Software Engineering Commons^™

Mando: Multi-Level Heterogeneous Graph Embeddings For Fine-Grained Detection Of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Nhat Minh Nguyen, Chunyao Xie, Zahra Ahmadi, Daniel Kudenko, Thanh Nam Doan, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning heterogeneous graphs consisting of different types of nodes and edges enhances the results of homogeneous graph techniques. An interesting example of such graphs is control-flow graphs representing possible software code execution flows. As such graphs represent more semantic information of code, developing techniques and tools for such graphs can be highly beneficial for detecting vulnerabilities in software for its reliability. However, existing heterogeneous graph techniques are still insufficient in handling complex graphs where the number of different types of nodes and edges is large and variable. This paper concentrates on the Ethereum smart contracts as a sample of software …

Answer Summarization For Technical Queries: Benchmark And New Approach, Chengran Yang, Bowen Xu, Ferdian Thung, Yucen Shi, Ting Zhang, Zhou Yang, Xin Zhou, Jieke Shi, Junda He, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prior studies have demonstrated that approaches to generate an answer summary for a given technical query in Software Question and Answer (SQA) sites are desired. We find that existing approaches are assessed solely through user studies. Hence, a new user study needs to be performed every time a new approach is introduced; this is time-consuming, slows down the development of the new approach, and results from different user studies may not be comparable to each other. There is a need for a benchmark with ground truth summaries as a complement assessment through user studies. Unfortunately, such a benchmark is non-existent …

Compressing Pre-Trained Models Of Code Into 3 Mb, Jieke Shi, Zhou Yang, Bowen Xu, Hong Jin Kang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although large pre-trained models of code have delivered significant advancements in various code processing tasks, there is an impediment to the wide and fluent adoption of these powerful models in software developers’ daily workflow: these large models consume hundreds of megabytes of memory and run slowly on personal devices, which causes problems in model deployment and greatly degrades the user experience. It motivates us to propose Compressor, a novel approach that can compress the pre-trained models of code into extremely small models with negligible performance sacrifice. Our proposed method formulates the design of tiny models as simplifying the pre-trained model …

Lawbreaker: An Approach For Specifying Traffic Laws And Fuzzing Autonomous Vehicles, Yang Sun, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun, Yuqi Chen, Zijiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) must be tested thoroughly before they can be deployed in autonomous vehicles. High-fidelity simulators allow them to be tested against diverse scenarios, including those that are difficult to recreate in real-world testing grounds. While previous approaches have shown that test cases can be generated automatically, they tend to focus on weak oracles (e.g. reaching the destination without collisions) without assessing whether the journey itself was undertaken safely and satisfied the law. In this work, we propose LawBreaker, an automated framework for testing ADSs against real-world traffic laws, which is designed to be compatible with different scenario …

Automatic Pull Request Title Generation, Ting Zhang, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Ferdian Thung, Donggyun Han, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pull Requests (PRs) are a mechanism on modern collaborative coding platforms, such as GitHub. PRs allow developers to tell others that their code changes are available for merging into another branch in a repository. A PR needs to be reviewed and approved by the core team of the repository before the changes are merged into the branch. Usually, reviewers need to identify a PR that is in line with their interests before providing a review. By default, PRs are arranged in a list view that shows the titles of PRs. Therefore, it is desirable to have a precise and concise …

A Comparative Analysis Of Clone Detection Techniques On Semanticclonebench, Sohaib Masood Rabbani, Nabeel Ahmad Gulzar, Saad Arshad, Shamsa Abid, Shafay Shamail

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Semantic code clone detection involves the detection of functionally similar code fragments which may otherwise be lexically, syntactically, or structurally dissimilar. The detection of semantic code clones has important applications in aspect mining and product line analysis. The accurate detection of semantic code clones is a challenging task and various techniques have been proposed. However, the evaluation of these techniques is performed using various datasets and we do not have a clear picture of the performance of these techniques relative to each other. Recently, SemanticCloneBench has been introduced as a benchmark for semantic clones. Now, we can use the SemanticCloneBench …

