Software Engineering Commons^™

Fasts: A Satisfaction-Boosting Bus Scheduling Assistant (Demo), Momo Song, Zhifeng Bao, Baihua Zheng, Zhiyong Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we demonstrate a satisfaction-boosting bus scheduling assistant called FASTS, which assists users to find an optimal bus schedule. FASTS performs bus scheduling based on the constraints specified by the user in either a coarse-grained or a fine-grained manner, supports different explorations with a varying number of constraints, and provides analysis to quantify the performance of bus schedules and presents the results in a visually pleasing way. We demonstrate FASTS using real-world bus routes (396 routes) and one-week bus touch-on/touch-off records (28 million trip records) in Singapore.

Urban Scale Trade Area Characterization For Commercial Districts With Cellular Footprints, Yi Zhao, Zimu Zhou, Xu Wang, Tongtong Liu, Zheng Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding customer mobility patterns to commercial districts is crucial for urban planning, facility management, and business strategies. Trade areas are a widely applied measure to quantify where the visitors are from. Traditional trade area analysis is limited to small-scale or store-level studies, because information such as visits to competitor commercial entities and place of residence is collected by labour-intensive questionnaires or heavily biased location-based social media data. In this article, we propose CellTradeMap, a novel district-level trade area analysis framework using mobile flow records (MFRs), a type of fine-grained cellular network data. We show that compared to traditional cellular data …

Persona Perception Scale: Development And Exploratory Validation Of An Instrument For Evaluating Individuals' Perceptions Of Personas, Joni Salminen, Joao M. Santos, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Soon-Gyo Jung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although used in many domains, the evaluation of personas is difficult due to the lack of validated measurement instruments. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Persona Perception Scale (PPS), a survey instrument for evaluating how individuals perceive personas. We develop the scale by reviewing relevant literature from social psychology, persona studies, and Human-Computer Interaction to find relevant constructs and items for measuring persona perceptions. Following initial pilot testing, we conduct an exploratory validation of the scale with 412 respondents and find that the constructs and items of the scale perform satisfactorily for deployment. The research has implications for both …

Detectif: Unified Detection And Correction Of Iot Faults In Smart Homes, Madhumita Maliick, Archan Misra, Niloy Ganguly, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper tackles the problem of detecting a comprehensive set of sensor faults that can occur in IoT-instrumented smart homes customized to infer Activities of Daily Living (ADL) from the activation of sensor sets. Specifically, sensors can suffer faults that (a) span durations that vary between several seconds to hours, (b) can result in both missing or false-alarm sensor-events. Previous fault detection approaches are geared primarily to identify missing faults (absence of sensor readings) of a permanent (very long-lived) nature, or sporadic false-alarm events. We propose DetectIF, a fault-detection framework that detects faults of varying time duration, and identifies both …

An Empirical Study Of Refactorings And Technical Debt In Machine Learning Systems, Yiming Tang, Raffi Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Rhia Singh, Ajani Stewart, Anita Raja

Publications and Research

Machine Learning (ML), including Deep Learning (DL), systems, i.e., those with ML capabilities, are pervasive in today's data-driven society. Such systems are complex; they are comprised of ML models and many subsystems that support learning processes. As with other complex systems, ML systems are prone to classic technical debt issues, especially when such systems are long-lived, but they also exhibit debt specific to these systems. Unfortunately, there is a gap of knowledge in how ML systems actually evolve and are maintained. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying refactorings, i.e., source-to-source semantics-preserving program transformations, performed in real-world, open-source …

Exploring The Efficacy Of Transfer Learning In Mining Image‑Based Software Artifacts, Natalie Best, Jordan Ott, Erik J. Linstead

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Background

Transfer learning allows us to train deep architectures requiring a large number of learned parameters, even if the amount of available data is limited, by leveraging existing models previously trained for another task. In previous attempts to classify image-based software artifacts in the absence of big data, it was noted that standard off-the-shelf deep architectures such as VGG could not be utilized due to their large parameter space and therefore had to be replaced by customized architectures with fewer layers. This proves to be challenging to empirical software engineers who would like to make use of existing architectures without …

A 3d Image-Guided System To Improve Myocardial Revascularization Decision-Making For Patients With Coronary Artery Disease, Haipeng Tang

Dissertations

OBJECTIVES. Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common type of heart disease and kills over 360,000 people a year in the United States. Myocardial revascularization (MR) is a standard interventional treatment for patients with stable CAD. Fluoroscopy angiography is real-time anatomical imaging and routinely used to guide MR by visually estimating the percent stenosis of coronary arteries. However, a lot of patients do not benefit from the anatomical information-guided MR without functional testing. Single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) is a widely used functional testing for CAD evaluation but limits to the absence of anatomical information. …

