Software Engineering Commons^™

Breaking Neural Reasoning Architectures With Metamorphic Relation-Based Adversarial Examples, Alvin Chan, Lei Ma, Felix Juefei-Xu, Yew-Soon Ong, Xiaofei Xie, Minhui Xue, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ability to read, reason, and infer lies at the heart of neural reasoning architectures. After all, the ability to perform logical reasoning over language remains a coveted goal of Artificial Intelligence. To this end, models such as the Turing-complete differentiable neural computer (DNC) boast of real logical reasoning capabilities, along with the ability to reason beyond simple surface-level matching. In this brief, we propose the first probe into DNC's logical reasoning capabilities with a focus on text-based question answering (QA). More concretely, we propose a conceptually simple but effective adversarial attack based on metamorphic relations. Our proposed adversarial attack …

On-Device Deep Learning Inference For System-On-Chip (Soc) Architectures, Tom Springer, Elia Eiroa-Lledo, Elizabeth Stevens, Erik Linstead

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

As machine learning becomes ubiquitous, the need to deploy models on real-time, embedded systems will become increasingly critical. This is especially true for deep learning solutions, whose large models pose interesting challenges for target architectures at the “edge” that are resource-constrained. The realization of machine learning, and deep learning, is being driven by the availability of specialized hardware, such as system-on-chip solutions, which provide some alleviation of constraints. Equally important, however, are the operating systems that run on this hardware, and specifically the ability to leverage commercial real-time operating systems which, unlike general purpose operating systems such as Linux, can …

Technological Countermeasures Of Copyright Piracy Enforcement In Nigeria: An Alternative To Creative Works Owners’ Livelihood In A Monolithic Economy Post Covid-19, Leonard Ume

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The Coronavirus pandemic is a global problem that came with its attendant economic shock that is higher than the one brought by World War 1 and 2 put together. The attendant consequences expectedly landed Nigeria economy to recession. Nigeria over the years has been grappling with the problem of diversification of her economy to forestall the ugly impact of monolithic economy. This paper investigated the effect of using technology in fighting intellectual copyright piracy which will encourage the citizens to harness their creative endowment to eke out a living with its resultant effect on the reduction of unemployment. The study …

An Analysis Of Testing Scenarios For Automated Driving Systems, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Siyuan Liu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

10.1109/SANER50967.2021.00078

Formal Verification For High Assurance Software: A Case Study Using The Spark Auto-Active Verification Toolset, Ryan M. Baity

Theses and Dissertations

Software is an increasingly integral and sophisticated part of safety- and mission-critical systems. Poorly written software can lead to information leakage, undetected cyber breaches, and even human injury in cases where the software directly interfaces with components of a physical system. These systems may range from power facilities to remotely piloted aircraft. Software bugs and vulnerabilities can lead to severe economic hardships and loss of life in these domains. As fast as software spreads to automate many facets of our lives, it also grows in complexity. The complexity of software systems combined with the nature of the critical domains dependent …

Improving Neural Network Verification Through Spurious Region Guided Refinement, Pengfei Yang, Renjue Li, Jianlin Li, Cheng Chao Huang, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Bai Xue, Lijun Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a spurious region guided refinement approach for robustness verification of deep neural networks. Our method starts with applying the DeepPoly abstract domain to analyze the network. If the robustness property cannot be verified, the result is inconclusive. Due to the over-approximation, the computed region in the abstraction may be spurious in the sense that it does not contain any true counterexample. Our goal is to identify such spurious regions and use them to guide the abstraction refinement. The core idea is to make use of the obtained constraints of the abstraction to infer new bounds for the neurons. …

Combining Query Reduction And Expansion For Text-Retrieval-Based Bug Localization, Juan Manuel Florez, Oscar Chaparro, Christoph Treude, Andrian Marcus

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated text-retrieval-based bug localization (TRBL) techniques normally use the full text of a bug report to formulate a query and retrieve parts of the code that are buggy. Previous research has shown that reducing the size of the query increases the effectiveness of TRBL. On the other hand, researchers also found improvements when expanding the query (i.e., adding more terms). In this paper, we bring these two views together to reformulate queries for TRBL. Specifically, we improve discourse-based query reduction strategies, by adopting a combinatorial approach and using task phrases from bug reports, and combine them with a state-of-the-art query …

Two Published Flight Dynamics Models Rewritten In Rust And Structures As An Ecs, Chad A. Willis

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores using the Entity-Component System (ECS) architecture to implement a Flight Dynamics Model (FDM) by re-implementing two published versions in the Rust programming language using the Specs Parallel ECS (SPECS) [1] for military simulation advancement. One FDM is based on Grant Palmers published textbook titled Physics for Game Programmers [2], and another is based on David Bourgs textbook titled Physics for Game Developers [3]. Furthermore, this thesis uses these models within an interactive flight simulator.The ECS architecture is based on the Data-Oriented Design (DOD) paradigm, where Components contain the data and the Systems implement the behavior which transforms …

