Software Engineering Commons^™

Where Does Google Find Api Documentation?, Christoph Treude, Maurício Aniche

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The documentation of popular APIs is spread across many formats, from vendor-curated reference documentation to Stack Overflow threads. For developers, it is often not obvious from where a particular piece of information can be retrieved. To understand this documentation landscape, we systematically conducted Google searches for the elements of ten popular APIs. We found that their documentation is widely dispersed among many sources, that GitHub and Stack Overflow play a prominent role among the search results, and that most sources are quick to document new API functionalities. These findings inform API vendors about where developers find documentation about their products, …

Towards Model Checking Android Applications, Guangdong Bai, Quanqi Ye, Yongzheng Wu, Heila Botha, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong, Willem Visser

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As feature-rich Android applications (apps for short) are increasingly popularized in security-sensitive scenarios, methods to verify their security properties are highly desirable. Existing approaches on verifying Android apps often have limited effectiveness. For instance, static analysis often suffers from a high false-positive rate, whereas approaches based on dynamic testing are limited in coverage. In this work, we propose an alternative approach, which is to apply the software model checking technique to verify Android apps. We have built a general framework named DroidPF upon Java PathFinder (JPF), towards model checking Android apps. In the framework, we craft an executable mock-up Android …

Towards Easy Comparison Of Local Businesses Using Online Reviews, Yong Wang, Hammad Haleem, Conglei Shi, Yanhong Wu, Xun Zhao, Siwei Fu, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of e-commerce, there is an increasing number of online review websites, such as Yelp, to help customers make better purchase decisions. Viewing online reviews, including the rating score and text comments by other customers, and conducting a comparison between different businesses are the key to making an optimal decision. However, due to the massive amount of online reviews, the potential difference of user rating standards, and the significant variance of review time, length, details and quality, it is difficult for customers to achieve a quick and comprehensive comparison. In this paper, we present E-Comp, a carefully-designed …

How Does Developer Interaction Relate To Software Quality? An Examination Of Product Development Data, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Industrial software systems are being increasingly developed by large and distributed teams. Tools like collaborative development environments (CDE) are used to facilitate interaction between members of such teams, with the expectation that social factors around the interaction would facilitate team functioning. In this paper, we first identify typically social characteristics of interaction in a software development team: reachability, connection, association, and clustering. We then examine how these factors relate to the quality of software produced by a team, in terms of the number of defects, through an empirical study of 70+ teams, involving 900+ developers in total, spread across 30+ …

Satd Detector: A Text-Mining-Based Self-Admitted Technical Debt Detection Tool, Zhongxin Liu, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, Emad Shihab, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In software projects, technical debt metaphor is used to describe the situation where developers and managers have to accept compromises in long-Term software quality to achieve short-Term goals. There are many types of technical debt, and self-Admitted technical debt (SATD) was proposed recently to consider debt that is introduced intentionally (e.g., through temporaryfi x) and admitted by developers themselves. Previous work has shown that SATD can be successfully detected using source code comments. However, most current state-of-The-Art approaches identify SATD comments through pattern matching, which achieve high precision but very low recall. That means they may miss many SATD comments …

Dynamic Pricing In Spatial Crowdsourcing: A Matching-Based Approach, Yongxin Tong, Libin Wang, Zimu Zhou, Lei Chen, Bowen Du, Jieping Ye

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In spatial crowdsourcing, requesters submit their task-related locations and increase the demand of a local area. The platform prices these tasks and assigns spatial workers to serve if the prices are accepted by requesters. There exist mature pricing strategies which specialize in tackling the imbalance between supply and demand in a local market. However, in global optimization, the platform should consider the mobility of workers; that is, any single worker can be the potential supply for several areas, while it can only be the true supply of one area when assigned by the platform. The hardness lies in the uncertainty …

Table Of Interest: Activity Recognition And Behaviour Analysis Using A Battery Lesswearable Sensor, Dibyanshu Jaiswal, Andrew Gigie, Tapas Chakravarty, Avik Ghose, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Energy overheads continue to be a major impediment for wearable based activity recognition systems. We proposed a hybrid approach, which combines wearable-based human sensing with object interaction tracking, for robust detection of ADLs in smart homes. Our proposed framework includes: (a) battery less, low sampling rate, wearable RF sensor tags, that are powered intermittently by an RFID reader, and (b) additional passive RF tags, mounted on daily use objects, that capture the presence and use of specific objects while performing such ADLs. Using an initial experimental set up, we show the ability to recognize activities like eating, typing and reading, …