Statistical And Deep Learning Models For Software Engineering Corpora, Van Duc Thong Hoang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation focuses on proposing statistical and deep learning models for software engineering corpora to detect bugs in software system. The dissertation aims to solve three main software engineering problems, i.e., bug localization (locating the potential buggy source files in a software project given a bug report or failing test cases), just-in-time defect prediction (identifying the potential defective commits as they are introduced into a version control system), and bug fixing patch identification (identifying commits repairing bugs for their propagation to parallelly maintained versions) to save developers’ time and e↵ort in improving software system quality. Moreover, I also propose a …

Novel Deep Learning Methods Combined With Static Analysis For Source Code Processing, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

It is desirable to combine machine learning and program analysis so that one can leverage the best of both to increase the performance of software analytics. On one side, machine learning can analyze the source code of thousands of well-written software projects that can uncover patterns that partially characterize software that is reliable, easy to read, and easy to maintain. On the other side, the program analysis can be used to define rigorous and unique rules that are only available in programming languages, which enrich the representation of source code and help the machine learning to capture the patterns better. …

Spark: Spatial-Aware Online Incremental Attack Against Visual Tracking, Qing Guo, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Lei Ma, Zhongguo Li, Wanli Xue, Wei Feng, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adversarial attacks of deep neural networks have been intensively studied on image, audio, and natural language classification tasks. Nevertheless, as a typical while important real-world application, the adversarial attacks of online video tracking that traces an object’s moving trajectory instead of its category are rarely explored. In this paper, we identify a new task for the adversarial attack to visual tracking: online generating imperceptible perturbations that mislead trackers along with an incorrect (Untargeted Attack, UA) or specified trajectory (Targeted Attack, TA). To this end, we first propose a spatial-aware basic attack by adapting existing attack methods, i.e., FGSM, BIM, and …

Investigating Single Precision Floating General Matrix Multiply In Heterogeneous Hardware, Steven Harris

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

The fundamental operation of matrix multiplication is ubiquitous across a myriad of disciplines. Yet, the identification of new optimizations for matrix multiplication remains relevant for emerging hardware architectures and heterogeneous systems. Frameworks such as OpenCL enable computation orchestration on existing systems, and its availability using the Intel High Level Synthesis compiler allows users to architect new designs for reconfigurable hardware using C/C++. Using the HARPv2 as a vehicle for exploration, we investigate the utility of several of the most notable matrix multiplication optimizations to better understand the performance portability of OpenCL and the implications for such optimizations on this and …

Commanding And Re-Dictation: Developing Eyes-Free Voice-Based Interaction For Editing Dictated Text, Debjyoti Ghosh, Can Liu, Shengdong Zhao, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing voice-based interfaces have limited support for text editing, especially when seeing the text is difficult, e.g., while walking or cooking. This research develops voice interaction techniques for eyes-free text editing. First, with a Wizard-of-Oz study, we identified two primary user strategies: using commands, e.g., “replace go with goes” and re-dictating over an erroneous portion, e.g., correcting “he go there” by saying “he goes there.” To support these user strategies with an actual system implementation, we developed two eyes-free voice interaction techniques, Commanding and Re-dictation, and evaluated them with a controlled experiment. Results showed that while Re-dictation performs significantly better …

How Practitioners Perceive Automated Bug Report Management Techniques, Weiqin Zou, David Lo, Zhenyu Chen, Xin Xia, Yang Feng, Baowen Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug reports play an important role in the process of debugging and fixing bugs. To reduce the burden of bug report managers and facilitate the process of bug fixing, a great amount of software engineering research has been invested into automated bug report management techniques. However, the verdict is still open whether such techniques are actually required and applicable outside of the theoretical research domain. To fill this gap, in this paper, we conducted a survey among 327 practitioners to gain their insights into various categories of automated bug report management techniques. Specifically, in the survey, we asked them to …

Refactoring From 9 To 5? What And When Employees And Volunteers Contribute To Oss, Luiz Felipe Dias, Caio Barbosa, Gustavo Pinto, Igor Steinmacher, Baldoino Fonseca, Márcio Ribeiro, Christoph Treude, Daniel Alencar Da Costa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we characterize the contributions made by employees (developers that work for GitHub, the company) and volunteers (developers that use GitHub, the platform) to OSS projects maintained by GitHub (the company) on GitHub (the platform). By mining activities performed in five well-known company-owned OSS projects, we investigate what they do and when they do it. We found that the majority of the volunteers' contributions are related to reengineering (e.g., refactoring), while employees focus more on management (e.g., documentation). When it comes to the working hours, we found that contributions are made mostly from 9am-5pm, even for the volunteers.

