020

Code Duplication On Stack Overflow, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the unarguable importance of Stack Overflow (SO) for the daily work of many software developers and despite existing knowledge about the impact of code duplication on software maintainability, the prevalence and implications of code clones on SO have not yet received the attention they deserve. In this paper, we motivate why studies on code duplication within SO are needed and how existing studies on code reuse differ from this new research direction. We present similarities and differences between code clones in general and code clones on SO and point to open questions that need to be addressed to be …


Posit: Simultaneously Tagging Natural And Programming Languages, Profir-Petru Pârțachi, Santanu Dash, Christoph Treude, Earl T. Barr May 2020

Posit: Simultaneously Tagging Natural And Programming Languages, Profir-Petru Pârțachi, Santanu Dash, Christoph Treude, Earl T. Barr

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developers use a mix of source code and natural language text to communicate with each other: Stack Overflow and Developer mailing lists abound with this mixed text. Tagging this mixed text is essential for making progress on two seminal software engineering problems — traceability, and reuse via precise extraction of code snippets from mixed text. In this paper, we borrow code-switching techniques from Natural Language Processing and adapt them to apply to mixed text to solve two problems: language identification and token tagging. Our technique, POSIT, simultaneously provides abstract syntax tree tags for source code tokens, part-of-speech tags for …


Memlock: Memory Usage Guided Fuzzing, Cheng Wen, Haijun Wang, Yuekang Li, Shengchao Qin, Yang Liu, Zhiwu Xu, Hongxu Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Geguang Pu, Ting Liu May 2020

Memlock: Memory Usage Guided Fuzzing, Cheng Wen, Haijun Wang, Yuekang Li, Shengchao Qin, Yang Liu, Zhiwu Xu, Hongxu Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Geguang Pu, Ting Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Uncontrolled memory consumption is a kind of critical software security weaknesses. It can also become a security-critical vulnerability when attackers can take control of the input to consume a large amount of memory and launch a Denial-of-Service attack. However, detecting such vulnerability is challenging, as the state-of-the-art fuzzing techniques focus on the code coverage but not memory consumption. To this end, we propose a memory usage guided fuzzing technique, named MemLock, to generate the excessive memory consumption inputs and trigger uncontrolled memory consumption bugs. The fuzzing process is guided with memory consumption information so that our approach is general and …


Typestate-Guided Fuzzer For Discovering Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities, Haijun Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Yi Li, Cheng Wen, Yuekang Li, Yang Liu, Shengchao Qin, Hongxu Chen, Yulei Sui May 2020

Typestate-Guided Fuzzer For Discovering Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities, Haijun Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Yi Li, Cheng Wen, Yuekang Li, Yang Liu, Shengchao Qin, Hongxu Chen, Yulei Sui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing coverage-based fuzzers usually use the individual control flow graph (CFG) edge coverage to guide the fuzzing process, which has shown great potential in finding vulnerabilities. However, CFG edge coverage is not effective in discovering vulnerabilities such as use-after-free (UaF). This is because, to trigger UaF vulnerabilities, one needs not only to cover individual edges, but also to traverse some (long) sequence of edges in a particular order, which is challenging for existing fuzzers. To this end, we propose to model UaF vulnerabilities as typestate properties, and develop a typestate-guided fuzzer, named UAFL, for discovering vulnerabilities violating typestate properties. Given …


Rankbooster: Visual Analysis Of Ranking Predictions, Abishek Puri, Bon Kyung Ku, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu May 2020

Rankbooster: Visual Analysis Of Ranking Predictions, Abishek Puri, Bon Kyung Ku, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ranking is a natural and ubiquitous way to facilitate decision-making in various applications. However, different rankings are often used for the same set of entities, with each ranking method placing emphasis on different factors. These factors can also be multi-dimensional in nature, compounding the problem. This complexity can make it challenging for an entity which is being ranked to understand what they can do to improve their rankings, and to analyze the effect of changes in various factors to their overall rank. In this paper, we present RankBooster, a novel visual analytics system to help users conveniently investigate ranking predictions. …