Adaptive Simultaneous Pervasive Visible Light Communication And Sensing, Ila Nitin Gokarn, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Driven by the rapid growth in the proliferation of low-cost LED luminaries, visible light is being increasingly explored as both a high-speed communication and sensing channel for a variety of IoT applications. Visible Light Communication (VLC) exploits the high-frequency modulation of an optical source while ensuring imperceptibility to the human eye. In parallel, recent approaches in Visible Light Sensing (VLS) have demonstrated how high frequency optical strobing can be used to perform vision-based remote sensing of mechanical vibrations (e.g., of factory equipment). To date, exemplars of VLC and VLS have, however, been explored in isolation, without consideration of their mutual …

Interactional Motifs: Leveraging Risks In Large And Distributed Software Development Teams, Subhajit Datta, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Subhashis Majumder

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

DeMarco and Lister begin their classic Peopleware with an air of ominous inevitability “somewhere today, a project is failing” (DeMarco and Lister, 2013). They are talking about software projects, and as the book so brilliantly establishes, software is peopleware. A failed project is the dreaded culmination of all the perceptible and imperceptible risks that are associated with the project. For software projects, a large majority of such risks originate in the interactions of people who are involved in the project. People who build the software are the most valued and the most vulnerable asset of any software project, something that …

Assessing Code Clone Harmfulness: Indicators, Factors, And Counter Measures, Bin Hu, Yijian Wu, Xin Peng, Jun Sun, Nanjie Zhan, Jun Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code clones are identical or similar code in software projects. On one hand, developers clone code to achieve higher productivity and thus clones inherently exist; on the other hand, code clones demand extra effort to maintain the consistency between clone instances and may introduce bugs, and thus are often considered harmful for software maintenance and quality. We believe that not all code clones have the same level of harmfulness. A systematic way of assessing the harmfulness level of cloned code would facilitate informed decisions on how to deal with clones. We propose a model for clone harmfulness level assessment with …

Recent Advances On Intelligent Mobility And Edge Computing, Xun Shao, Zhi Liu, Xianfu Chen, Seng W. Loke, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, we have seen fast development of wireless communications, networking, and cloud computing: 4G, 5G and multiaccess networks greatly enhance the quality of service (QoS) of wireless access networks; software-defined networking, network function virtualization, and information-centric networking largely reduce the cost of network service providers and improve the quality of experience (QoE) of end-users; the development of mobile devices and mobile cloud computing lead to explosive deployment of mobile services and applications; the recent development of advanced algorithms such as Deep Learning has shown great potential in resource allocation and service orchestration. Deep integration of the above technologies …

Csci 40500/77100: Software Engineering, Raffi Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

This course is intended to be an introductory survey on the fundamental concepts and principles that underlie current and emerging methods, tools, and techniques for the efficient engineering of high-quality software systems. This may include understanding and appreciating problems in large-scale software development such as functional analysis of information processing systems, system design concepts, timing estimates, documentation, and system testing.

Csci 40500/77100: Software Engineering, Raffi Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

This course is intended to be an introductory survey on the fundamental concepts and principles that underlie current and emerging methods, tools, and techniques for the efficient engineering of high-quality software systems. This may include understanding and appreciating problems in large-scale software development such as functional analysis of information processing systems, system design concepts, timing estimates, documentation, and system testing.

Treecaps: Tree-Based Capsule Networks For Source Code Processing, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui, Yijun Yu, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently program learning techniques have been proposed to process source code based on syntactical structures (e.g., Abstract Syntax Trees) and/or semantic information (e.g., Dependency Graphs). While graphs may be better at capturing various viewpoints of code semantics than trees, constructing graph inputs from code need static code semantic analysis that may not be accurate and introduces noise during learning. On the other hand, syntax trees are precisely defined according to the language grammar and easier to construct and process than graphs. We propose a new tree-based learning technique, named TreeCaps, by fusing capsule networks with tree-based convolutional neural networks, to …

Revman: Revenue-Aware Multi-Task Online Insurance Recommendation, Yu Li, Yi Zhang, Lu Gan, Gengwei Hong, Zimu Zhou, Qiang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online insurance is a new type of e-commerce with exponential growth. An effective recommendation model that maximizes the total revenue of insurance products listed in multiple customized sales scenarios is crucial for the success of online insurance business. Prior recommendation models are ineffective because they fail to characterize the complex relatedness of insurance products in multiple sales scenarios and maximize the overall conversion rate rather than the total revenue. Even worse, it is impractical to collect training data online for total revenue maximization due to the business logic of online insurance. We propose RevMan, a Revenue-aware Multi-task Network for online …

