Software Engineering Commons^™

Uni-Prover: A Universal Automated Prover For Specificationally Rich Languages, Nicodemus Msafiri John Mbwambo

All Dissertations

Formal software verification systems must be designed to adapt to growth in the scope and complexity of software, driven by expanding capabilities of computer hardware and domain of potential usage. They must provide specification languages that are flexible and rich enough to allow software developers to write precise and comprehensible specifications for a full spectrum of object-based software components. Rich specification languages allow for arbitrary extensions to the library of mathematical theories, and critically, verification of programs with such specifications require a universal automated prover. Most existing verification systems either incorporate specification languages limited to first-order logic, which lacks the …

How Developers Engineer Test Cases: An Observational Study, Maurício Aniche, Christoph Treude, Andy Zaidman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the main challenges that developers face when testing their systems lies in engineering test cases that are good enough to reveal bugs. And while our body of knowledge on software testing and automated test case generation is already quite significant, in practice, developers are still the ones responsible for engineering test cases manually. Therefore, understanding the developers’ thought- and decision-making processes while engineering test cases is a fundamental step in making developers better at testing software. In this paper, we observe 13 developers thinking-aloud while testing different real-world open-source methods, and use these observations to explain how developers …

Dronlomaly: Runtime Detection Of Anomalous Drone Behaviors Via Log Analysis And Deep Learning, Lwin Khin Shar, Wei Minn, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Jianli Fan, Lingxiao Jiang, Daniel Wai Kiat Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Drones are increasingly popular and getting used in a variety of missions such as area surveillance, pipeline inspection, cinematography, etc. While the drone is conducting a mission, anomalies such as sensor fault, actuator fault, configuration errors, bugs in controller program, remote cyber- attack, etc., may affect the drone’s physical stability and cause serious safety violations such as crashing into the public. During a flight mission, drones typically log flight status and state units such as GPS coordinates, actuator outputs, accelerator readings, gyroscopic readings, etc. These log data may reflect the above-mentioned anomalies. In this paper, we propose a novel, deep …

Active Attestation Of Embedded Systems, Mark M. Stephenson, Patrick A. Reber, Patrick J. Sweeney, Scott R. Graham

AFIT Patents

An active attestation apparatus verifies at runtime the integrity of untrusted machine code of an embedded system residing in a memory device while it is being run/used with while slowing the processing time less than other methods. The apparatus uses an integrated circuit chip containing a microcontroller and a reprogrammable logic device, such as a field programmable gate array (FPGA), to implement software attestation at runtime and in less time than is typically possible with comparable attestation approaches, while not requiring any halt of the processor in the microcontroller. The reprogrammable logic device includes functionality to load an encrypted version …

Integrating Computing Into Preservice Teacher Preparation Programs Across The Core: Language, Mathematics, And Science, Lauren E. Margulieux, Patrick Enderle, Pier Junor Clarke, Natalie King, Caroline Sullivan, Michelle Zoss, Joyce Many

Journal of Computer Science Integration

This paper describes the beginning of a design-based research project for integrating computing activities in preservice teacher programs throughout a middle and secondary education department. Computing integration activities use computing tools, like programming, to support learning in non-computing disciplines. The paper begins with the motivation for integrating computing that encouraged widespread buy-in, design goals, and design parameters. The primary motivating factor for this work was preparing teachers to use technology to support learning in their classrooms. Involving computing education faculty in the preparation enabled the activities to include computer science and spread computational literacy. The paper also describes the process …

Unoapi: Balancing Performance, Portability, And Productivity (P3) In Hpc Education, Konstantin Laufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

oneAPI is a major initiative by Intel aimed at making it easier to program heterogeneous architectures used in high-performance computing using a unified application programming interface (API). While raising the abstraction level via a unified API represents a promising step for the current generation of students and practitioners to embrace high- performance computing, we argue that a curriculum of well- developed software engineering methods and well-crafted exem- plars will be necessary to ensure interest by this audience and those who teach them. We aim to bridge the gap by developing a curriculum—codenamed UnoAPI—that takes a more holistic approach by looking …