Early Detection Of Mild Cognitive Impairment With In-Home Sensors To Monitor Behavior Patterns In Community-Dwelling Senior Citizens In Singapore: Cross-Sectional Feasibility Study, Iris Rawtaer, Rathi Mahendran, Ee Heok Kua, Hwee-Pink Tan, Hwee Xian Tan, Tih-Shih Lee, Tze Pin Ng May 2020

Early Detection Of Mild Cognitive Impairment With In-Home Sensors To Monitor Behavior Patterns In Community-Dwelling Senior Citizens In Singapore: Cross-Sectional Feasibility Study, Iris Rawtaer, Rathi Mahendran, Ee Heok Kua, Hwee-Pink Tan, Hwee Xian Tan, Tih-Shih Lee, Tze Pin Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: Dementia is a global epidemic and incurs substantial burden on the affected families and the health care system. A window of opportunity for intervention is the predementia stage known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Individuals often present to services late in the course of their disease and more needs to be done for early detection; sensor technology is a potential method for detection.Objective: The aim of this cross-sectional study was to establish the feasibility and acceptability of utilizing sensors in the homes of senior citizens to detect changes in behaviors unobtrusively.Methods: We recruited 59 community-dwelling seniors (aged >65 years …


Towards Characterizing Adversarial Defects Of Deep Learning Software From The Lens Of Uncertainty, Xiyue Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Xiaoning Du, Qiang Hu, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao, Meng Sun May 2020

Towards Characterizing Adversarial Defects Of Deep Learning Software From The Lens Of Uncertainty, Xiyue Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Xiaoning Du, Qiang Hu, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao, Meng Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past decade, deep learning (DL) has been successfully applied to many industrial domain-specific tasks. However, the current state-of-the-art DL software still suffers from quality issues, which raises great concern especially in the context of safety- and security-critical scenarios. Adversarial examples (AEs) represent a typical and important type of defects needed to be urgently addressed, on which a DL software makes incorrect decisions. Such defects occur through either intentional attack or physical-world noise perceived by input sensors, potentially hindering further industry deployment. The intrinsic uncertainty nature of deep learning decisions can be a fundamental reason for its incorrect behavior. …


Automated Identification Of Libraries From Vulnerability Data, Chen Yang, Andrew Santosa, Asankhaya Sharma, David Lo May 2020

Automated Identification Of Libraries From Vulnerability Data, Chen Yang, Andrew Santosa, Asankhaya Sharma, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) has gained traction in recent years with a number of commercial offerings from various companies. SCA involves vulnerability curation process where a group of security researchers, using various data sources, populate a database of open-source library vulnerabilities, which is used by a scanner to inform the end users of vulnerable libraries used by their applications. One of the data sources used is the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The key challenge faced by the security researchers here is in figuring out which libraries are related to each of the reported vulnerability in NVD. In this article, we …


Designing A Smart Internet Of Things Solution For Point Of Use Water Filtration Management System In Residential, Commercial And Public Settings, Tristan Lim, Hwee-Pink Tan, Chin Sin Ong, Rahul Belani, Siddhant S. K. Agrawal Apr 2020

Designing A Smart Internet Of Things Solution For Point Of Use Water Filtration Management System In Residential, Commercial And Public Settings, Tristan Lim, Hwee-Pink Tan, Chin Sin Ong, Rahul Belani, Siddhant S. K. Agrawal

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The use of water filtration Point-of-Use (POU) systems are extensive, ranging from water dispensers in public estates, to household POU water systems. Manufacturers typically recommend filtration cartridges to be changed (i) after their useful life, or (ii) when the water flow volume have exceeded certain capacity, whichever is earlier. However, filtration mechanisms are typically not changed with sufficient regularity. Overused filters can result in negative health effects, over and above the deterioration and loss of filtration benefits of the POU water system. Presently most existing water purification systems do not have smart connected Internet of Things (IoT) means of informing …


