Software Engineering Commons^™

Sieve: Helping Developers Sift Wheat From Chaff Via Cross-Platform Analysis, Agus Sulistya, Gede A. A. P. Prana, David Lo, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developers have benefited from various sources of knowledge such as forums, question-and-answer sites, and social media platforms to help them in various tasks. Extracting software-related knowledge from different platforms involves many challenges. In this paper, we propose an approach to improve the effectiveness of knowledge extraction tasks by performing cross-platform analysis. Our approach is based on transfer representation learning and word embedding, leveraging information extracted from a source platform which contains rich domain-related content. The information extracted is then used to solve tasks in another platform (considered as target platform) with less domain-related content. We first build a word …

New Challenges In Display-Saturated Environments, Mateusz Andrzej Mikusz, Tsu Wei Kenny Choo, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Nigel Davies, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We live in a world in which our physical spaces are becoming increasingly enriched with computing technology. Pervasive displays have been at the forefront of this progression and are now commonplace. In this paper, we focus on the natural end-point of this trend and consider the case when displays become truly ubiquitous and saturate our physical environments. We use as motivation a state-of-the-art display deployment in which mobile users navigating the space are simultaneously exposed to many hundreds of displays within their field of view and we highlight a number of new research challenges.

Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning For Energy Forecasting With Big Data, Yifang Tian, Ljubisa Sehovac, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Smart meter popularity has resulted in the ability to collect big energy data and has created opportunities for large-scale energy forecasting. Machine Learning (ML) techniques commonly used for forecasting, such as neural networks, involve computationally intensive training typically with data from a single building or a single aggregated load to predict future consumption for that same building or aggregated load. With hundreds of thousands of meters, it becomes impractical or even infeasible to individually train a model for each meter. Consequently, this paper proposes Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning (SBCTL), an approach for building neural network-based models for many meters by …

Why Reinventing The Wheels? An Empirical Study On Library Reuse And Re-Implementation, Bowen Xu, Le An, Ferdian Thung, Foutse Khomh, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, with the rapid growth of open source software (OSS), library reuse becomes more and more popular since a large amount of third- party libraries are available to download and reuse. A deeper understanding on why developers reuse a library (i.e., replacing self-implemented code with an external library) or re-implement a library (i.e., replacing an imported external library with self-implemented code) could help researchers better understand the factors that developers are concerned with when reusing code. This understanding can then be used to improve existing libraries and API recommendation tools for researchers and practitioners by using the developers concerns identified …

Predicting The Hardness Of Turf Surfaces From A Soil Moisture Sensor Using Iot Technologies, Ann Marie Mckeon

Other

In horseracing, “the going” is a term to describe the racetrack ground conditions. In Ireland presently, a groundskeeper or course clerk walks the racecourse poking it with a blackthorn stick, assesses conditions, and declares the going – it is a subjective measurement.

This thesis will propose using remote low-cost soil moisture sensors to gather high frequency data about the soil water content in the ground and to enable informed decisions to be made. This will remove the subjective element from the ground hardness, and look at the data in an objective way.

The soil moisture sensor will systematically collect high …

A Low-Cost Soft Robotic Hand Exoskeleton For Use In Therapy Of Limited Hand–Motor Function, Grant Rudd, Liam Daly, Vukica Jovanovic, Filip Cukov

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

We present the design and validation of a low-cost, customizable and 3D-printed anthropomorphic soft robotic hand exoskeleton for rehabilitation of hand injuries using remotely administered physical therapy regimens. The design builds upon previous work done on cable actuated exoskeleton designs by implementing the same kinematic functionality, but with the focus shifted to ease of assembly and cost effectiveness as to allow patients and physicians to manufacture and assemble the hardware necessary to implement treatment. The exoskeleton was constructed solely from 3D-printed and widely available of-the-shelf components. Control of the actuators was realized using an Arduino microcontroller, with a custom-designed shield …

Ion Software-Defined Radio Metadata Standard Final Report, Sanjeev Gunawardena, Alexander Rugamer, Muhammad Subhan Hameed, Markel Arizabaleta, Thomas Pany, Javier Arribas

Faculty Publications

The ION GNSS SDR Metadata Standard describes the formatting and other essential PNT-related parameters of sampled data streams and files. This allows processors to seamlessly consume such data without the need to input these parameters manually. The technical development phase of the initial version of the standard has now been deemed complete and is currently undergoing the last remaining procedural steps towards adoption as a formal standard by the Institute of Navigation. This paper reports on the activities of the working group since September 2018 and summarizes the final products of the standard. It also reports on examples of early …

