Software Engineering Commons^™

Accurate Developer Recommendation For Bug Resolution, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xinyu Wang, Bo Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug resolution refers to the activity that developers perform to diagnose, fix, test, and document bugs during software development and maintenance. It is a collaborative activity among developers who contribute their knowledge, ideas, and expertise to resolve bugs. Given a bug report, we would like to recommend the set of bug resolvers that could potentially contribute their knowledge to fix it. We refer to this problem as developer recommendation for bug resolution. In this paper, we propose a new and accurate method named DevRec for the developer recommendation problem. DevRec is a composite method which performs two kinds of analysis: …

Automated Library Recommendation, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Julia Lawall

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many third party libraries are available to be downloaded and used. Using such libraries can reduce development time and make the developed software more reliable. However, developers are often unaware of suitable libraries to be used for their projects and thus they miss out on these benefits. To help developers better take advantage of the available libraries, we propose a new technique that automatically recommends libraries to developers. Our technique takes as input the set of libraries that an application currently uses, and recommends other libraries that are likely to be relevant. We follow a hybrid approach that combines association …

Creating Adaptive Quests To Support Personalized Learning Experiences When Learning Software Languages, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past three years the authors have been developing and refining an online practicing platform called SingPath, which enables users to practice writing code in various software languages. The most recent feature to be released is a Quest mode that encourages users by showing short video clips each time a user solves five problems. In addition, users are able to choose whether to play through these quests on easy, medium, or hard levels of difficulty. The ability for users to customize their game play enables them to modify the difficulty of the experience and ideally self-regulate how frustrating or …

Livelabs: Initial Reflections On Building A Large-Scale Mobile Behavioral Experimentation Testbed, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We believe that, for successful adoption of novel mobile technologies and applications, it is important to be able to test them under real usage patterns, and with real users. To implement this vision, we present our initial effort in building LiveLabs, a large-scale mobile testbed for in-situ experimentation. LiveLabs is unique in two aspects. First, LiveLabs operates on a scale much larger than most research testbeds— it is being deployed in four different public spaces in Singapore (a university campus, a shopping mall, an airport and a leisure resort), and is expected to have a pool of over 30,000 opt-in …

Skyhunter: A Multi-Surface Environment For Supporting Oil And Gas Exploration, Teddy Seyed, Mario Costa Sousa, Frank Maurer, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The process of oil and gas exploration and its result, the decision to drill for oil in a specific location, relies on a number of distinct but related domains. These domains require effective collaboration to come to a decision that is both cost effective and maintains the integrity of the environment. As we show in this paper, many of the existing technologies and practices that support the oil and gas exploration process overlook fundamental user issues such as collaboration, interaction and visualization. The work presented in this paper is based upon a design process that involved expert users from an …

Automatic Recovery Of Root Causes From Bug-Fixing Changes, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

What is the root cause of this failure? This question is often among the first few asked by software debuggers when they try to address issues raised by a bug report. Root cause is the erroneous lines of code that cause a chain of erroneous program states eventually leading to the failure. Bug tracking and source control systems only record the symptoms (e.g., bug reports) and treatments of a bug (e.g., committed changes that fix the bug), but not its root cause. Many treatments contain non-essential changes, which are intermingled with root causes. Reverse engineering the root cause of a …

Adaptive Gameplay For Programming Practice, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past four years, we have collaborated to develop a set of online games to enable users to practice software languages in a self-directed manner and as part of a class. Recently we introduced a new adaptive difficulty feature that enables players to self-regulate the difficulty of the games they are playing to practice. These new features also provide additional information to further adapt the problem content to better meet the needs of the users.