Understanding The Relation Between Repeat Developer Interactions And Bug Resolution Times In Large Open Source Ecosystems: A Multisystem Study, Subhajit Datta, Reshma Roychoudhuri, Subhashis Majumder Apr 2020

Understanding The Relation Between Repeat Developer Interactions And Bug Resolution Times In Large Open Source Ecosystems: A Multisystem Study, Subhajit Datta, Reshma Roychoudhuri, Subhashis Majumder

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large‐scale software systems are being increasingly built by distributed teams of developers who interact across geographies and time zones. Ensuring smooth knowledge transfer and the percolation of skills within and across such teams remain key challenges for organizations. Towards addressing this challenge, organizations often grapple with questions around whether and how repeat collaborations between members of a team relate to outcomes of important activities. In the context of this paper, the word ‘repeat interaction’ does not imply a greater number of interactions; it refers to repeat interaction between a pair of developers who have collaborated before. In this paper, we …


A Generalized Formal Semantic Framework For Smart Contracts, Jiao Jiao, Shang-Wei Lin, Jun Sun Apr 2020

A Generalized Formal Semantic Framework For Smart Contracts, Jiao Jiao, Shang-Wei Lin, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts can be regarded as one of the most popular blockchain-based applications. The decentralized nature of the blockchain introduces vulnerabilities absent in other programs. Furthermore, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to patch a smart contract after it has been deployed. Therefore, smart contracts must be formally verified before they are deployed on the blockchain to avoid attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities. There is a recent surge of interest in analyzing and verifying smart contracts. While most of the existing works either focus on EVM bytecode or translate Solidity contracts into programs in intermediate languages for analysis and verification, …


Google Summer Of Code: Student Motivations And Contributions, Jefferson O. Silva, Igor Scaliante Wiese, Daniel M. Germán, Christoph Treude, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, Igor Steinmacher Apr 2020

Google Summer Of Code: Student Motivations And Contributions, Jefferson O. Silva, Igor Scaliante Wiese, Daniel M. Germán, Christoph Treude, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, Igor Steinmacher

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Several open source software (OSS) projects participate in engagement programs like Summers of Code expecting to foster newcomers’ onboarding and receive contributions. However, scant empirical evidence identifies why students join such programs. In this paper, we study the well-established Google Summer of Code (GSoC), which is a 3-month OSS engagement program that offers stipends and mentorship to students willing to contribute to OSS projects. We combined a survey (of students and mentors) and interviews (of students) to understand what motivates students to enter GSoC. Our results show that students enter GSoC for an enriching experience, and not necessarily to become …


How To And How Much? Teaching Ethics In An Interaction Design Course, Bimlesh Wadhwa, Eng Lieh Ouh, Benjamin Gan Apr 2020

How To And How Much? Teaching Ethics In An Interaction Design Course, Bimlesh Wadhwa, Eng Lieh Ouh, Benjamin Gan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

How much is sufficient and how should one teach ethics in an Interaction Design curriculum in undergraduate computing program has been a point of dilemma for many HCI educators. We conducted a preliminary study using a mixed method to gather perception on ethics in our interaction design courses at two of the leading Singapore Universities. We answer three research questions specific to an undergraduate HCI course: Is there a need for ethics? Is there sufficient ethics coverage? and how to teach ethics? We surveyed 140 students and interviewed six teachers in two Singapore Universities. Our findings suggest that 92% of …


Maptransfer: Urban Air Quality Map Generation For Downscaled Sensor Deployments, Yun Cheng, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Lothar Thiele Apr 2020

Maptransfer: Urban Air Quality Map Generation For Downscaled Sensor Deployments, Yun Cheng, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dense deployments of commodity air quality sensors have proven effective to provide spatially-resolved information on urban air pollution in real-time. However, long-term operation of a dense sensor deployment incurs enormous maintenance expenses and efforts. A cost-effective alternative is to first collect measurements with an initial dense deployment and then rely on a small subset of sensors for air quality map generation. To avoid dramatic accuracy degradation in air quality maps generated using the downscaled sparse deployment, we design MapTransfer, an air quality map generation scheme which augments the current sensor measurements from the downscaled sparse deployment with appropriate historical data …


