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2019

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Articles 31 - 60 of 256

Full-Text Articles in Software Engineering

Assessing The Generalizability Of Code2vec Token Embeddings, Hong Jin Kang, Tegawende F. Bissyande, David Lo Nov 2019

Assessing The Generalizability Of Code2vec Token Embeddings, Hong Jin Kang, Tegawende F. Bissyande, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as sentiment analysis or syntactic parsing, have benefited from the development of word embedding models. In particular, regardless of the training algorithms, the learned embeddings have often been shown to be generalizable to different NLP tasks. In contrast, despite recent momentum on word embeddings for source code, the literature lacks evidence of their generalizability beyond the example task they have been trained for. In this experience paper, we identify 3 potential downstream tasks, namely code comments generation, code authorship identification, and code clones detection, that source code token embedding models can be applied …

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Map-Coverage: A Novel Coverage Criterion For Testing Thread-Safe Classes, Zan Wang, Yingquan Zhao, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Xiang Chen, Huarui Lin Nov 2019

Map-Coverage: A Novel Coverage Criterion For Testing Thread-Safe Classes, Zan Wang, Yingquan Zhao, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Xiang Chen, Huarui Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Concurrent programs must be thoroughly tested, as concurrency bugs are notoriously hard to detect. Code coverage criteria can be used to quantify the richness of a test suite (e.g., whether a program has been tested sufficiently) or provide practical guidelines on test case generation (e.g., as objective functions used in program fuzzing engines). Traditional code coverage criteria are, however, designed for sequential programs and thus ineffective for concurrent programs. In this work, we introduce a novel code coverage criterion for testing thread-safe classes called MAP-coverage (short for memory-access patterns). The motivation is that concurrency bugs are often correlated with certain …

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Secure Virtual Machine Placement In Cloud Data Centers, Amit Agarwal, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta Nov 2019

Secure Virtual Machine Placement In Cloud Data Centers, Amit Agarwal, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to an increasing number of avenues for conducting cross-VM side-channel attacks, the security of multi-tenant public IaaS cloud environments is a growing concern. These attacks allow an adversary to steal private information from a target user whose VM instance is co-located with that of the adversary. In this paper, we focus on secure VM placement algorithms which a cloud provider can use for the automatic enforcement of security against such co-location based attacks. To do so, we first establish a metric for evaluating and quantifying co-location security of multi-tenant public IaaS clouds, and then propose a novel VM placement …

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Learning-Guided Network Fuzzing For Testing Cyber-Physical System Defences, Yuqi Chen, Chris Poskitt, Jun Sun, Sridhar Adepu, Fan Zhang Nov 2019

Learning-Guided Network Fuzzing For Testing Cyber-Physical System Defences, Yuqi Chen, Chris 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 …

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Smrtfridge: Iot-Based, User Interaction-Driven Food Item & Quantity Sensing, Amit Sharma, Archan Misra, Vengateswaran Subramaniam, Youngki Lee Nov 2019

Smrtfridge: Iot-Based, User Interaction-Driven Food Item & Quantity Sensing, Amit Sharma, Archan Misra, Vengateswaran Subramaniam, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present SmrtFridge, a consumer-grade smart fridge prototype that demonstrates two key capabilities: (a) identify the individual food items that users place in or remove from a fridge, and (b) estimate the residual quantity of food items inside a refrigerated container (opaque or transparent). Notably, both of these inferences are performed unobtrusively, without requiring any explicit user action or tagging of food objects. To achieve these capabilities, SmrtFridge uses a novel interaction-driven, multi-modal sensing pipeline, where Infrared (IR) and RGB video sensing, triggered whenever a user interacts naturally with the fridge, is used to extract a foreground visual image of …

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Saffron: Adaptive Grammar-Based Fuzzing For Worst-Case Analysis, Xuan Bach D. Le, Corina Pasareanu, Rohan Padhye, David Lo, Willem Visser, Koushik Sen Nov 2019