An Empirical Study Of Artifacts And Security Risks In The Pre-Trained Model Supply Chain, Wenxin Jiang, Nicholas Synovic, Rohan Sethi, Aryan Indarapu, Matt Hyattt, Taylor R. Schorlemmer, George K. Thiruvathukal, James C. Davis

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance on many tasks, but require increasingly complex architectures and costly training procedures. Engineers can reduce costs by reusing a pre-trained model (PTM) and fine-tuning it for their own tasks. To facilitate software reuse, engineers collaborate around model hubs, collections of PTMs and datasets organized by problem domain. Although model hubs are now comparable in popularity and size to other software ecosystems, the associated PTM supply chain has not yet been examined from a software engineering perspective.

We present an empirical study of artifacts and security features in 8 model hubs. We indicate the potential …

Redefining Research In Nanotechnology Simulations: A New Approach To Data Caching And Analysis, Darin Tsai, Alan Zhang, Aloysius Rebeiro

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Research Software Science: Expanding The Impact Of Research Software Engineering, Michael A. Heroux

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Software plays a central role in scientific discovery. Improving how we develop and use software for research can have both broad and deep impacts on a spectrum of challenges and opportunities society faces today. The emergence of the research software engineer (RSE) role correlates with the growing complexity of scientific challenges and the diversity of software team skills. In this article, research software science (RSS), an idea related to RSE and particularly suited to research software teams, is described. RSS promotes the use of scientific methodologies to explore and establish broadly applicable knowledge. Using RSS, we can pursue sustainable, repeatable, …

How To Formulate Specific How-To Questions In Software Development?, Mingwei Liu, Xin Peng, Andrian Marcus, Christoph Treude, Jiazhan Xie, Huanjun Xu, Yanjun Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers often ask how-to questions using search engines, technical Q&A communities, and interactive Q&A systems to seek help for specific programming tasks. However, they often do not formulate the questions in a specific way, making it hard for the systems to return the best answers. We propose an approach (TaskKG4Q) that interactively helps developers formulate a programming related how-to question. TaskKG4Q is using a programming task knowledge graph (task KG in short) mined from Stack Overflow questions, which provides a hierarchical conceptual structure for tasks in terms of [actions], [objects], and [constraints]. An empirical evaluation of the intrinsic quality of …

Real World Projects, Real Faults: Evaluating Spectrum Based Fault Localization Techniques On Python Projects, Ratnadira Widyasari, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Stefanus Agus Haryono, Shaowei Wang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spectrum Based Fault Localization (SBFL) is a statistical approach to identify faulty code within a program given a program spectra (i.e., records of program elements executed by passing and failing test cases). Several SBFL techniques have been proposed over the years, but most evaluations of those techniques were done only on Java and C programs, and frequently involve artificial faults. Considering the current popularity of Python, indicated by the results of the Stack Overflow survey among developers in 2020, it becomes increasingly important to understand how SBFL techniques perform on Python projects. However, this remains an understudied topic. In this …

Itiger: An Automatic Issue Title Generation Tool, Ting Zhang, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Thung Ferdian, Donggyun Han, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In both commercial and open-source software, bug reports or issues are used to track bugs or feature requests. However, the quality of issues can differ a lot. Prior research has found that bug reports with good quality tend to gain more attention than the ones with poor quality. As an essential component of an issue, title quality is an important aspect of issue quality. Moreover, issues are usually presented in a list view, where only the issue title and some metadata are present. In this case, a concise and accurate title is crucial for readers to grasp the general concept …