Voicecoach: Interactive Evidence-Based Training For Voice Modulation Skills In Public Speaking, Xingbo Wang, Haipeng Zeng, Yong Wang, Aoyu Wu, Zhida Sun, Xiaojuan Ma, Qu Huamin Apr 2020

Voicecoach: Interactive Evidence-Based Training For Voice Modulation Skills In Public Speaking, Xingbo Wang, Haipeng Zeng, Yong Wang, Aoyu Wu, Zhida Sun, Xiaojuan Ma, Qu Huamin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The modulation of voice properties, such as pitch, volume, and speed, is crucial for delivering a successful public speech. However, it is challenging to master different voice modulation skills. Though many guidelines are available, they are often not practical enough to be applied in different public speaking situations, especially for novice speakers. We present VoiceCoach, an interactive evidence-based approach to facilitate the effective training of voice modulation skills. Specifically, we have analyzed the voice modulation skills from 2623 high-quality speeches (i.e., TED Talks) and use them as the benchmark dataset. Given a voice input, VoiceCoach automatically recommends good voice modulation …


Dfseer: A Visual Analytics Approach To Facilitate Model Selection For Demand Forecasting, Dong Sun, Zezheng Feng, Yuanzhe Chen, Yong Wang, Jia Zeng, Mingxuan Yuan, Ting-Chuen Pong, Huamin Qu Apr 2020

Dfseer: A Visual Analytics Approach To Facilitate Model Selection For Demand Forecasting, Dong Sun, Zezheng Feng, Yuanzhe Chen, Yong Wang, Jia Zeng, Mingxuan Yuan, Ting-Chuen Pong, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Selecting an appropriate model to forecast product demand is critical to the manufacturing industry. However, due to the data complexity, market uncertainty and users’ demanding requirements for the model, it is challenging for demand analysts to select a proper model. Although existing model selection methods can reduce the manual burden to some extent, they often fail to present model performance details on individual products and reveal the potential risk of the selected model. This paper presents DFSeer, an interactive visualization system to conduct reliable model selection for demand forecasting based on the products with similar historical demand. It supports model …


Techniques To Visualize Occluded Graph Elements For 2.5d Map Editing, Kazuyuki Fujita, Daigo Hayashi, Kotaro Hara, Kazuki Takashima, Yoshifumi Kitamura Apr 2020

Techniques To Visualize Occluded Graph Elements For 2.5d Map Editing, Kazuyuki Fujita, Daigo Hayashi, Kotaro Hara, Kazuki Takashima, Yoshifumi Kitamura

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose an interface with two novel techniques to visualize occluded graph nodes and edges that help the user edit map data with a 2.5D geographical structure (e.g., multi-floor indoor maps). We first design a visualization technique —Repel Signification— that employs micro-animation to signify the graph elements that are overlapping with each other (and potentially erroneous). We also design a technique that enables the user to edit the occluded components with Expansion Interaction, which simultaneously visualizes both in-floor and across-floor occluded connections between the map elements. The combination of the two methods would enable the map editors (non-experts) to effectively …


Heartquake: Accurate Low-Cost Non-Invasive Ecg Monitoring Using Bed-Mounted Geophones, Jaeyeon Park, Hyeon Cho, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Jeonggil Ko Mar 2020

Heartquake: Accurate Low-Cost Non-Invasive Ecg Monitoring Using Bed-Mounted Geophones, Jaeyeon Park, Hyeon Cho, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Jeonggil Ko

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This work presents HeartQuake, a low cost, accurate, non-intrusive, geophone-based sensing system for extracting accurate electrocardiogram (ECG) patterns using heartbeat vibrations that penetrate through a bed mattress. In HeartQuake, cardiac activity-originated vibration patterns are captured on a geophone and sent to a server, where the data is filtered to remove the sensor's internal noise and passed on to a bidirectional long short term memory (Bi-LSTM) deep learning model for ECG waveform estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution that can non-intrusively provide accurate ECG waveform characteristics instead of more basic abstract features such as the …