An Exploratory Study On The Introduction And Removal Of Different Types Of Technical Debt In Deep Learning Frameworks, Jiakun Liu, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, Emad Shihab, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To complete tasks faster, developers often have to sacrifice the quality of the software. Such compromised practice results in the increasing burden to developers in future development. The metaphor, technical debt, describes such practice. Prior research has illustrated the negative impact of technical debt, and many researchers investigated how developers deal with a certain type of technical debt. However, few studies focused on the removal of different types of technical debt in practice. To fill this gap, we use the introduction and removal of different types of self-admitted technical debt (i.e., SATD) in 7 deep learning frameworks as an example. …

Fault Analysis And Debugging Of Microservice Systems: Industrial Survey, Benchmark System, And Empirical Study, Xiang Zhou, Xin Peng, Tao Xie, Jun Sun, Chao Ji, Wenhai Li, Dan Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The complexity and dynamism of microservice systems pose unique challenges to a variety of software engineering tasks such as fault analysis and debugging. In spite of the prevalence and importance of microservices in industry, there is limited research on the fault analysis and debugging of microservice systems. To fill this gap, we conduct an industrial survey to learn typical faults of microservice systems, current practice of debugging, and the challenges faced by developers in practice. We then develop a medium-size benchmark microservice system (being the largest and most complex open source microservice system within our knowledge) and replicate 22 industrial …

Understanding Adversarial Robustness Via Critical Attacking Route, Tianlin Li, Aishan Liu, Xianglong Liu, Yitao Xu, Chongzhi Zhang, Xiaofei Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples which are generated by inputs with imperceptible perturbations. Understanding adversarial robustness of DNNs has become an important issue, which would for certain result in better practical deep learning applications. To address this issue, we try to explain adversarial robustness for deep models from a new perspective of critical attacking route, which is computed by a gradient-based influence propagation strategy. Similar to rumor spreading in social net-works, we believe that adversarial noises are amplified and propagated through the critical attacking route. By exploiting neurons' influences layer by layer, we compose the critical …

Decision-Guided Weighted Automata Extraction From Recurrent Neural Networks, Xiyue Zhang, Xiaoning Du, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Yang Liu, Meng Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in learning and processing sequential data (e.g., speech and natural language). However, due to the black-box nature of neural networks, understanding the decision logic of RNNs is quite challenging. Some recent progress has been made to approximate the behavior of an RNN by weighted automata. They provide better interpretability, but still suffer from poor scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to extracting weighted automata with the guidance of a target RNN’s decision and context information. In particular, we identify the patterns of RNN’s step-wise predictive decisions to instruct the …

Efficientderain: Learning Pixel-Wise Dilation Filtering For High-Efficiency Single-Image Deraining, Qing Guo, Jingyang Sun, Felix Juefei-Xu, Lei Ma, Xiaofei Xie, Wei Feng, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Single-image deraining is rather challenging due to the unknown rain model. Existing methods often make specific assumptions of the rain model, which can hardly cover many diverse circumstances in the real world, compelling them to employ complex optimization or progressive refinement. This, however, significantly affects these methods’ efficiency and effectiveness for many efficiency-critical applications. To fill this gap, in this paper, we regard the single-image deraining as a general image-enhancing problem and originally propose a model-free deraining method, i.e., EfficientDeRain, which is able to process a rainy image within 10 ms (i.e., around 6 ms on average), over 80 times …

Qlens: Visual Analytics Of Multi-Step Problem-Solving Behaviors For Improving Question Design, Meng Xia, Reshika P. Velumani, Yong Wang, Huamin Qu, Xiaojuan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of online education in recent years, there has been an increasing number of learning platforms that provide students with multi-step questions to cultivate their problem-solving skills. To guarantee the high quality of such learning materials, question designers need to inspect how students’ problem-solving processes unfold step by step to infer whether students’ problem-solving logic matches their design intent. They also need to compare the behaviors of different groups (e.g., students from different grades) to distribute questions to students with the right level of knowledge. The availability of fine-grained interaction data, such as mouse movement trajectories from …

Visual Analysis Of Discrimination In Machine Learning, Qianwen Wang, Zhenghua Xu, Zhutian Chen, Yong Wang, Shixia Liu, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The growing use of automated decision-making in critical applications, such as crime prediction and college admission, has raised questions about fairness in machine learning. How can we decide whether different treatments are reasonable or discriminatory? In this paper, we investigate discrimination in machine learning from a visual analytics perspective and propose an interactive visualization tool, DiscriLens, to support a more comprehensive analysis. To reveal detailed information on algorithmic discrimination, DiscriLens identifies a collection of potentially discriminatory itemsets based on causal modeling and classification rules mining. By combining an extended Euler diagram with a matrix-based visualization, we develop a novel set …