Using Meta-Ethnography To Synthesize Research: A Worked Example Of The Relations Between Personality On Software Team Processes, Fabio Q. B. Silva Dr., Shirley S. J. O. Cruz, Tatiana B. Gouveia, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Context: The increase in the number of qualitative and mixed-methods research published in software engineering has created an opportunity for further knowledge generation through the synthesis of studies with similar aims. This is particularly true in the research on human aspects because the phenomena of interest are often better understood using qualitative research. However, the use of qualitative synthesis methods is not widespread and worked examples of their consistent application in software engineering are needed. Objective: To explore the use of meta-ethnography in the synthesis of empirical studies in software engineering through an example using studies about the relations between …

A Robust Rgbd Slam System For 3d Environment With Planar Surfaces, Po-Chang Su, Ju Shen, Sen-Ching S. Cheung

Computer Science Faculty Publications

With the increasing popularity of RGB-depth (RGB-D) sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect, there have been much research on capturing and reconstructing 3D environments using a movable RGB-D sensor. The key process behind these kinds of simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) systems is the iterative closest point or ICP algorithm, which is an iterative algorithm that can estimate the rigid movement of the camera based on the captured 3D point clouds. While ICP is a well-studied algorithm, it is problematic when it is used in scanning large planar regions such as wall surfaces in a room. The lack of depth …

Securearray: Improving Wifi Security With Fine-Grained Physical-Layer, Jie Xiong, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the important role that WiFi networks play in home and enterprise networks they are relatively weak from a security standpoint. With easily available directional antennas, attackers can be physically located off-site, yet compromise WiFi security protocols such as WEP, WPA, and even to some extent WPA2 through a range of exploits specific to those protocols, or simply by running dictionary and human-factors attacks on users' poorly-chosen passwords. This presents a security risk to the entire home or enterprise network. To mitigate this ongoing problem, we propose SecureArray, a system designed to operate alongside existing wireless security protocols, adding defense …

Focus: A Usable & Effective Approach To Oled Display Power Management, Kiat Wee Tan, Tadashi Okoshi, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Focus, a system for effectively and efficiently reducing power consumption of OLED displays on smartphones. These displays, while becoming exceedingly common still consume significant power. The key idea of Focus is that we use the notion of saliency to save display power by dimming portions of the applications that are less important to the user. We envision Focus being especially useful during low battery situations when usability is less important than power savings. We tested Focus using 15 applications running on a Samsung Galaxy S III and show that it …

Inferring Ongoing Human Activities Based On Recurrent Self-Organizing Map Trajectory, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatically inferring ongoing activities is to enable the early recognition of unfinished activities, which is quite meaningful for applications, such as online human-machine interaction and security monitoring. State-of-the-art methods use the spatiotemporal interest point (STIP) based features as the low-level video description to handle complex scenes. While the existing problem is that typical bag-of-visual words (BoVW) focuses on the statistical distribution of features but ignores the inherent contexts in activity sequences, resulting in low discrimination when directly dealing with limited observations. To solve this problem, the Recurrent Self-Organizing Map (RSOM), which was designed to process sequential data, is novelly adopted …

Conferencesense: Monitoring Of Public Events Using Phone Sensors, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Amit Kumar, Vikrant Nandakumar, Sonali Batra, Salil Kanhere, Pradipta De, Vinayak Naik, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore the use of a participatory sensing paradigm, where data generated from individual smartphones is used to extract and understand collective properties of temporary public gatherings and events (e.g., concerts & conferences). We focus on the use of this paradigm at a technical conference, and describe the design, implementation and deployment of ConferenceSense, an application that uses multiple sensor and human-generated inputs from attendees' smartphones to infer context, such as the start time of a session or the degree of interaction during a tea break. Based on data collected from multiple attendees at a 3-day conference, we explore how …

Will Fault Localization Work For These Failures? An Automated Approach To Predict Effectiveness Of Fault Localization Tools, Tien-Duy B. Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Debugging is a crucial yet expensive activity to improve the reliability of software systems. To reduce debugging cost, various fault localization tools have been proposed. A spectrum-based fault localization tool often outputs an ordered list of program elements sorted based on their likelihood to be the root cause of a set of failures (i.e., their suspiciousness scores). Despite the many studies on fault localization, unfortunately, however, for many bugs, the root causes are often low in the ordered list. This potentially causes developers to distrust fault localization tools. Recently, Parnin and Orso highlight in their user study that many debuggers …

Theory And Practice, Do They Match? A Case With Spectrum-Based Fault Localization, Tien-Duy B. Le, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spectrum-based fault localization refers to the process of identifying program units that are buggy from two sets of execution traces: normal traces and faulty traces. These approaches use statistical formulas to measure the suspiciousness of program units based on the execution traces. There have been many spectrum-based fault localization approaches proposing various formulas in the literature. Two of the best performing and well-known ones are Tarantula and Ochiai. Recently, Xie et al. find that theoretically, under certain assumptions, two families of spectrum-based fault localization formulas outperform all other formulas including those of Tarantula and Ochiai. In this work, we empirically …