Ifix: Fixing Concurrency Bugs While They Are Introduced, Zan Wang, Haichi Wang, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Haoyu Wang, Junjie Chen Mar 2020

Ifix: Fixing Concurrency Bugs While They Are Introduced, Zan Wang, Haichi Wang, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Haoyu Wang, Junjie Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Concurrency bugs are notoriously hard to identify and fix. A systematic way of avoiding concurrency bugs is to design and implement a locking policy that consistently guards all shared variables. Concurrency bugs thus can be viewed as the result of an illy-designed or poorly implemented locking policy. The trouble is that the locking policy is often not documented, which makes debugging concurrency bugs clueless. We argue that it is too late to debug concurrency bugs after programming is done and we instead detect and fix them while they are being implemented. In this work, we propose an approach named IFIX …


An Empirical Study On Correlation Between Coverage And Robustness For Deep Neural Networks, Yizhen Dong, Peixin Zhang, Jingyi Wang, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Jianye Hao, Xinyu Wang, Li Wang, Jinsong Dong, Ting Dai Mar 2020

An Empirical Study On Correlation Between Coverage And Robustness For Deep Neural Networks, Yizhen Dong, Peixin Zhang, Jingyi Wang, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Jianye Hao, Xinyu Wang, Li Wang, Jinsong Dong, Ting Dai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep neural networks (DNN) are increasingly applied in safety-critical systems, e.g., for face recognition, autonomous car control and malware detection. It is also shown that DNNs are subject to attacks such as adversarial perturbation and thus must be properly tested. Many coverage criteria for DNN since have been proposed, inspired by the success of code coverage criteria for software programs. The expectation is that if a DNN is well tested (and retrained) according to such coverage criteria, it is more likely to be robust. In this work, we conduct an empirical study to evaluate the relationship between coverage, robustness and …


Learning Fault Models Of Cyber Physical Systems, Teck Ping Khoo, Jun Sun, Sudipta Chattopadhyay Mar 2020

Learning Fault Models Of Cyber Physical Systems, Teck Ping Khoo, Jun Sun, Sudipta Chattopadhyay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) comprise sensors and actuators which interact with the physical environment over a computer network to achieve some control objective. Bugs in CPSs can have severe consequences as CPSs are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications. Debugging CPSs is therefore an important real world problem. Traces from a CPS can be lengthy and are usually linked to different parts of the system, making debugging CPSs a complex and time-consuming undertaking. It is challenging to isolate a component without running the whole CPS. In this work, we propose a model-based approach to debugging a CPS. For each CPS property, …


Capacitor-Based Activity Sensing For Kinetic-Powered Wearable Iots, Guohao Lan, Dong Ma, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu Mar 2020

Capacitor-Based Activity Sensing For Kinetic-Powered Wearable Iots, Guohao Lan, Dong Ma, Weitao Xu, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose the use of the conventional energy storage component, i.e., capacitor, in the kinetic-powered wearable IoTs as the sensor to detect human activities. Since activities accumulate energy in the capacitor at different rates, the charging rate of the capacitor can be used to detect the activities. The key advantage of the proposed capacitor-based activity sensing mechanism, called CapSense, is that it obviates the need for sampling the motion signal at a high rate, and thus, significantly reduces power consumption of the wearable device. The challenge we face is that capacitors are inherently non-linear energy accumulators, which leads to significant …


Automated Synthesis Of Local Time Requirement For Service Composition, Étienne André, Tian Huat Tan, Manman Chen, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong Mar 2020

Automated Synthesis Of Local Time Requirement For Service Composition, Étienne André, Tian Huat Tan, Manman Chen, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Service composition aims at achieving a business goal by composing existing service-based applications or components. The response time of a service is crucial, especially in time-critical business environments, which is often stated as a clause in service-level agreements between service providers and service users. To meet the guaranteed response time requirement of a composite service, it is important to select a feasible set of component services such that their response time will collectively satisfy the response time requirement of the composite service. In this work, we use the BPEL modeling language that aims at specifying Web services. We extend it …