Exploiting Approximation, Caching And Specialization To Accelerate Vision Sensing Applications, Nguyen Loc Huynh

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Over the past few years, deep learning has emerged as state-of-the-art solutions for many challenging computer vision tasks such as face recognition, object detection, etc. Despite of its outstanding performance, deep neural networks (DNNs) are computational intensive, which prevent them to be widely adopted on billions of mobile and embedded devices with scarce resources. To address that limitation, we
focus on building systems and optimization algorithms to accelerate those models, making them more computational-efficient.
First, this thesis explores the computational capabilities of different existing processors (or co-processors) on modern mobile devices. It recognizes that by leveraging the mobile Graphics Processing …

Spatio-Temporal Analysis And Prediction Of Cellular Traffic In Metropolis, Xu Wang, Zimu Zhou, Fu Xiao, Kai Xing, Zheng Yang, Yunhao Liu, Chunyi Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Understanding and predicting cellular traffic at large-scale and fine-granularity is beneficial and valuable to mobile users, wireless carriers and city authorities. Predicting cellular traffic in modern metropolis is particularly challenging because of the tremendous temporal and spatial dynamics introduced by diverse user Internet behaviours and frequent user mobility citywide. In this paper, we characterize and investigate the root causes of such dynamics in cellular traffic through a big cellular usage dataset covering 1.5 million users and 5,929 cell towers in a major city of China. We reveal intensive spatiotemporal dependency even among distant cell towers, which is largely overlooked in …

A Case Study On Automated Fuzz Target Generation For Large Codebases, Matthew Kelly, Christoph Treude, Alex Murray

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fuzz Testing is a largely automated testing technique that provides random and unexpected input to a program in attempt to trigger failure conditions. Much of the research conducted thus far into Fuzz Testing has focused on developing improvements to available Fuzz Testing tools and frameworks in order to improve efficiency. In this paper however, we instead look at a way in which we can reduce the amount of developer time required to integrate Fuzz Testing to help maintain an existing codebase. We accomplish this with a new technique for automatically generating Fuzz Targets, the modified versions of programs on which …

Enhancing Python Compiler Error Messages Via Stack Overflow, Emillie Thiselton, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: Compilers tend to produce cryptic and uninformative error messages, leaving programmers confused and requiring them to spend precious time to resolve the underlying error. To find help, programmers often take to online question-and-answer forums such as Stack Overflow to start discussion threads about the errors they encountered.Aims: We conjecture that information from Stack Overflow threads which discuss compiler errors can be automatically collected and repackaged to provide programmers with enhanced compiler error messages, thus saving programmers' time and energy.Method: We present Pycee, a plugin integrated with the popular Sublime Text IDE to provide enhanced compiler error messages for the …

Can Earables Support Effective User Engagement During Weight-Based Gym Exercises?, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore the use of personal ‘earable’ devices (widely used by gym-goers) in providing personalized, quantified insights and feedback to users performing gym exercises. As in-ear sensing by itself is often too weak to pick up exercise-driven motion dynamics, we propose a novel, low-cost system that can monitor multiple concurrent users by fusing data from (a) wireless earphones, equipped with inertial and physiological sensors and (b) inertial sensors attached to exercise equipment. We share preliminary findings from a small-scale study to demonstrate the promise of this approach, as well as identify open challenges.

Going Big: A Large-Scale Study On What Big Data Developers Ask, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Raffi Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Software developers are increasingly required to write big data code. However, they find big data software development challenging. To help these developers it is necessary to understand big data topics that they are interested in and the difficulty of finding answers for questions in these topics. In this work, we conduct a large-scale study on Stackoverflow to understand the interest and difficulties of big data developers. To conduct the study, we develop a set of big data tags to extract big data posts from Stackoverflow; use topic modeling to group these posts into big data topics; group similar topics into …

Texture-Based Deep Neural Network For Histopathology Cancer Whole Slide Image (Wsi) Classification, Nelson Zange Tsaku

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

Automatic histopathological Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis for cancer classification has been highlighted along with the advancements in microscopic imaging techniques. However, manual examination and diagnosis with WSIs is time-consuming and tiresome. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have succeeded in histopathological image analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel cancer texture-based deep neural network (CAT-Net) that learns scalable texture features from histopathological WSIs. The innovation of CAT-Net is twofold: (1) capturing invariant spatial patterns by dilated convolutional layers and (2) Reducing model complexity while improving performance. Moreover, CAT-Net can provide discriminative texture patterns formed on cancerous regions of histopathological …