Saffron: Adaptive Grammar-Based Fuzzing For Worst-Case Analysis, Xuan Bach D. Le, Corina Pasareanu, Rohan Padhye, David Lo, Willem Visser, Koushik Sen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fuzz testing has been gaining ground recently with substantial efforts devoted to the area. Typically, fuzzers take a set of seed inputs and leverage random mutations to continually improve the inputs with respect to a cost, e.g. program code coverage, to discover vulnerabilities or bugs. Following this methodology, fuzzers are very good at generating unstructured inputs that achieve high coverage. However fuzzers are less effective when the inputs are structured, say they conform to an input grammar. Due to the nature of random mutations, the overwhelming abundance of inputs generated by this common fuzzing practice often adversely hinders the effectiveness …

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Stressmon: Scalable Detection Of Perceived Stress And Depression Using Passive Sensing Of Changes In Work Routines And Group Interactions, Nur Camellia Binte Zakaria, Rajesh Balan, Youngki Lee Nov 2019

Stressmon: Scalable Detection Of Perceived Stress And Depression Using Passive Sensing Of Changes In Work Routines And Group Interactions, Nur Camellia Binte Zakaria, Rajesh Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stress and depression are a common affliction in all walks of life. When left unmanaged, stress can inhibit productivity or cause depression. Depression can occur independently of stress. There has been a sharp rise in mobile health initiatives to monitor stress and depression. However, these initiatives usually require users to install dedicated apps or multiple sensors, making such solutions hard to scale. Moreover, they emphasise sensing individual factors and overlook social interactions, which plays a significant role in influencing stress and depression while being a part of a social system. We present StressMon, a stress and depression detection system that …

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Vitamon: Measuring Heart Rate Variability Using Smartphone Front Camera, Sinh Huynh, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Jeonggil Ko, Youngki Lee Nov 2019

Vitamon: Measuring Heart Rate Variability Using Smartphone Front Camera, Sinh Huynh, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Jeonggil Ko, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present VitaMon, a mobile sensing system that can measure the inter-heartbeat interval (IBI) from the facial video captured by a commodity smartphone's front camera. The continuous IBI measurement is used to compute heart rate variability (HRV), one of the most important markers of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) regulation. The underlying idea of VitaMon is that video recording of human face contains multiple cardiovascular pulse signals with different phase shift. Our measurement on 10 participants shows the significant time delay (36.79 ms) between the pulse signals measured at the jaw region and forehead region. VitaMon leverages deep neural network …

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Statistical Log Differencing, Lingfeng Bao, Nimrod Busany, David Lo, Shahar Maoz Nov 2019

Statistical Log Differencing, Lingfeng Bao, Nimrod Busany, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent works have considered the problem of log differencing: given two or more system’s execution logs, output a model of their differences. Log differencing has potential applications in software evolution, testing, and security. In this paper we present statistical log differencing, which accounts for frequencies of behaviors found in the logs. We present two algorithms, s2KDiff for differencing two logs, and snKDiff, for differencing of many logs at once, both presenting their results over a single inferred model. A unique aspect of our algorithms is their use of statistical hypothesis testing: we let the engineer control the sensitivity of the …

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Automatic Generation Of Pull Request Descriptions, Zhongxin Liu, Xin Xia, Christoph Treude, David Lo, Shanping Li Nov 2019

Automatic Generation Of Pull Request Descriptions, Zhongxin Liu, Xin Xia, Christoph Treude, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Enabled by the pull-based development model, developers can easily contribute to a project through pull requests (PRs). When creating a PR, developers can add a free-form description to describe what changes are made in this PR and/or why. Such a description is helpful for reviewers and other developers to gain a quick understanding of the PR without touching the details and may reduce the possibility of the PR being ignored or rejected. However, developers sometimes neglect to write descriptions for PRs. For example, in our collected dataset with over 333K PRs, more than 34% of the PR descriptions are empty. …

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Wuji: Automatic Online Combat Game Testing Using Evolutionary Deep Reinforcement Learning, Yan Zheng, Xiaofei Xie, Ting Su, Lei Ma, Jianye Hao, Zhaopeng Meng, Yang Liu, Ruimin Shen, Yingfeng Chen, Changjie Fan Nov 2019