S2n2: An Interpretive Semantic Structure Attention Neural Network For Trajectory Classification, Canghong Jin, Ting Tao, Xianzhe Luo, Zemin Liu, Minghui Wu Mar 2020

S2n2: An Interpretive Semantic Structure Attention Neural Network For Trajectory Classification, Canghong Jin, Ting Tao, Xianzhe Luo, Zemin Liu, Minghui Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We have witnessed a rapid growth over past decades in sensor data mining (SDM), which aims at extracting valuable information automatically from large repositories of moving activity data. One of the significant SDM tasks is identifying humans through their transit modes using a variety of user-tracking systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, distinguishing traces of users and understanding their behaviors are difficult tasks in most real-life cases for the following reasons: 1) activity data containing both temporal and spatial contexts are of high order and sparse; 2) living patterns are not as regular as expected, and the route …


Understanding Wikipedia As A Resource For Opportunistic Learning Of Computing Concepts, Martin P. Robillard, Christoph Treude Mar 2020

Understanding Wikipedia As A Resource For Opportunistic Learning Of Computing Concepts, Martin P. Robillard, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Posts on on-line forums where programmers look for information often include links to Wikipedia when it can be assumed the reader will not be familiar with the linked terms. A Wikipedia article will thus often be the first exposure to a new computing concept for a novice programmer. We conducted an exploratory study with 18 novice programmers by asking them to read a Wikipedia article on a common computing concept that was new to them, while using the think-aloud protocol. We performed a qualitative analysis of the session transcripts to better understand the experience of the novice programmer learning a …


Predicting Student Performance In Interactive Online Question Pools Using Mouse Interaction Features, Huan Wei, Haotian Li, Meng Xia, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu Mar 2020

Predicting Student Performance In Interactive Online Question Pools Using Mouse Interaction Features, Huan Wei, Haotian Li, Meng Xia, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling student learning and further predicting the performance is a well-established task in online learning and is crucial to personalized education by recommending different learning resources to different students based on their needs. Interactive online question pools (e.g., educational game platforms), an important component of online education, have become increasingly popular in recent years. However, most existing work on student performance prediction targets at online learning platforms with a well-structured curriculum, predefined question order and accurate knowledge tags provided by domain experts. It remains unclear how to conduct student performance prediction in interactive online question pools without such well-organized question …


W8-Scope: Fine-Grained, Practical Monitoring Of Weight Stack-Based Exercises, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan Mar 2020

W8-Scope: Fine-Grained, Practical Monitoring Of Weight Stack-Based Exercises, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fine-grained, unobtrusive monitoring of gym exercises can help users track their own exercise routines and also provide corrective feedback. We propose W8-Scope, a system that uses a simple magnetic-cum-accelerometer sensor, mounted on the weight stack of gym exercise machines, to infer various attributes of gym exercise behavior. More specifically, using multiple machine learning models, W8-Scope helps identify who is exercising, what exercise she is doing, how much weight she is lifting, and whether she is committing any common mistakes. Real world studies, conducted with 50 subjects performing 14 different exercises over 103 distinct sessions in two gyms, show that W8-Scope …


Securing Bring-Your-Own-Device (Byod) Programming Exams, Oka Kurniawan, Norman Lee, Christopher M. Poskitt Mar 2020

Securing Bring-Your-Own-Device (Byod) Programming Exams, Oka Kurniawan, Norman Lee, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional pen and paper exams are inadequate for modern university programming courses as they are misaligned with pedagogies and learning objectives that target practical coding ability. Unfortunately, many institutions lack the resources or space to be able to run assessments in dedicated computer labs. This has motivated the development of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) exam formats, allowing students to program in a similar environment to how they learnt, but presenting instructors with significant additional challenges in preventing plagiarism and cheating. In this paper, we describe a BYOD exam solution based on lockdown browsers, software which temporarily turns students' laptops into secure workstations …