A Multimodal Approach To Sarcasm Detection On Social Media, Dipto Das

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

In recent times, a major share of human communication takes place online. The main reason being the ease of communication on social networking sites (SNSs). Due to the variety and large number of users, SNSs have drawn the attention of the computer science (CS) community, particularly the affective computing (also known as emotional AI), information retrieval, natural language processing, and data mining groups. Researchers are trying to make computers understand the nuances of human communication including sentiment and sarcasm. Emotion or sentiment detection requires more insights about the communication than it does for factual information retrieval. Sarcasm detection is particularly …

Formally Designing And Implementing Cyber Security Mechanisms In Industrial Control Networks., Mehdi Sabraoui

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation describes progress in the state-of-the-art for developing and deploying formally verified cyber security devices in industrial control networks. It begins by detailing the unique struggles that are faced in industrial control networks and why concepts and technologies developed for securing traditional networks might not be appropriate. It uses these unique struggles and examples of contemporary cyber-attacks targeting control systems to argue that progress in securing control systems is best met with formal verification of systems, their specifications, and their security properties. This dissertation then presents a development process and identifies two technologies, TLA+ and seL4, that can be …

Blocks' Network: Redesign Architecture Based On Blockchain Technology, Moataz Hanif

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The Internet is a global network that uses communication protocols. It is considered the most important system reached by humanity, which no one can abandon. However, this technology has become a weapon that threatens the privacy of users, especially in the client-server model, where data is stored and managed privately. Additionally, users have no power over their data that store in a private server, which means users’ data may interrupt by government or might be sold via service provider for-profit purposes. Furthermore, blockchain is a technology that we can rely on to solve issues related to client-server model if appropriately …

Suitability Of Finite State Automata To Model String Constraints In Probablistic Symbolic Execution, Andrew Harris

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Probabilistic Symbolic Execution (PSE) extends Symbolic Execution (SE), a path-sensitive static program analysis technique, by calculating the probabilities with which program paths are executed. PSE relies on the ability of the underlying symbolic models to accurately represent the execution paths of the program as the collection of input values following these paths. While researchers established PSE for numerical data types, PSE for complex data types such as strings is a novel area of research.

For string data types SE tools commonly utilize finite state automata to represent a symbolic string model. Thus, PSE inherits from SE automata-based symbolic string models …

Biker: A Tool For Bi-Information Source Based Api Method Recommendation, Liang Cai, Haoye Wang, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, Zhenchang Xing, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

A Survey On Bluetooth 5.0 And Mesh: New Milestones Of Iot, Juenjie Yin, Zheng Yang, Hao Cao, Tongtong Liu, Zimu Zhou, Chenshu Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Enhancing Multi-Hop Sensor Calibration With Uncertainty Estimates, Balz Maag, Zimu Zhou, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Low-cost sensors, installed on mobile vehicles, provide a cost-effective way for fine-grained urban air pollution monitoring. However, frequent calibration is crucial for lowcost sensors to consistently deliver accurate measurements. Multi-hop calibration is a common practice to calibrate mobile sensor deployments, but is prone to severe error accumulation over hops. Prior research mitigates error accumulation by designing special calibration models, which only apply to linear models. In this paper, we propose an orthogonal approach by selecting reliable measurements for calibration at each hop. We analyze the impact of different data-induced uncertainties on calibration errors and devise a scheme to estimate these …

Deviant: A Mutation Testing Tool For Solidity Smart Contracts, Patrick Chapman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Blockchain in recent years has exploded in popularity with Ethereum being one of the leading blockchain platforms. Solidity is a widely used scripting language for creating smart contracts in Ethereum applications. Quality assurance in Solidity contracts is of critical importance because bugs or vulnerabilities can lead to a considerable loss of financial assets. However, it is unclear what level of quality assurance is provided in many of these applications.

Mutation testing is the process of intentionally injecting faults into a target program and then running the provided test suite against the various injected faults. Mutation testing is used to evaluate …

Let Me In: Guidelines For The Successful Onboarding Of Newcomers To Open Source Projects, Igor Steinmacher, Christoph Treude, Marco Aurélio Gerosa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many community-based open source software (OSS) projects depend on a continuous influx of newcomers for their survival and continuity, yet newcomers face many barriers to contributing to a project. We provide guidelines based on our previous work for both OSS communities and newcomers to OSS projects.