Wuji: Automatic Online Combat Game Testing Using Evolutionary Deep Reinforcement Learning, Yan Zheng, Xiaofei Xie, Ting Su, Lei Ma, Jianye Hao, Zhaopeng Meng, Yang Liu, Ruimin Shen, Yingfeng Chen, Changjie Fan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

—Game testing has been long recognized as a notoriously challenging task, which mainly relies on manual playing and scripting based testing in game industry. Even until recently, automated game testing still remains to be largely untouched niche. A key challenge is that game testing often requires to play the game as a sequential decision process. A bug may only be triggered until completing certain difficult intermediate tasks, which requires a certain level of intelligence. The recent success of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) sheds light on advancing automated game testing, without human competitive intelligent support. However, the existing DRLs mostly focus …

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Coverage-Guided Fuzzing For Feedforward Neural Networks, Xiaofei Xie, Hongxu Chen, Yi Li, Lei Ma, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao Nov 2019

Coverage-Guided Fuzzing For Feedforward Neural Networks, Xiaofei Xie, Hongxu Chen, Yi Li, Lei Ma, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep neural network (DNN) has been widely applied to safety-critical scenarios such as autonomous vehicle, security surveillance, and cyber-physical control systems. Yet, the incorrect behaviors of DNNs can lead to severe accidents and tremendous losses due to hidden defects. In this paper, we present DeepHunter, a general-purpose fuzzing framework for detecting defects of DNNs. DeepHunter is inspired by traditional grey-box fuzzing and aims to increase the overall test coverage by applying adaptive heuristics according to runtime feedback. Specifically, DeepHunter provides a series of seed selection strategies, metamorphic mutation strategies, and testing criteria customized to DNN testing; all these components support …

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An Empirical Study Towards Characterizing Deep Learning Development And Deployment Across Different Frameworks And Platforms, Qianyu Guo, Sen Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Qiang Hu, Hongtao Liu, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao, Xiaohong Li Nov 2019

An Empirical Study Towards Characterizing Deep Learning Development And Deployment Across Different Frameworks And Platforms, Qianyu Guo, Sen Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Qiang Hu, Hongtao Liu, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep Learning (DL) has recently achieved tremendous success. A variety of DL frameworks and platforms play a key role to catalyze such progress. However, the differences in architecture designs and implementations of existing frameworks and platforms bring new challenges for DL software development and deployment. Till now, there is no study on how various mainstream frameworks and platforms influence both DL software development and deployment in practice.To fill this gap, we take the first step towards understanding how the most widely-used DL frameworks and platforms support the DL software development and deployment. We conduct a systematic study on these frameworks …

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A Quantitative Analysis Framework For Recurrent Neural Network, Xiaoning Du, Xiaofei Xie, Yi Li, Lei Ma, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao Nov 2019

A Quantitative Analysis Framework For Recurrent Neural Network, Xiaoning Du, Xiaofei Xie, Yi Li, Lei Ma, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recurrent neural network (RNN) has achieved great success in processing sequential inputs for applications such as automatic speech recognition, natural language processing and machine translation. However, quality and reliability issues of RNNs make them vulnerable to adversarial attacks and hinder their deployment in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a quantitative analysis framework — DeepStellar— to pave the way for effective quality and security analysis of software systems powered by RNNs. DeepStellar is generic to handle various RNN architectures, including LSTM and GRU, scalable to work on industrial-grade RNN models, and extensible to develop customized analyzers and tools. We …

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Deepmutation++: A Mutation Testing Framework For Deep Learning Systems, Qiang Hu, Lei Ma, Xiaofei Xie, Bing Yu, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao Nov 2019

Deepmutation++: A Mutation Testing Framework For Deep Learning Systems, Qiang Hu, Lei Ma, Xiaofei Xie, Bing Yu, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly expanding their real-world applications across domains, e.g., image processing, speech recognition and natural language processing. However, there is still limited tool support for DNN testing in terms of test data quality and model robustness. In this paper, we introduce a mutation testing-based tool for DNNs, DeepMutation++, which facilitates the DNN quality evaluation, supporting both feed-forward neural networks (FNNs) and stateful recurrent neural networks (RNNs). It not only enables static analysis of the robustness of a DNN model against the input as a whole, but also allows the identification of the vulnerable segments of a …