Learning Spatio-Temporal Co-Occurrence Correlograms For Efficient Human Action Classification, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based features show great promises in human action analysis with high efficiency and robustness. However, they typically focus on bag-of-visual words (BoVW), which omits any correlation among words and shows limited discrimination in real-world videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to add the spatio-temporal co-occurrence relationships of visual words to BoVW for a richer representation. Rather than assigning a particular scale on videos, we adopt the normalized google-like distance (NGLD) to measure the words' co-occurrence semantics, which grasps the videos' structure information in a statistical way. All pairwise distances in spatial and temporal …

Opencuda+Mpi, Kenny Ballou, Nilab Mohammad Mousa

Student Research Initiative

The introduction and rise of General Purpose Graphics Computing has significantly impacted parallel and high-performance computing. It has introduced challenges when it comes to distributed computing with GPUs. Current solutions target specifics: specific hardware, specific network topology, a specific level of processing. Those restrictions on GPU computing limit scientists and researchers in various ways. The goal of OpenCUDA+MPI project is to develop a framework that allows researchers and scientists to write a general algorithm without the overhead of worrying about the specifics of the hardware and the cluster it will run against while taking full advantage of parallel and distributed …

Automated Test Case Generation To Validate Non-Functional Software Requirements, Pingyu Zhang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A software system is bounded by a set of requirements. Functional requirements describe what the system must do, in terms of inputs, behavior, and outputs. We define non-functional requirements to be how well these functional requirements are satisfied, in terms of qualities or constraints on the design or on the implementation of a system. In practice, the validation of these kinds of requirements, does not receive equal emphasis. Techniques for validating functional requirements target all levels of software testing phases, and explore both black-box and white-box approaches. Techniques for validating non-functional requirements, on the other hand, largely operate in a …

Oyster Sustainability Modeling As A Public Resource, Nathan A. Cooper

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A simulation algorithm based on biological references points proposed by Powell and Klink (2007) is implemented for predicting the total allowable catch of eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) from Louisiana’s coast. The model accepts initial per-square-meter shell mass and oyster size distributions as input. Fishing effort is provided as fractions removed of each resource for each month of the season. The model outputs the expected remaining shell mass and harvests of sack and seed oysters after discrete fishing months. Oyster mortality credits the shell budget, while fishing fractions debit oyster and shell resources. Surviving oysters grow larger along a …

Forensic Analysis Of Whatsapp On Android Smartphones, Neha S. Thakur

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Android forensics has evolved over time offering significant opportunities and exciting challenges. On one hand, being an open source platform Android is giving developers the freedom to contribute to the rapid growth of the Android market whereas on the other hand Android users may not be aware of the security and privacy implications of installing these applications on their phones. Users may assume that a password-locked device protects their personal information, but applications may retain private information on devices, in ways that users might not anticipate. In this thesis we will be concentrating on one such application called 'WhatsApp', a …

Reaper – Toward Automating Mobile Cloud Communication, Daniel R. Ward

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Mobile devices connected to cloud based services are becoming a mainstream method of delivery up-to-date and context aware information to users. Connecting mobile applications to cloud service require significant developer effort. Yet this communication code usually follows certain patterns, varying accordingly to the specific type of data sent and received from the server. By analyzing the causes of theses variations, we can create a system that can automate the code creation for communication from a mobile device to a cloud server. To automate code creation, a general pattern must extracted. This general solution can then be applied to any database …

Experimental Studies Of Android App Development For Smart Chess Board System, Srujan Gopu

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Playing chess on a smart phone has gained popularity in the last few years, offering the convenience of correspondence play, automatic recording of a game, etc. Although a good number of players love playing chess on a tablet/smart phone, it doesn't come close to the experience of playing over the traditional board. The feel and pleasure are more real when playing face down with the opponent sitting across each other rather than playing in mobile devices. This is especially true during chess tournaments. It would be ideal to enhance the experience of playing chess on board with the features of …

Solving The Search For Source Code, Kathryn T. Stolee

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Programmers frequently search for source code to reuse using keyword searches. When effective and efficient, a code search can boost programmer productivity, however, the search effectiveness depends on the programmer's ability to specify a query that captures how the desired code may have been implemented. Further, the results often include many irrelevant matches that must be filtered manually. More semantic search approaches could address these limitations, yet existing approaches either do not scale, are not flexible enough to find approximate matches, or require complex specifications.