Locating Vulnerabilities In Binaries Via Memory Layout Recovering, Haijun Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Shang-Wei Lin, Yun Lin, Yuekang Li, Shengchao Qin, Yang Liu, Ting Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Locating vulnerabilities is an important task for security auditing, exploit writing, and code hardening. However, it is challenging to locate vulnerabilities in binary code, because most program semantics (e.g., boundaries of an array) is missing after compilation. Without program semantics, it is difficult to determine whether a memory access exceeds its valid boundaries in binary code. In this work, we propose an approach to locate vulnerabilities based on memory layout recovery. First, we collect a set of passed executions and one failed execution. Then, for passed and failed executions, we restore their program semantics by recovering fine-grained memory layouts based …

Cerebro: Context-Aware Adaptive Fuzzing For Effective Vulnerability Detection, Yuekang Li, Yinxing Xue, Hongxu Chen, Xiuheng Wu, Cen Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Haijun Wang, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing greybox fuzzers mainly utilize program coverage as the goal to guide the fuzzing process. To maximize their outputs, coverage-based greybox fuzzers need to evaluate the quality of seeds properly, which involves making two decisions: 1) which is the most promising seed to fuzz next (seed prioritization), and 2) how many efforts should be made to the current seed (power scheduling). In this paper, we present our fuzzer, Cerebro, to address the above challenges. For the seed prioritization problem, we propose an online multi-objective based algorithm to balance various metrics such as code complexity, coverage, execution time, etc. To address …

Diffchaser: Detecting Disagreements For Deep Neural Networks, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Haijun Wang, Yuekang Li, Yang Liu, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The platform migration and customization have become an indispensable process of deep neural network (DNN) development lifecycle. A highprecision but complex DNN trained in the cloud on massive data and powerful GPUs often goes through an optimization phase (e.g., quantization, compression) before deployment to a target device (e.g., mobile device). A test set that effectively uncovers the disagreements of a DNN and its optimized variant provides certain feedback to debug and further enhance the optimization procedure. However, the minor inconsistency between a DNN and its optimized version is often hard to detect and easily bypasses the original test set. This …

Who Should Make Decision On This Pull Request? Analyzing Time-Decaying Relationships And File Similarities For Integrator Prediction, Jing Jiang, David Lo, Jiateng Zheng, Xin Xia, Yun Yang, Li Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In pull-based development model, integrators are responsible for making decisions about whether to accept pull requests andintegrate code contributions. Ideally, pull requests are assigned to integrators and evaluated within a short time after their submissions. However, the volume of incoming pull requests is large in popular projects, and integrators often encounter difficulties inprocessing pull requests in a timely fashion. Therefore, an automatic integrator prediction approach is required to assign appropriate pull requests to integrators. In this paper, we propose an approach TRFPre which analyzes Time-decaying Relationships andFile similarities to predict integrators. We evaluate the effectiveness of TRFPre on 24 projects …

How Does Machine Learning Change Software Development Practices?, Zhiyuan Wan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Gail C. Murphy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Adding an ability for a system to learn inherently adds uncertainty into the system. Given the rising popularity of incorporating machine learning into systems, we wondered how the addition alters software development practices. We performed a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies with 14 interviewees and 342 survey respondents from 26 countries across four continents to elicit significant differences between the development of machine learning systems and the development of non-machine-learning systems. Our study uncovers significant differences in various aspects of software engineering (e.g., requirements, design, testing, and process) and work characteristics (e.g., skill variety, problem solving and task identity). …

Sar: Learning Cross-Language Api Mappings With Little Knowledge, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui, Yijun Yu, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To save effort, developers often translate programs from one programming language to another, instead of implementing it from scratch. Translating application program interfaces (APIs) used in one language to functionally equivalent ones available in another language is an important aspect of program translation. Existing approaches facilitate the translation by automatically identifying the API mappings across programming languages. However, these approaches still require large amount of parallel corpora, ranging from pairs of APIs or code fragments that are functionally equivalent, to similar code comments. To minimize the need of parallel corpora, this paper aims at an automated approach that can map …

Multiagent Decision Making And Learning In Urban Environments, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our increasingly interconnected urban environments provide several opportunities to deploy intelligent agents—from self-driving cars, ships to aerial drones—that promise to radically improve productivity and safety. Achieving coordination among agents in such urban settings presents several algorithmic challenges—ability to scale to thousands of agents, addressing uncertainty, and partial observability in the environment. In addition, accurate domain models need to be learned from data that is often noisy and available only at an aggregate level. In this paper, I will overview some of our recent contributions towards developing planning and reinforcement learning strategies to address several such challenges present in largescale urban …