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Mobidroid: A Performance-Sensitive Malware Detection System On Mobile Platform, Ruitao Feng, Sen Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Guozhu Meng, Yang Liu, Shang-Wei Lin Nov 2019

Mobidroid: A Performance-Sensitive Malware Detection System On Mobile Platform, Ruitao Feng, Sen Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Guozhu Meng, Yang Liu, Shang-Wei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Currently, Android malware detection is mostly performed on the server side against the increasing number of Android malware. Powerful computing resource gives more exhaustive protection for Android markets than maintaining detection by a single user in many cases. However, apart from the Android apps provided by the official market (i.e., Google Play Store), apps from unofficial markets and third-party resources are always causing a serious security threat to end-users. Meanwhile, it is a time-consuming task if the app is downloaded first and then uploaded to the server side for detection because the network transmission has a lot of overhead. In …

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Safe Inputs Approximation For Black-Box Systems, Bai Xue, Yang Liu, Lei Ma, Xiyue Zhang, Meng Sun, Xiaofei Xie Nov 2019

Safe Inputs Approximation For Black-Box Systems, Bai Xue, Yang Liu, Lei Ma, Xiyue Zhang, Meng Sun, Xiaofei Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given a family of independent and identically distributed samples extracted from the input region and their corresponding outputs, in this paper we propose a method to under-approximate the set of safe inputs that lead the blackbox system to respect a given safety specification. Our method falls within the framework of probably approximately correct (PAC) learning. The computed under-approximation comes with statistical soundness provided by the underlying PAC learning process. Such a set, which we call a PAC under-approximation, is obtained by computing a PAC model of the black-box system with respect to the specified safety specification. In our method, the …

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Ad-Link: An Adaptive Approach For User Identity Linkage, Xin Mu, Wei Xie, Ka Wei, Roy Lee, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim Nov 2019

Ad-Link: An Adaptive Approach For User Identity Linkage, Xin Mu, Wei Xie, Ka Wei, Roy Lee, Feida Zhu, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User identity linkage (UIL) refers to linking accounts of the same user across different online social platforms. The state-of-the-art UIL methods usually perform account matching using user account’s features derived from the profile attributes, content and relationships. They are however static and do not adapt well to fast-changing online social data due to: (a) new content and activities generated by users; as well as (b) new platform functions introduced to users. In particular, the importance of features used in UIL methods may change over time and new important user features may be introduced. In this paper, we proposed AD-Link, a …

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Autofocus: Interpreting Attention-Based Neural Networks By Code Perturbation, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui, Yijun Yu, Lingxiao Jiang Nov 2019

Autofocus: Interpreting Attention-Based Neural Networks By Code Perturbation, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui, Yijun Yu, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite being adopted in software engineering tasks, deep neural networks are treated mostly as a black box due to the difficulty in interpreting how the networks infer the outputs from the inputs. To address this problem, we propose AutoFocus, an automated approach for rating and visualizing the importance of input elements based on their effects on the outputs of the networks. The approach is built on our hypotheses that (1) attention mechanisms incorporated into neural networks can generate discriminative scores for various input elements and (2) the discriminative scores reflect the effects of input elements on the outputs of the …

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Ml4iot: A Framework To Orchestrate Machine Learning Workflows On Internet Of Things Data, Jose Miguel Alves, Leonardo Honorio, Miriam A M Capretz Oct 2019

Ml4iot: A Framework To Orchestrate Machine Learning Workflows On Internet Of Things Data, Jose Miguel Alves, Leonardo Honorio, Miriam A M Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Internet of Things (IoT) applications generate vast amounts of real-time data. Temporal analysis of these data series to discover behavioural patterns may lead to qualified knowledge affecting a broad range of industries. Hence, the use of machine learning (ML) algorithms over IoT data has the potential to improve safety, economy, and performance in critical processes. However, creating ML workflows at scale is a challenging task that depends upon both production and specialized skills. Such tasks require investigation, understanding, selection, and implementation of specific ML workflows, which often lead to bottlenecks, production issues, and code management complexity and even then may …