Using Natural Language Processing To Increase Modularity And Interpretability Of Automated Essay Evaluation And Student Feedback, Chris Roche, Nathan Deinlein, Darryl Dawkins, Faizan Javed

SMU Data Science Review

For English teachers and students who are dissatisfied with the one-size-fits-all approach of current Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems, this research uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques that provide a focus on configurability and interpretability. Unlike traditional AES models which are designed to provide an overall score based on pre-trained criteria, this tool allows teachers to tailor feedback based upon specific focus areas. The tool implements a user-interface that serves as a customizable rubric. Students’ essays are inputted into the tool either by the student or by the teacher via the application’s user-interface. Based on the rubric settings, the tool …

Learning Experience With Learnwithemma, Clara Susaie, Choo-Kim Tan, Pey-Yun Goh

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

The presence of Covid-19 was a game-changer in all the sectors that traditional learning, working, selling even living methods have changed from basic methods to something else to curb Covid-19. The impact was huge on most sectors due to the lack of experience in overcoming pandemics. One of the sectors that face the most struggle was educational institutions. For many years, face-to-face learning and teaching method have been in practice. While during Covid-19, everyone was forced to attend online classes as a precautious measure. Online learning is completely based on digital study without the physical presence of students or lecturers. …

Secure File Storage On Cloud Using Hybrid Cryptography, Jian-Foo Lai, Swee-Huay Heng

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

As technology today is moving forward exponentially, data exchange over the Internet has become a daily routine. Furthermore, businesses are growing internationally and offices are being established in a variety of different places throughout the world. This has resulted in the necessity to make data accessible and practical from any place. As a result, information sent via an may lead to critical security problems involving the breach of secrecy, authentication, and data integrity. This paper introduces a cloud storage system by utilising hybrid cryptography approach that leverages both advantages of symmetric key and asymmetric key cryptographic techniques. In our proposed …

A Systematic Review On Non-Functional Requirements Documentation In Agile Methodology, Steven Loh Mun Keong, Zarina Che Embi

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

This systematic literature review studies and summarizes findings of requirements documentation of non-functional requirements practiced by agile software development teams. It identifies current practices and existing gaps when agile software teams discuss and implement non-functional requirements, and the current methods used to document non-functional requirements. Our aim is to identify available evidence on current practices and gaps in documenting non-functional requirements. The review was conducted by searching major databases for publications between 2018 and 2022. The inclusion and exclusion criteria as well as quality assessment scoring criteria were subsequently established. Results show that common themes in the practices and gaps …

Emotion Recognition By Facial Expression And Voice: Review And Analysis, Yixen Lim Lim, Kok-Why Ng, Palanichamy Naveen, Su-Cheng Haw

Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering

Emotion is a scorching topic in the recent years due to the critical unseen stress incurred during the pandemic and post-pandemic. This is worsening with the recent economy’s inflation and increase of living cost, many employees are seriously affected and drawn forth many families saddened cases and tremendous drop of working performance. The increasing stress brings a lot of harm not only to the individual but to the company’s and country’s growth. To recognize emotion through a single model is less accurate, however, recruiting multiple-models may lead to latency in data processing and possibly misleading results if the input models …

Hierarchical Semantic-Aware Neural Code Representation, Yuan Jiang, Xiaohong Su, Christoph Treude, Tiantian Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code representation is a fundamental problem in many software engineering tasks. Despite the effort made by many researchers, it is still hard for existing methods to fully extract syntactic, structural and sequential features of source code, which form the hierarchical semantics of the program and are necessary to achieve a deeper code understanding. To alleviate this difficulty, we propose a new supervised approach based on the novel use of Tree-LSTM to incorporate the sequential and the global semantic features of programs explicitly into the representation model. Unlike previous techniques, our proposed model can not only learn low-level syntactic information within …