An Empirical Study Of Blockchain System Vulnerabilities: Modules, Types, And Patterns, Xiao Yi, Daoyuan Wu, Lingxiao Jiang, Yuzhou Fang, Kehuan Zhang, Wei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Blockchain, as a distributed ledger technology, becomes increasingly popular, especially for enabling valuable cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. However, the blockchain software systems inevitably have many bugs. Although bugs in smart contracts have been extensively investigated, security bugs of the underlying blockchain systems are much less explored. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on blockchain’s system vulnerabilities from four representative blockchains, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and Stellar. Specifically, we first design a systematic filtering process to effectively identify 1,037 vulnerabilities and their 2,317 patches from 34,245 issues/PRs (pull requests) and 85,164 commits on GitHub. We thus build the first blockchain …

Context-Aware Code Recommendation In Intellij Idea, Shamsa Abid, Hamid Abdul Basit, Shafay Shamail

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers spend a lot of time online, searching for code to help them implement their desired features. While code recommenders help improve developers’ productivity, there is currently no support for context-aware code recommendation for opportunistic code reuse on-the-go. Typical code recommendation systems provide recommendations against a search query, whereas a code recommender that supports opportunistic reuse can recommend related code snippets that represent features that the developer may want to implement next. In this paper, we present a novel Context-aware Feature-driven API usage-based Code Recommender (CA-FACER) tool, which is an Intellij IDEA plugin that leverages a developer’s development context to …

Predictive Self-Organizing Neural Networks For In-Home Detection Of Mild Cognitive Impairment, Seng Khoon Teh, Iris Rawtaer, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In-home sensing of daily living patterns from older adults coupled with machine learning is a promisingapproach to detect Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), a potentially reversible condition with early detectionand appropriate intervention. However, the number of subjects involved in such real-world studies istypically limited, posing the so-called small data problem to most predictive models which rely on a sizablenumber of labeled data. In this work, a predictive self-organizing neural network known as fuzzy AdaptiveResonance Associate Map (fuzzy ARAM) is proposed to detect MCI using in-home sensor data collected from aunique Singapore cross-sectional study. Specifically, mean and standard deviation of nine in-home …

Adaptive Fairness Improvement Based Causality Analysis, Mengdi Zhang, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given a discriminating neural network, the problem of fairness improvement is to systematically reduce discrimination without significantly scarifies its performance (i.e., accuracy). Multiple categories of fairness improving methods have been proposed for neural networks, including pre-processing, in-processing and postprocessing. Our empirical study however shows that these methods are not always effective (e.g., they may improve fairness by paying the price of huge accuracy drop) or even not helpful (e.g., they may even worsen both fairness and accuracy). In this work, we propose an approach which adaptively chooses the fairness improving method based on causality analysis. That is, we choose the …

Large-Scale Analysis Of Non-Termination Bugs In Real-World Oss Projects, Xiuhan Shi, Xiaofei Xie, Yi Li, Yao Zhang, Sen Chen, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Termination is a crucial program property. Non-termination bugs can be subtle to detect and may remain hidden for long before they take effect. Many real-world programs still suffer from vast consequences (e.g., no response) caused by non-termination bugs. As a classic problem, termination proving has been studied for many years. Many termination checking tools and techniques have been developed and demonstrated effectiveness on existing wellestablished benchmarks. However, the capability of these tools in finding practical non-termination bugs has yet to be tested on real-world projects. To fill in this gap, in this paper, we conducted the first large-scale empirical study …

Mando-Guru: Vulnerability Detection For Smart Contract Source Code By Heterogeneous Graph Embeddings, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Nhat Minh Nguyen, Hong-Phuc Doan, Zahrai Ahmadi, Thanh Nam Doan, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are increasingly used with blockchain systems for high-value applications. It is highly desired to ensure the quality of smart contract source code before they are deployed. This paper proposes a new deep learning-based tool, MANDO-GURU, that aims to accurately detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts at both coarse-grained contract-level and fine-grained line-level. Using a combination of control-flow graphs and call graphs of Solidity code, we design new heterogeneous graph attention neural networks to encode more structural and potentially semantic relations among different types of nodes and edges of such graphs and use the encoded embeddings of the graphs and …