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On The Yellow Brick Road, A Path To Enterprise Architecture Maturity, Avsharn Bachoo Oct 2019

On The Yellow Brick Road, A Path To Enterprise Architecture Maturity, Avsharn Bachoo

The African Journal of Information Systems

This study concentrated on the relationship between the Enterprise Architecture (EA) maturity of an organization and the business value associated with it in the South African financial services environment. It was developed within the critical realism philosophy, which states that mechanisms generate events by accentuating the underlying EA mechanisms that lead to business value, as well as provide insights into the opportunities and challenges organizations experienced as they progressed to higher levels of maturity. Constructed using the resource-based view of the firm as the underlying theoretical framework, this research examined EA as an intangible resource and maturity as a source …

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Duplicate Pull Request Detection: When Time Matters, Qingye Wang, Bowen Xu, Xin Xia, Ting Wang, Shanping Li Oct 2019

Duplicate Pull Request Detection: When Time Matters, Qingye Wang, Bowen Xu, Xin Xia, Ting Wang, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In open source communities (e.g., GitHub), developers frequently submit pull requests to fix bugs or add new features during development process. Since the process of pull request is uncoordinated and distributed, it causes massive duplication. Usually, only the first pull request qualified by reviewers can be merged to the main branch of the repository, and the others are regarded as duplication by maintainers. Since the duplication largely aggravates workloads of project reviewers and maintainers, the evolutionary process of open source repositories is delayed. To identify the duplicate pull requests automatically, Ren et al. proposed a state-of-the-art approach that models a …

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Explaining Regressions Via Alignment Slicing And Mending, Haijun Wang, Yun Lin, Zijiang Yang, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jinsong Dong, Qinghua Zheng, Ting Liu Oct 2019

Explaining Regressions Via Alignment Slicing And Mending, Haijun Wang, Yun Lin, Zijiang Yang, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jinsong Dong, Qinghua Zheng, Ting Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Regression faults, which make working code stop functioning, are often introduced when developers make changes to the software. Many regression fault localization techniques have been proposed. However, issues like inaccuracy and lack of explanation are still obstacles for their practical application. In this work, we propose a trace-based approach to identifying not only where the root cause of a regression bug lies, but also how the defect is propagated to its manifestation as the explanation. In our approach, we keep the trace of original correct version as reference and infer the faulty steps on the trace of regression version so …

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Smartembed: A Tool For Clone And Bug Detection In Smart Contracts Through Structural Code Embedding, Zhipeng Gao, Magalle Hewa Vinoj Yasanga Jayasundara, Lingxiao Jiang, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy Oct 2019

Smartembed: A Tool For Clone And Bug Detection In Smart Contracts Through Structural Code Embedding, Zhipeng Gao, Magalle Hewa Vinoj Yasanga Jayasundara, Lingxiao Jiang, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ethereum has become a widely used platform to enable secure, Blockchain-based financial and business transactions. However, a major concern in Ethereum is the security of its smart contracts. Many identified bugs and vulnerabilities in smart contracts not only present challenges to maintenance of blockchain, but also lead to serious financial loses. There is a significant need to better assist developers in checking smart contracts and ensuring their reliability. In this paper, we propose a web service tool, named SMARTEMBED, which can help Solidity developers to find repetitive contract code and clone-related bugs in smart contracts. Our tool is based on …

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Inferring Accurate Bus Trajectories From Noisy Estimated Arrival Time Records, Lakmal Meegahapola, Noel Athaide, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Shili Xiang, Archan Misra Oct 2019