We propose a novel approach to semantic search that addresses some of these limitations and …

Usmmc: A Self-Contained Model Checker For Uml State Machines, Shuang Liu, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Manchun Zheng, Bimlesh Wadhwa, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

UML diagrams are gaining increasing usage in Object-Oriented system designs. UML state machines are specifically used in modeling dynamic behaviors of classes. It has been widely agreed that verification of system designs at an early stage will dramatically reduce the development cost. Tool support for verification UML designs can also encourage consistent usage of UML diagrams throughout the software development procedure. In this work, we present a tool, named USMMC, which turns model checking of UML state machines into practice. USMMC is a self-contained toolkit, which provides editing, interactive simulation as well as powerful model checking support for UML state …

Open Source Software Development Process Model – A Grounded Theory Approach, Keng Siau, Y. Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The open source movement has provided software users with more choices, lower software acquisition cost, more flexible software customization, and possibly higher quality software product. Although the development of open source software is dynamic and it encourages innovations, the process can be chaotic. An Open Source Software Development (OSSD) process model to enhance the survivability of OSSD projects is needed. This research uses the grounded theory approach to derive a Phase-Role-Skill-Responsibility (PRSR) OSSD process model. The three OSSD process phases -- Launch Stage, Before the First Release, and Between Releases -- address the characteristics of the OSSD process as well …

Integration Of Social Media Technologies With Erp:A Prototype Implementation, Venky Shankararaman, Eng Kit Lum

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many organizations use social media to enhance collaboration both internally among employees and externally with customers and partners. However, it is not sufficient to just create a presence in some key social environments such as Facebook or YouTube. In order to fully leverage the value of social media, organizations must integrate social media with their business processes, which means new solutions have to be developed that extend existing enterprise systems. In this paper, we present a prototype solution that demonstrates the integration of social media with the order processing process. The implemented solution brings together the embedded best practice processes …

How Many Researchers Does It Take To Make Impact? Mining Software Engineering Publication Data For Collaboration Insights, Subhajit Datta, Santonu Sarkar, Sajeev A. S. M., Nishant Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the three and half decades since the inception of organized research publication in software engineering, the discipline has gained a significant maturity. This journey to maturity has been guided by the synergy of ideas, individuals and interactions. In this journey software engineering has evolved into an increasingly empirical discipline. Empirical sciences involve significant collaboration, leading to large teams working on research problems. In this paper we analyze a corpus of 19,000+ papers, written by 21,000+ authors from 16 publication venues between 1975 to 2010, to understand what is the ideal team size that has produced maximum impact in software …

Big Data: Immediate Opportunities And Longer Term Challenges, Jens Pohl, Kym Jason Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The transformation of words, locations, and human interactions into digital data forms the basis of trend detection and information extraction opportunities that can be automated with the increasing availability of relatively inexpensive computer storage and processing technology. Trend detection, which focuses on what, is facilitated by the ability to apply analytics to an entire corpus of data instead of a random sample. Since the corpus essentially includes all data within a population there is no need to apply any of the precautions that are in order to ensure the representativeness of a sample in traditional statistical analysis. Several examples are …

An Empirical Study Of Adoption Of Software Testing In Open Source Projects, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Tegawende F. Bissyande, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Psyhcos: Parameter Synthesis For Hierarchical Concurrent Real-Time Systems, Étienne André, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong, Shang-Wei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time systems are often hard to control, due to their complicated structures, quantitative time factors and even unknown delays. We present here PSyHCoS, a tool for analyzing parametric real-time systems specified using the hierarchical modeling language PSTCSP. PSyHCoS supports several algorithms for parameter synthesis and model checking, as well as state space reduction techniques. Its architecture favors reusability in terms of syntax, semantics, and algorithms. It comes with a friendly user interface that can be used to edit, simulate and verify PSTCSP models. Experiments show its efficiency and applicability