Codematcher: A Tool For Large-Scale Code Search Based On Query Semantics Matching, Chao Liu, Xuanlin Bao, Xin Xia, Meng Yan, David Lo, Ting Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the emergence of large-scale codebases, such as GitHub and Gitee, searching and reusing existing code can help developers substantially improve software development productivity. Over the years, many code search tools have been developed. Early tools leveraged the information retrieval (IR) technique to perform an efficient code search for a frequently changed large-scale codebase. However, the search accuracy was low due to the semantic mismatch between query and code. In the recent years, many tools leveraged Deep Learning (DL) technique to address this issue. But the DL-based tools are slow and the search accuracy is unstable.In this paper, we …

Autopruner: Transformer-Based Call Graph Pruning, Cong Thanh Le, Hong Jin Kang, Truong Giang Nguyen, Stefanus Agus Haryono, David Lo, Xuan-Bach D. Le, Huynh Quyet Thang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Constructing a static call graph requires trade-offs between soundness and precision. Program analysis techniques for constructing call graphs are unfortunately usually imprecise. To address this problem, researchers have recently proposed call graph pruning empowered by machine learning to post-process call graphs constructed by static analysis. A machine learning model is built to capture information from the call graph by extracting structural features for use in a random forest classifier. It then removes edges that are predicted to be false positives. Despite the improvements shown by machine learning models, they are still limited as they do not consider the source code …

In War And Peace: The Impact Of World Politics On Software Ecosystems, Raula Kula, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reliance on third-party libraries is now commonplace in contemporary software engineering. Being open source in nature, these libraries should advocate for a world where the freedoms and opportunities of open source software can be enjoyed by all. Yet, there is a growing concern related to maintainers using their influence to make political stances (i.e., referred to as protestware). In this paper, we reflect on the impact of world politics on software ecosystems, especially in the context of the ongoing War in Ukraine. We show three cases where world politics has had an impact on a software ecosystem, and how these …

A Data Driven Model To Promote Preparedness And Respond Intelligently To Pandemic Outbreaks, Safea Mohammed Al Senani

Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major effect on various vital sectors of the economy, including education healthcare, and the industry. Governments have imposed strict regulations to reduce the spread of this global disease outbreak. Consequently, working from home, online learning, social distancing and various control measures were enforced. In response, many schools shifted to distance learning, although most of these schools were neither technically ready nor administratively prepared for the online transition. Despite recent progress, countries are still experiencing daunting challenges to control the infection rate and magnitude, stabilize the economy, and relax socialization and public life activities. Decision-makers …

A Fine-Grained Data Set And Analysis Of Tangling In Bug Fixing Commits, Steffen Herbold, Alexander Trautsch, Benjamin Ledel, Alireza Aghamohammadi, Taher Ahmed Ghaleb, Kuljit Kaur Chahal, Tim Bossenmaier, Bhaveet Nagaria, Philip Makedonski, Matin Nili Ahmadabadi, Kristóf Szabados, Helge Spieker, Matej Madeja, Nathaniel G. Hoy, Christoph Treude, Shangwen Wang, Gema Rodríguez-Pérez, Ricardo Colomo-Palacios, Roberto Verdecchia, Paramvir Singh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Tangled commits are changes to software that address multiple concerns at once. For researchers interested in bugs, tangled commits mean that they actually study not only bugs, but also other concerns irrelevant for the study of bugs.Objective: We want to improve our understanding of the prevalence of tangling and the types of changes that are tangled within bug fixing commits.Methods: We use a crowd sourcing approach for manual labeling to validate which changes contribute to bug fixes for each line in bug fixing commits. Each line is labeled by four participants. If at least three participants agree on the …

Which Neural Network Makes More Explainable Decisions? An Approach Towards Measuring Explainability, Mengdi Zhang, Jun Sun, Jingyi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Neural networks are getting increasingly popular thanks to their exceptional performance in solving many real-world problems. At the same time, they are shown to be vulnerable to attacks, difficult to debug and subject to fairness issues. To improve people’s trust in the technology, it is often necessary to provide some human-understandable explanation of neural networks’ decisions, e.g., why is that my loan application is rejected whereas hers is approved? That is, the stakeholder would be interested to minimize the chances of not being able to explain the decision consistently and would like to know how often and how easy it …