Detecting And Characterizing Self Hiding Behavior In Android Applications, Raina Samuel

Theses

Applications (apps) that conceal their activities are fundamentally deceptive; app marketplaces and end-users should treat such apps as suspicious. However, due to its nature and intent, activity concealing is not disclosed up-front, which puts users at risk. This study focuses on characterization and detection of such techniques, e.g., hiding the app or removing traces, known as 'self hiding' (SH) behavior. SH behavior has not been studied per se - rather it has been reported on only as a byproduct of malware investigations. This gap is addressed via a study and suite of static analyses targeted at SH in Android apps. …

Poster: Towards Safe Refactoring For Intelligent Parallelization Of Java 8 Streams, Yiming Tang, Raffi Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Syed Ahmed

Publications and Research

The Java 8 Stream API sets forth a promising new programming model that incorporates functional-like, MapReduce-style features into a mainstream programming language. However, using streams correctly and efficiently may involve subtle considerations. In this poster, we present our ongoing work and preliminary results towards an automated refactoring approach that assists developers in writing optimal stream code. The approach, based on ordering and typestate analysis, determines when it is safe and advantageous to convert streams to parallel and optimize a parallel streams.

Semantic Data Storage In Information Systems, Jean Vincent Fonou Dombeu, Raoul Kwuimi

The African Journal of Information Systems

The storage and retrieval of information are important functions of information systems (IS). These IS functions have been realized for decades, due to the maturity of the relational database technology. In recent years, the concept of Semantic Information System (SIS) has emerged as IS in which information is represented with explicit semantic based on its meaning rather than its syntax to enable its automatic and intelligent processing by computers. At present, there is a shortage of discussions on the topic of semantic data storage in IS as compared to the relational database storage counterpart. This study uses a combination of …

A Jython-Based Restful Web Service Api For Python Code Reflection, John A. Nielson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Often times groups of domain experts, such as scientists and engineers, will develop their own software modules for specialized computational tasks. When these users determine there is a need to integrate the data and computations used in their specialized components with an enterprise data management system, interoperability between the enterprise system and the specialized components rather than re-implementation allows for faster implementation and more flexible change management by shifting the onus of changes to the scientific components to the subject matter experts rather than the enterprise information technology team. The Jython-based RESTful web service API was developed to leverage code …

Multi-Worker-Aware Task Planning In Real-Time Spatial Crowdsourcing, Qian Tao, Yuxiang Zeng, Zimu Zhou, Yongxin Tong, Lei Chen, Ke Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatial crowdsourcing emerges as a new computing paradigm with the development of mobile Internet and the ubiquity of mobile devices. The core of many real-world spatial crowdsourcing applications is to assign suitable tasks to proper workers in real time. Many works only assign a set of tasks to each worker without making the plan how to perform the assigned tasks. Others either make task plans only for a single worker or are unable to operate in real time. In this paper, we propose a new problem called the Multi-Worker-Aware Task Planning (MWATP) problem in the online scenario, in which we …

Cslc Tutoring Portal, Brian Hodges

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

A web portal designed for the Computer Science Learning Center to track students requesting help

A Home Security System Based On Smartphone Sensors, Michael Mahler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Several new smartphones are released every year. Many people upgrade to new phones, and their old phones are not put to any further use. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using such retired smartphones and their on-board sensors to build a home security system. We observe that door-related events such as opening and closing have unique vibration signatures when compared to many types of environmental vibrational noise. These events can be captured by the accelerometer of a smartphone when the phone is mounted on a wall near a door. The rotation of a door can also be captured …

Hierarchical Learning Of Cross-Language Mappings Through Distributed Vector Representations For Code, Nghi D. Q. Bui, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Translating a program written in one programming language to another can be useful for software development tasks that need functionality implementations in different languages. Although past studies have considered this problem, they may be either specific to the language grammars, or specific to certain kinds of code elements (e.g., tokens, phrases, API uses). This paper proposes a new approach to automatically learn cross-language representations for various kinds of structural code elements that may be used for program translation. Our key idea is two folded: First, we normalize and enrich code token streams with additional structural and semantic information, and train …

Applications Of Varying Leadership Structures For Software Engineering Teams, Elliot Sandfort