Automatic Fairness Testing Of Neural Classifiers Through Adversarial Sampling, Peixin Zhang, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Xinyu Wang, Guoliang Dong, Xinggen Wang, Ting Dai, Jinsong Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although deep learning has demonstrated astonishing performance in many applications, there are still concerns about its dependability. One desirable property of deep learning applications with societal impact is fairness (i.e., non-discrimination). Unfortunately, discrimination might be intrinsically embedded into the models due to the discrimination in the training data. As a countermeasure, fairness testing systemically identifies discriminatory samples, which can be used to retrain the model and improve the model’s fairness. Existing fairness testing approaches however have two major limitations. Firstly, they only work well on traditional machine learning models and have poor performance (e.g., effectiveness and efficiency) on deep learning …

Gpgpu Microbenchmarking For Irregular Application Optimization, Dalton R. Winans-Pruitt

Theses and Dissertations

Irregular applications, such as unstructured mesh operations, do not easily map onto the typical GPU programming paradigms endorsed by GPU manufacturers, which mostly focus on maximizing concurrency for latency hiding. In this work, we show how alternative techniques focused on latency amortization can be used to control overall latency while requiring less concurrency. We used a custom-built microbenchmarking framework to test several GPU kernels and show how the GPU behaves under relevant workloads. We demonstrate that coalescing is not required for efficacious performance; an uncoalesced access pattern can achieve high bandwidth - even over 80% of the theoretical global memory …

A Tool-Supported Metamodel For Program Bugfix Analysis In Empirical Software Engineering, Manal Zneit

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes a software modeling approach aimed at addressing empirical studies in software engineering. We build a metamodel that provides an overview of the taxonomy of program bugfixes in deep learning programs. For modeling purposes, we present a prototype tool that is an implementation of the model-driven techniques presented.

Perturbation Modeling For Molecular Design Of Protein Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors Using Unsupervised Machine Learning, Keerthi Krishnan

Computational and Data Sciences (MS) Theses

The field of computational drug discovery and development has grown, with the aid of new computational tools for novel molecule discovery. In specific, generative deep learning models have excelled as tools to aid in navigating the large space of known molecules and in the creation of new molecules. These models are fed various representations of molecules as inputs and learn to perform a variety of things, such as the optimization of these molecules towards a targeted property. Ultimately, these generative learning models allow us to build bridges between chemical and continuous spaces to understand the compromise between invoking small incremental …

Technology Agency On Usage: Grounded Theory And Measurement Of Technology Induced Usage Behavior, Sandip Kumar Sarkar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Most of today’s software applications involve a dyadic interplay between human and technology agency. The use of algorithms driven by user can alter users' interaction patterns by affording them novel and relevant technology action possibilities. I argue that algorithmic activities and features embedded in apps can keep users on IT applications (apps) for longer periods of time. I refer to the behavior of interacting with the apps for longer time than planned as technology-induced excessive use. While practitioners are beginning to recognize characteristics of technology-induced excessive use, research on this topic is very limited. I used a multimethod approach to …

Constraint-Aware, Scalable, And Efficient Algorithms For Multi-Chip Power Module Layout Optimization, Imam Al Razi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Moving towards an electrified world requires ultra high-density power converters. Electric vehicles, electrified aerospace, data centers, etc. are just a few fields among wide application areas of power electronic systems, where high-density power converters are essential. As a critical part of these power converters, power semiconductor modules and their layout optimization has been identified as a crucial step in achieving the maximum performance and density for wide bandgap technologies (i.e., GaN and SiC). New packaging technologies are also introduced to produce reliable and efficient multichip power module (MCPM) designs to push the current limits. The complexity of the emerging MCPM …