Inferring Accurate Bus Trajectories From Noisy Estimated Arrival Time Records, Lakmal Meegahapola, Noel Athaide, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Shili Xiang, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Urban commuting data has long been a vital source of understanding population mobility behaviour and has been widely adopted for various applications such as transport infrastructure planning and urban anomaly detection. While individual-specific transaction records (such as smart card (tap-in, tap-out) data or taxi trip records) hold a wealth of information, these are often private data available only to the service provider (e.g., taxicab operator). In this work, we explore the utility in harnessing publicly available, albeit noisy, transportation datasets, such as noisy “Estimated Time of Arrival" (ETA) records (commonly available to commuters through transit Apps or electronic signages). We …

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Towards Generating Transformation Rules Without Examples For Android Api Replacement, Ferdian Thung, Hong Jin Kang, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo Oct 2019

Towards Generating Transformation Rules Without Examples For Android Api Replacement, Ferdian Thung, Hong Jin Kang, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deprecation of APIs in software libraries is common when library maintainers make changes to a library and will no longer support certain APIs in the future. When deprecation occurs, developers whose programs depend on the APIs need to replace the usages of the deprecated APIs sooner or later. Often times, software documentation specifies which new APIs the developers should use in place of a deprecated API. However, replacing the usages of a deprecated API remains a challenge since developers may not know exactly how to use the new APIs. The developers would first need to understand the API changes before …

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Parametric Timed Model Checking For Guaranteeing Timed Opacity, Étienne André, Jun Sun Oct 2019

Parametric Timed Model Checking For Guaranteeing Timed Opacity, Étienne André, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information leakage can have dramatic consequences on systems security. Among harmful information leaks, the timing information leakage is the ability for an attacker to deduce internal information depending on the system execution time. We address the following problem: given a timed system, synthesize the execution times for which one cannot deduce whether the system performed some secret behavior. We solve this problem in the setting of timed automata (TAs). We first provide a general solution, and then extend the problem to parametric TAs, by synthesizing internal timings making the TA secure. We study decidability, devise algorithms, and show that our …

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Comprehending Test Code: An Empirical Study, Chak Shun Yu, Christoph Treude, Maurício Aniche Oct 2019

Comprehending Test Code: An Empirical Study, Chak Shun Yu, Christoph Treude, Maurício Aniche

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how developers comprehend test code specifically, despite the undisputed importance of testing. In this paper, we report on the results of an empirical study with 44 developers to understand which factors influence developers when comprehending Java test code. We measured three dependent variables: the total time spent reading a test suite, the ability to identify the overall purpose of a test suite, and the ability …

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Tracy: A Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization Framework, Rodrigo Rebouças De Almeida, Christoph Treude, Uirá Kulesza Oct 2019

Tracy: A Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization Framework, Rodrigo Rebouças De Almeida, Christoph Treude, Uirá Kulesza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technical debt is a pervasive problem in software development. Software development teams have to prioritize debt items and determine whether they should address debt or develop new features at any point in time. This paper presents "Tracy", a framework for the prioritization of technical debt using a business-driven approach built on top of business processes. The current stage of the proposed framework is at the beginning of the third phase of Design Science Research, which is usually divided into the phases of exploration, engineering, and evaluation. The exploration and engineering phases involved the participation of 49 professionals from 12 different …

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Nonuniform Timeslicing Of Dynamic Graphs Based On Visual Complexity, Yong Wang, Daniel Archambault, Hammad Haleem, Torsten Moeller, Yanhong Wu, Huamin Qu Oct 2019

Nonuniform Timeslicing Of Dynamic Graphs Based On Visual Complexity, Yong Wang, Daniel Archambault, Hammad Haleem, Torsten Moeller, Yanhong Wu, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Uniform timeslicing of dynamic graphs has been used due to its convenience and uniformity across the time dimension. However, uniform timeslicing does not take the data set into account, which can generate cluttered timeslices with edge bursts and empty timeslices with few interactions. The graph mining filed has explored nonuniform timeslicing methods specifically designed to preserve graph features for mining tasks. In this paper, we propose a nonuni-form timeslicing approach for dynamic graph visualization. Our goal is to create timeslices of equal visual complexity. To this end, we adapt histogram equalization to create timeslices with a similar number of events, …

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