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This thesis explores the similarities and differences between applications of managing software engineering teams in Design Studio and the state of the practice. Information about the leadership structure of Design Studio teams was gathered over 3 semesters of Design Studio experiences with two companies: Hudl and TD Ameritrade. Information about leadership concepts in the state of the practice was gathered from experiences and observations with three different companies: Hudl, Garmin, and TD Ameritrade. From these experiences and observations, it can be concluded that the leadership structure of Design Studio is valuable as a student learning experience, and with proper consideration …

Ksugo, Chase Godwin

KSU Journey Honors College Capstones and Theses

KSUGo seeks to better enable students to interact with their community, maintain a level of safety on and off campus, improve their course management skills, and increase information propagation among students and campus officials. Currently, Kennesaw State does not have a dedicated general purpose native application on any mobile device platform for students, faculty, or staff to use for improving their everyday Kennesaw State experience. This project seeks to rectify that need by providing a native application with support for the Android platform.

Recommending Apis For Software Evolution, Ferdian Thung

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Softwares are constantly evolving. This evolution has been made easier through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). By leveraging APIs, developers reuse previously implemented functionalities and concentrate on writing new codes. These APIs may originate from either third parties or internally from other compo- nents of the software that are currently developed. In the first case, developers need to know how to find and use third party APIs. In the second case, developers need to be aware of internal APIs in their own software. In either case, there is often too much information to digest. For instance, finding the …

Anflo: Detecting Anomalous Sensitive Information Flows In Android Apps, Biniam Fisseha Demissie, Mariano Ceccato, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smartphone apps usually have access to sensitive user data such as contacts, geo-location, and account credentials and they might share such data to external entities through the Internet or with other apps. Confidentiality of user data could be breached if there are anomalies in the way sensitive data is handled by an app which is vulnerable or malicious. Existing approaches that detect anomalous sensitive data flows have limitations in terms of accuracy because the definition of anomalous flows may differ for different apps with different functionalities; it is normal for “Health” apps to share heart rate information through the Internet …

Finding Small-Bowel Lesions: Challenges In Endoscopy-Image-Based Learning Systems, Jungmo Ahn, Loc Nguyen Huynh, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee, Jeonggil Ko

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Capsule endoscopy identifies damaged areas in a patient's small intestine but often outputs poor-quality images or misses lesions, leading to either misdiagnosis or repetition of the lengthy procedure. The authors propose applying deep-learning models to automatically process the captured images and identify lesions in real time, enabling the capsule to take additional images of a specific location, adjust its focus level, or improve image quality. The authors also describe the technical challenges in realizing a viable automated capsule-endoscopy system.

Wisdom In Sum Of Parts: Multi-Platform Activity Prediction In Social Collaborative Sites, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we proposed a novel framework which uses user interests inferred from activities (a.k.a., activity interests) in multiple social collaborative platforms to predict users’ platform activities. Included in the framework are two prediction approaches: (i) direct platform activity prediction, which predicts a user’s activities in a platform using his or her activity interests from the same platform (e.g., predict if a user answers a given Stack Overflow question using the user’s interests inferred from his or her prior answer and favorite activities in Stack Overflow), and (ii) cross-platform activity prediction, which predicts a user’s activities in a platform …

Analyzing Requirements And Traceability Information To Improve Bug Localization, Michael Rath, David Lo, Patrick Mader

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Locating bugs in industry-size software systems is time consuming and challenging. An automated approach for assisting the process of tracing from bug descriptions to relevant source code benefits developers. A large body of previous work aims to address this problem and demonstrates considerable achievements. Most existing approaches focus on the key challenge of improving techniques based on textual similarity to identify relevant files. However, there exists a lexical gap between the natural language used to formulate bug reports and the formal source code and its comments. To bridge this gap, state-of-the-art approaches contain a component for analyzing bug history information …

Recommending Frequently Encountered Bugs, Yun Zhang, David Lo, Xin Xia, Jing Jiang, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers introduce bugs during software development which reduce software reliability. Many of these bugs are commonly occurring and have been experienced by many other developers. Informingdevelopers, especially novice ones, about commonly occurring bugsin a domain of interest (e.g., Java), can help developers comprehendprogram and avoid similar bugs in the future. Unfortunately, information about commonly occurring bugs are not readily available. Toaddress this need, we propose a novel approach named RFEB whichrecommends frequently encountered bugs (FEBugs) that may affectmany other developers. RFEB analyzes Stack Overflow which is thelargest software engineering-specific Q&A communities. Amongthe plenty of questions posted in Stack Overflow, many …