Deep Learning Edge Detection In Image Inpainting, Zheng Zheng

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In recent years, deep learning has grown rapidly, and it has been creatively implemented for various applications. In 2019, deep learning based EdgeConnect image inpainting algorithm came out and occupied a place in the image inpainting field. Unlike traditional image inpainting methods which mainly read and use the color information of the remaining part of the image to fill the missing regions of the image, EdgeConnect uses the innovative edge-first and color-next approach. It uses an edge detector to generate an edge map of an image with missing regions, then the missing edges are completed by an edge model, finally …

Holistic Combination Of Structural And Textual Code Information For Context Based Api Recommendation, Chi Chen, Xin Peng, Zhengchang Xing, Jun Sun, Xin Wang, Yifan Zhao, Wenyun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context based API recommendation is an important way to help developers find the needed APIs effectively and efficiently. For effective API recommendation, we need not only a joint view of both structural and textual code information, but also a holistic view of correlated API usage in control and data flow graph as a whole. Unfortunately, existing API recommendation methods exploit structural or textual code information separately. In this work, we propose a novel API recommendation approach called APIRec-CST (API Recommendation by Combining Structural and Textual code information). APIRec-CST is a deep learning model that combines the API usage with the …

Fed-Ltd: Towards Cross-Platform Ride Hailing Via Federated Learning To Dispatch, Yansheng Wang, Yongxin Tong, Zimu Zhou, Ziyao Ren, Yi Xu, Guobin Wu, Weifeng Lv

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning based order dispatching has witnessed tremendous success in ride hailing. However, the success halts within individual ride hailing platforms because sharing raw order dispatching data across platforms may leak user privacy and business secrets. Such data isolation not only impairs user experience but also decreases the potential revenues of the platforms. In this paper, we advocate federated order dispatching for cross-platform ride hailing, where multiple platforms collaboratively make dispatching decisions without sharing their local data. Realizing this concept calls for new federated learning strategies that tackle the unique challenges on effectiveness, privacy and efficiency in the context of order …

Finding Meta Winning Ticket To Train Your Maml, Dawei Gao, Yuexiang Xie, Zimu Zhou, Zhen Wang, Yaliang Li, Bolin. Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) states that a randomly initialized dense network contains sub-networks that can be trained in isolation to the performance of the dense network. In this paper, to achieve rapid learning with less computational cost, we explore LTH in the context of meta learning. First, we experimentally show that there are sparse sub-networks, known as meta winning tickets, which can be meta-trained to few-shot classification accuracy to the original backbone. The application of LTH in meta learning enables the adaptation of meta-trained networks on various IoT devices with fewer computation. However, the status quo to identify winning …

Aligning Dual Disentangled User Representations From Ratings And Textual Content, Nhu Thuat Tran, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Classical recommendation methods typically render user representation as a single vector in latent space. Oftentimes, a user's interactions with items are influenced by several hidden factors. To better uncover these hidden factors, we seek disentangled representations. Existing disentanglement methods for recommendations are mainly concerned with user-item interactions alone. To further improve not only the effectiveness of recommendations but also the interpretability of the representations, we propose to learn a second set of disentangled user representations from textual content and to align the two sets of representations with one another. The purpose of this coupling is two-fold. For one benefit, we …

Legion: Massively Composing Rankers For Improved Bug Localization At Adobe, Darryl Jarman, Jeffrey Berry, Riley Smith, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Studies have estimated that, in industrial settings, developers spend between 30 and 90 percent of their time fixing bugs. As such, tools that assist in identifying the location of bugs provide value by reducing debugging costs. One such tool is BugLocator. This study initially aimed to determine if developers working on the Adobe Analytics product could use BugLocator. The initial results show that BugLocator achieves a similar accuracy on five of seven Adobe Analytics repositories and on open-source projects. However, these results do not meet the minimum applicability requirement deemed necessary by Adobe Analytics developers prior to possible adoption. Thus, …