Terrace-Based Food Counting And Segmentation, Huu-Thanh Nguyen, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper represents object instance as a terrace, where the height of terrace corresponds to object attention while the evolution of layers from peak to sea level represents the complexity in drawing the finer boundary of an object. A multitask neural network is presented to learn the terrace representation. The attention of terrace is leveraged for instance counting, and the layers provide prior for easy-to-hard pathway of progressive instance segmentation. We study the model for counting and segmentation for a variety of food instances, ranging from Chinese, Japanese to Western food. This paper presents how the terrace model deals with …

Change Request Prediction And Effort Estimation In An Evolving Software System, Lamees Abdullah Alhazzaa

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Prediction of software defects has been the focus of many researchers in empirical software engineering and software maintenance because of its significance in providing quality estimates from the project management perspective for an evolving legacy system. Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGM) have been used to predict future defects in a software release. Modern software engineering databases contain Change Requests (CR), which include both defects and other maintenance requests. Our goal is to use defect prediction methods to help predict CRs in an evolving legacy system.

Limited research has been done in defect prediction using curve-fitting methods evolving software systems, with …

Text Classification Using Novel Term Weighting Scheme-Based Improved Tf-Idf For Internet Media Reports, Zhiying Jiang Phd, Bo Gao, Yanlin He, Yongming Han, Paul Doyle, Qunxiong Zhu

Other

With the rapid development of the internet technology, a large amount of internet text data can be obtained. The text classification (TC) technology plays a very important role in processing massive text data, but the accuracy of classification is directly affected by the performance of term weighting in TC. Due to the original design of information retrieval (IR), term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) is not effective enough for TC, especially for processing text data with unbalanced distributions in internet media reports. Therefore, the variance between the DF value of a particular term and the average of all DFs , namely, …

Tagtools: Software Supporting Biologging Research, Sam Fynewever, Racheal Tejevbo, Stacy L. De Ruiter

Summer Research

Observing animals in obscure habitats has long posed a challenge in biology. Biologging addresses this broad problem, obtaining data about animals like their acceleration, GPS position, etc. using electronic tags. Data from tags can lead to important knowledge of animal behavior, as DeRuiter et al. (2013) have shown1 . However, data is often shared raw, causing inconsistencies. This project maintains TagTools, software addressing this specific problem. TagToolsfunctions (in Matlab, Octave & R) calibrate data and help analyze behavior. TagTools software is traditionally taught at in-person workshops. Our old documents (practicals) were hosted online, but had bugs & were very long, …

An Ensemble Approach For Annotating Source Code Identifiers With Part-Of-Speech Tags, Christian D. Newman,, Michael J. Decker, Reem S. Alsuhaibani, Anthony Peruma, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Satyajit Mohapatra, Tejal Vishnoi, Marcos Zampieri, Timothy Sheldon, Emily Hill

Articles

This paper presents an ensemble part-of-speech tagging approach for source code identifiers. Ensemble tagging is a technique that uses machine-learning and the output from multiple part-of-speech taggers to annotate natural language text at a higher quality than the part-of-speech taggers are able to obtain independently. Our ensemble uses three state-of-the-art part-of-speech taggers: SWUM, POSSE, and Stanford. We study the quality of the ensemble's annotations on five different types of identifier names: function, class, attribute, parameter, and declaration statement at the level of both individual words and full identifier names. We also study and discuss the weaknesses of our tagger to …

Applications Of Machine Learning To Facilitate Software Engineering And Scientific Computing, Natalie Best

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

The use of machine learning has risen in recent years, though many areas remain unexplored due to lack of data or lack of computational tools. This dissertation explores machine learning approaches in case studies involving image classification and natural language processing. In addition, a software library in the form of two-way bridge connecting deep learning models in Keras with ones available in the Fortran programming language is also presented.

In Chapter 2, we explore the applicability of transfer learning utilizing models pre-trained on non-software engineering data applied to the problem of classifying software unified modeling language diagrams where data is …

The Role Of Software Engineering In Bioinformatics, Brendan Sean Lawlor

Theses

This thesis proposes that by applying state-of-the-art software engineering tools, techniques and frameworks to currently recognised challenges in bioinformatics, improved outcomes can be attained in that field. It begins by decomposing software engineering into two categories, namely process and architecture, and choosing two key challenges in the practice of bioinformatics: reproducibility and scalability. The body of the thesis is an exploration of the intersection between these two software engineering categories and these two bioinformatics challenges. The question is asked: Can best practices in professional software engineering be applied to address key issues in the bioinformatics domain, creating positive outcomes? And …