Api-Related Developer Information Needs In Stack Overflow, Mingwei Liu, Xin Peng, Andrian Marcus, Shuangshuang Xing, Christoph Treude, Chengyuan Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow (SO) provides informal documentation for APIs in response to questions that express API related developer needs. Navigating the information available on SO and getting information related to a particular API and need is challenging due to the vast amount of questions and answers and the tag-driven structure of SO. In this paper we focus on identifying and classifying fine-grained developer needs expressed in sentences of API-related SO questions, as well as the specific information types used to express such needs, and the different roles APIs play in these questions and their answers. We derive a taxonomy, complementing existing …

Recipegen++: An Automated Trigger Action Programs Generator, Imam Nur Bani Yusuf, Diyanah Abdul Jamal, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trigger Action Programs (TAPs) are event-driven rules that allow users to automate smart-devices and internet services. Users can write TAPs by specifying triggers and actions from a set of predefined channels and functions. Despite its simplicity, composing TAPs can still be challenging for users due to the enormous search space of available triggers and actions. The growing popularity of TAPs is followed by the increasing number of supported devices and services, resulting in a huge number of possible combinations between triggers and actions. Motivated by such a fact, we improve our prior work and propose RecipeGen++, a deep-learning-based approach that …

Rewards And Challenges In Adopting Agility In An Academic Department, Massood Towhidnejad, Omar Ochoa, James J. Pembridge, Radu Babiceanu, Carlos Castro

Posters

Introducing agility into department processes may be challenging especially when interfacing with a non-agile environment. While frequent meetings can add more time constraints, the team environment emphasizes more communication, transparency, and accountability in completing the products leading to a higher sense of ownership of the completed work.

Softskip: Empowering Multi-Modal Dynamic Pruning For Single-Stage Referring Comprehension, Dulanga Weerakoon, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Tuan Tran, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Supporting real-time referring expression comprehension (REC) on pervasive devices is an important capability for human-AI collaborative tasks. Model pruning techniques, applied to DNN models, can enable real-time execution even on resource-constrained devices. However, existing pruning strategies are designed principally for uni-modal applications, and suffer a significant loss of accuracy when applied to REC tasks that require fusion of textual and visual inputs. We thus present a multi-modal pruning model, LGMDP, which uses language as a pivot to dynamically and judiciously select the relevant computational blocks that need to be executed. LGMDP also introduces a new SoftSkip mechanism, whereby 'skipped' visual …

Transrepair: Context-Aware Program Repair For Compilation Errors, Xueyang Li, Shangqing Liu, Ruitao Feng, Guozhu Meng, Xiaofei Xie, Kai Chen, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatically fixing compilation errors can greatly raise the productivity of software development, by guiding the novice or AI programmers to write and debug code. Recently, learning-based program repair has gained extensive attention and became the state of-the-art in practice. But it still leaves plenty of space for improvement. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end solution TransRepair to locate the error lines and create the correct substitute for a C program simultaneously. Superior to the counterpart, our approach takes into account the context of erroneous code and diagnostic compilation feedback. Then we devise a Transformer-based neural network to learn the …

Qvip: An Ilp-Based Formal Verification Approach For Quantized Neural Networks, Yedi Zhang, Zhe Zhao, Guangke Chen, Fu Song, Min Zhang, Taolue Chen, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning has become a promising programming paradigm in software development, owing to its surprising performance in solving many challenging tasks. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly being deployed in practice, but are limited on resource-constrained devices owing to their demand for computational power. Quantization has emerged as a promising technique to reduce the size of DNNs with comparable accuracy as their floating-point numbered counterparts. The resulting quantized neural networks (QNNs) can be implemented energy-efficiently. Similar to their floating-point numbered counterparts, quality assurance techniques for QNNs, such as testing and formal verification, are essential but are currently less explored. In …