Self-Adaptive Systems: A Systematic Literature Review Across Categories And Domains, Terence Wong, Markus Wagner, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Championed by IBM’s vision of autonomic computing paper in 2003, the autonomic computing research field has seen increased research activity over the last 20 years. Several conferences (SEAMS, SASO, ICAC) and workshops (SISSY) have been established and have contributed to the autonomic computing knowledge base in search of a new kind of system — a self-adaptive system (SAS). These systems are characterized by being context-aware and can act on that awareness. The actions carried out could be on the system or on the context (or environment). The underlying goal of a SAS is the sustained achievement of its goals …

Finding Meta Winning Ticket To Train Your Maml, Dawei Gao, Yuexiang Xie, Zimu Zhou, Zhen Wang, Yaliang Li, Bolin. Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) states that a randomly initialized dense network contains sub-networks that can be trained in isolation to the performance of the dense network. In this paper, to achieve rapid learning with less computational cost, we explore LTH in the context of meta learning. First, we experimentally show that there are sparse sub-networks, known as meta winning tickets, which can be meta-trained to few-shot classification accuracy to the original backbone. The application of LTH in meta learning enables the adaptation of meta-trained networks on various IoT devices with fewer computation. However, the status quo to identify winning …

Quertci: A Tool Integrating Github Issue Querying With Comment Classification, Ye Paing, Tatiana Castro Vélez, Raffi Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) researchers study (open-source) project issues and the comments and threads within to discover—among others—challenges developers face when incorporating new technologies, platforms, and programming language constructs. However, such threads accumulate, becoming unwieldy and hindering any insight researchers may gain. While existing approaches alleviate this burden by classifying issue thread comments, there is a gap between searching popular open-source software repositories (e.g., those on GitHub) for issues containing particular keywords and feeding the results into a classification model. This paper demonstrates a research infrastructure tool called QuerTCI that bridges this gap by integrating the GitHub issue comment search …

Digbug: Pre/Post-Processing Operator Selection For Accurate Bug Localization, Kisub Kim, Sankalp Ghatpande, Kui Liu, Anil Koyuncu, Dongsun Kim, Tegawendé F. Bissyande, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug localization is a recurrent maintenance task in software development. It aims at identifying relevant code locations (e.g., code files) that must be inspected to fix bugs. When such bugs are reported by users, the localization process become often overwhelming as it is mostly a manual task due to incomplete and informal information (written in natural languages) available in bug reports. The research community has then invested in automated approaches, notably using Information Retrieval techniques. Unfortunately, reported performance in the literature is still limited for practical usage. Our key observation, after empirically investigating a large dataset of bug reports as …

Npc: Neuron Path Coverage Via Characterizing Decision Logic Of Deep Neural Networks, Xiaofei Xie, Tianlin Li, Jian Wang, Lei Ma, Qing Guo, Felix Juefei-Xu, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning has recently been widely applied to many applications across different domains, e.g., image classification and audio recognition. However, the quality of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) still raises concerns in the practical operational environment, which calls for systematic testing, especially in safety-critical scenarios. Inspired by software testing, a number of structural coverage criteria are designed and proposed to measure the test adequacy of DNNs. However, due to the blackbox nature of DNN, the existing structural coverage criteria are difficult to interpret, making it hard to understand the underlying principles of these criteria. The relationship between the structural coverage and …

Deepcause: Verifying Neural Networks With Abstraction Refinement, Nguyen Hua Gia Phuc

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Neural networks have been becoming essential parts in many safety-critical systems (such
as self-driving cars and medical diagnosis). Due to that, it is desirable that neural networks
not only have high accuracy (which traditionally can be validated using a test set) but also
satisfy some safety properties (such as robustness, fairness, or free of backdoor). To verify
neural networks against desired safety properties, there are many approaches developed
based on classical abstract interpretation. However, like in program verification, these
approaches suffer from false alarms, which may hinder the deployment of the networks.

One natural remedy to tackle the problem adopted …