Emergency Department Systems Engineering: Modelling And Event Simulation, O Alharethi Salman Zayed

Student Works (2020-2029)

Emergency department systems are meant to ensure the timely delivery for essential healthcare services through complex systems. (ED) offers various services and have several components in its parts. Examined long previous research on system engineering and quality of healthcare resulting on these are influenced by operational management. Real time data are very helpful for decision making for any systems. Patient output feedback and satisfaction can be ensured with engineered management. EDs have become evident particularly in current scenario when the world is in the grip of the deadly COVID-19. All this implies that analysis is significant for improvement of services …

Rethinking Pruning For Accelerating Deep Inference At The Edge, Dawei Gao, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Yongxin Tong, Ke Xu, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is a growing trend to deploy deep neural networks at the edge for high-accuracy, real-time data mining and user interaction. Applications such as speech recognition and language understanding often apply a deep neural network to encode an input sequence and then use a decoder to generate the output sequence. A promising technique to accelerate these applications on resource-constrained devices is network pruning, which compresses the size of the deep neural network without severe drop in inference accuracy. However, we observe that although existing network pruning algorithms prove effective to speed up the prior deep neural network, they lead to …

Prevalence, Contents And Automatic Detection Of Kl-Satd, Leevi Rantala, Mika Mantyla, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When developers use different keywords such as TODO and FIXME in source code comments to describe self-admitted technical debt (SATD), we refer it as Keyword-Labeled SATD (KL-SATD). We study KL-SATD from 33 software repositories with 13,588 KL-SATD comments. We find that the median percentage of KL-SATD comments among all comments is only 1,52%. We find that KL-SATD comment contents include words expressing code changes and uncertainty, such as remove, fix, maybe and probably. This makes them different compared to other comments. KL-SATD comment contents are similar to manually labeled SATD comments of prior work. Our machine learning classifier using logistic …

A Longitudinal Study Of A Capstone Course, Benjamin Gan, Eng Lieh Ouh, Yin Yin Fiona Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This is a 7 years study on a capstone course completed by 1700+ students for 200+ organizations involving 300+ projects. Student teams deliver a system to solve real-world problems proposed by industry partners. We want to understand what independent variables influence student performance. We analyzed the deployment status of systems delivered, the type of organization/industry, the number of meetings and the technology used. Our results show some organization value proof of concept over fully deployed systems, student strengths are in Infocomm and Finance projects, the number of meetings is a weak correlation to performance and best performing projects are fully …

Specialization: Do Your Job Well Helping Students Who Are Considering A Career In Programming Know How To Invest Their Time., Scott Pulley

Marriott Student Review

The article examines the effects of specialization on the hiring process for undergraduates studying programming whether in information systems or computer science.

Lulling Waters: A Poetry Reading For Real-Time Music Generation Through Emotion Mapping, Ashley Muniz, Toshihisa Tsuruoka

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Through a poetic narrative, “Lulling Waters” tells the story of a whale overcoming the loss of his mother, who passed away from ingesting plastic, as he attempts to escape from the polluted oceanic world. The live performance of this poem utilizes a software system called Soundwriter, which was developed with the goal of enriching the oral storytelling experience through music. This video demonstrates how Soundwriter’s real-time hybrid system was able to analyze “Lulling Waters” through its lexical and auditory features. Emotionally salient words were given ratings based on arousal, valence, and dominance while the emotionally charged prosodic features of the …

Keen2act: Activity Recommendation In Online Social Collaborative Platforms, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Thong Hoang, Richard J. Oentaryo, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social collaborative platforms such as GitHub and Stack Overflow have been increasingly used to improve work productivity via collaborative efforts. To improve user experiences in these platforms, it is desirable to have a recommender system that can suggest not only items (e.g., a GitHub repository) to a user, but also activities to be performed on the suggested items (e.g., forking a repository). To this end, we propose a new approach dubbed Keen2Act, which decomposes the recommendation problem into two stages: the Keen and Act steps. The Keen step identifies, for a given user, a (sub)set of items in which he/she …

Sentiment Analysis Over Collaborative Relationships In Open Source Software Projects, Lingjia Li, Jian Cao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sentiments and collaboration efficiency are key factors in the success of the open source software (OSS) development process. However, in the software engineering domain, no studies have been conducted to analyze the effect between collaborators' sentiments, and the role of sentiment in collaborative relationships during the development process. In this study, we apply sentiment analysis and statistical analysis on collaboration artifacts over five projects on GitHub. We use sentiment consistency to quantify the relation between sentiments in collaborative relationships. It is found that sentiment consistency is positively correlated with the closeness of collaborative relationships and collaborators' overall sentiment states. We …

Functional Programming For Systems Software: Implementing Baremetal Programs In Habit, Donovan Ellison