Deep Code Comment Generation, Xing Hu, Ge Li, Xin Xia, David Lo, Zhi Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During software maintenance, code comments help developerscomprehend programs and reduce additional time spent on readingand navigating source code. Unfortunately, these comments areoften mismatched, missing or outdated in the software projects.Developers have to infer the functionality from the source code.This paper proposes a new approach named DeepCom to automatically generate code comments for Java methods. The generatedcomments aim to help developers understand the functionalityof Java methods. DeepCom applies Natural Language Processing(NLP) techniques to learn from a large code corpus and generatescomments from learned features. We use a deep neural networkthat analyzes structural information of Java methods for bettercomments generation. We conduct …

Learning From Mutants: Using Code Mutation To Learn And Monitor Invariants Of A Cyber-Physical System, Yuqi Chen, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) consist of sensors, actuators, and controllers all communicating over a network; if any subset becomes compromised, an attacker could cause significant damage. With access to data logs and a model of the CPS, the physical effects of an attack could potentially be detected before any damage is done. Manually building a model that is accurate enough in practice, however, is extremely difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for constructing models of CPS automatically, by applying supervised machine learning to data traces obtained after systematically seeding their software components with faults ("mutants"). We demonstrate the …

Sotorrent: Reconstructing And Analyzing The Evolution Of Stack Overflow Posts, Sebastian Baltes, Lorik Dumani, Christoph Treude, Stephan Diehl

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of code snippets and free-form text on a wide variety of topics. Like other software artifacts, questions and answers on SO evolve over time, for example when bugs in code snippets are fixed, code is updated to work with a more recent library version, or text surrounding a code snippet is edited for clarity. To be able to analyze how content on SO evolves, we built SOTorrent, an open dataset based on the official SO data dump. SOTorrent provides access to the version history …

Budgeting In Student Life: An Educational Website, Heather Grunden

Honors Projects

An applied honors project in the form of a website prototype. The purpose of this website is to introduce college students to the concept of budgeting and to teach them the core steps of creating their own budget, since many existing budgeting applications are pay-to-use, and the free options tend to have little to no instruction.

Fit Buddy Prototype And Ksugo Mobile App, Albert Lim

KSU Journey Honors College Capstones and Theses

The purpose of my Honors Capstone project is to deliver a mobile app prototype that is focused on improving the student experience at Kennesaw State University (KSU), called Fit Buddy. There are three key concepts that will be covered in this Proof of Concept project: social networking, fitness, and IoT (Internet of Things) usages.

Additionally, the purpose of the CS Capstone project is to deliver a mobile app that is focused on improving the faculty, student, and guest experience at KSU, called KSUGo. The primary objective and purpose in creating this stems from KSU’s many resourceful outlets, which we seek …

Creating A Reproducible Metadata Transformation Pipeline Using Technology Best Practices, Cara Key, Mike Waugh

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Over the course of two years, a team of librarians and programmers from LSU Libraries migrated the 186 collections of the Louisiana Digital Library from OCLC's CONTENTdm platform over to the open-source Islandora platform.

Early in the process, the team understood the value of creating a reproducible metadata transformation pipeline, because there were so many unknowns at the beginning of the process along with the certainty that mistakes would be made. This presentation will describe how the team used innovative and collaborative tools, such as Trello, Ansible, Vagrant, VirtualBox, git and GitHub to accomplish the task.

Seismology And Volcanology: Exploration Of Volcanoes, Long-Periods, And Machines - Predicting Volcano Eruption Using Signature Seismic Data, Kyle Killion, Rajeev Kumar, Celia J. Taylor, Gabriele Morra

SMU Data Science Review

Abstract. Seismo-volcanologists manually isolate and verify long-period waves and Strombolian events using seismic and acoustic waves. This is a very detailed and time-consuming process. This project is to employ machine learning algorithms to find models which locate long-period and Strombolian signatures automatically. By comparing the timing of seismic and acoustic waves, clustering techniques effectively isolated big volcanic events and aided in the further refinement of techniques to capture the hundreds of typical daily Strombolian events at Villarrica volcano. Within the research, we utilized the unsupervised machine learning environment to locate a group of signatures for customizing machine learned long-period signature …