University Honors Theses

Programming in a baremetal environment, directly on top of hardware with very little to help manage memory or ensure safety, can be dangerous even for experienced programmers. Programming languages can ease the burden on developers and sometimes take care of entire sets of errors. This is not the case for a language like C that will do almost anything you want, for better or worse. To operate in a baremetal environment often requires direct control over memory, but it would be nice to have that capability without sacrificing safety guarantees. Rust is a new language that aims to fit this …

Automatic Android Deprecated-Api Usage Update By Learning From Single Updated Example, Stefanus A. Haryono, Ferdian Thung, Hong Jin Kang, Lucas Serrano, Gilles Muller, Julia Lawall, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the deprecation of APIs in the Android operating system, developers have to update usages of the APIs to ensure that their applications work for both the past and current versions of Android. Such updates may be widespread, non-trivial, and time-consuming. Therefore, automation of such updates will be of great benefit to developers. AppEvolve, which is the state-of-the-art tool for automating such updates, relies on having before- and after-update examples to learn from. In this work, we propose an approach named CocciEvolve that performs such updates using only a single after-update example. CocciEvolve learns edits by extracting the relevant …

Psc2code: Denoising Code Extraction From Programming Screencasts, Lingfeng Bao, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Minghui Wu, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programming screencasts have become a pervasive resource on the Internet, which help developers learn new programming technologies or skills. The source code in programming screencasts is an important and valuable information for developers. But the streaming nature of programming screencasts (i.e., a sequence of screen-captured images) limits the ways that developers can interact with the source code in the screencasts. Many studies use the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technique to convert screen images (also referred to as video frames) into textual content, which can then be indexed and searched easily. However, noisy screen images significantly affect the quality of source …

Automated Synthesis Of Local Time Requirement For Service Composition, Étienne André, Tian Huat Tan, Manman Chen, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Service composition aims at achieving a business goal by composing existing service-based applications or components. The response time of a service is crucial, especially in time-critical business environments, which is often stated as a clause in service-level agreements between service providers and service users. To meet the guaranteed response time requirement of a composite service, it is important to select a feasible set of component services such that their response time will collectively satisfy the response time requirement of the composite service. In this work, we use the BPEL modeling language that aims at specifying Web services. We extend it …

Objsim: Efficient Testing Of Cyber-Physical Systems, Jun Sun, Zijiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) play a critical role in automating public infrastructure and thus attract wide range of attacks. Assessing the effectiveness of defense mechanisms is challenging as realistic sets of attacks to test them against are not always available. In this short paper, we briefly describe smart fuzzing, an automated, machine learning guided technique for systematically producing test suites of CPS network attacks. Our approach uses predictive ma- chine learning models and meta-heuristic search algorithms to guide the fuzzing of actuators so as to drive the CPS into different unsafe physical states. The approach has been proven effective on two …

Recovering Fitness Gradients For Interprocedural Boolean Flags In Search-Based Testing, Yun Lin, Jun Sun, Gordon Fraser, Ziheng Xiu, Ting Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In Search-based Software Testing (SBST), test generation is guided by fitness functions that estimate how close a test case is to reach an uncovered test goal (e.g., branch). A popular fitness function estimates how close conditional statements are to evaluating to true or false, i.e., the branch distance. However, when conditions read Boolean variables (e.g., if(x && y)), the branch distance provides no gradient for the search, since a Boolean can either be true or false. This flag problem can be addressed by transforming individual procedures such that Boolean flags are replaced with numeric comparisons that provide better guidance for …

Global Pac Bounds For Learning Discrete Time Markov Chains, Hugo Bazille, Blaise Genest, Cyrille Jegourel, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning models from observations of a system is a powerful tool with many applications. In this paper, we consider learning Discrete Time Markov Chains (DTMC), with different methods such as frequency estimation or Laplace smoothing. While models learnt with such methods converge asymptotically towards the exact system, a more practical question in the realm of trusted machine learning is how accurate a model learnt with a limited time budget is. Existing approaches provide bounds on how close the model is to the original system, in terms of bounds on local (transition) probabilities, which has unclear implication on the global behavior. …

Privacy-Enhanced Remote Data Integrity Checking With Updatable Timestamp, Tong Wu, Guomin Yang, Yi Mu, Rongmao Chen, Shengmin Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Remote data integrity checking (RDIC) enables clients to verify whether the outsourced data is intact without keeping a copy locally or downloading it. Nevertheless, the existing RDIC schemes do not support the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) payment model, where the payment is decided by the volume and duration of the outsourced data. Specifically, none of the existing works have considered the client’s control over changes in storage duration. In this paper, we propose an RDIC scheme to simultaneously check the data content and storage duration represented by an updatable timestamp via the third-party auditor (TPA). Also, our proposed scheme achieves indistinguishable privacy …