Software Engineering Commons^™

Mabic: Mobile Application Builder For Interactive Communication, Huy Manh Nguyen

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Nowadays, the web services and mobile technology advance to a whole new level. These technologies make the modern communication faster and more convenient than the traditional way. People can also easily share data, picture, image and video instantly. It also saves time and money. For example: sending an email or text message is cheaper and faster than a letter. Interactive communication allows the instant exchange of feedback and enables two-way communication between people and people, or people and computer. It increases the engagement of sender and receiver in communication.

Although many systems such as REDCap and Taverna are built for …

User-Centered Design Of Multi-Gene Sequencing Panel Reports For Clinicians., Elizabeth Cutting, Meghan Banchero, Amber L. Beitelshees, James J. Cimino, Guilherme Del Fiol, Ayse P. Gurses, Mark A. Hoffman, Linda Jo Bone Jeng, Kensaku Kawamoto, Mark Kelemen, Harold Alan Pincus, Alan R. Shuldiner, Marc S. Williams, Toni I. Pollin, Casey Lynnette Overby

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

The objective of this study was to develop a high-fidelity prototype for delivering multi-gene sequencing panel (GS) reports to clinicians that simulates the user experience of a final application. The delivery and use of GS reports can occur within complex and high-paced healthcare environments. We employ a user-centered software design approach in a focus group setting in order to facilitate gathering rich contextual information from a diverse group of stakeholders potentially impacted by the delivery of GS reports relevant to two precision medicine programs at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Responses from focus group sessions were transcribed, coded and …

Determining Quality- And Energy-Aware Multiple Contexts In Pervasive Computing Environments, Nirmalya Roy, Archan Misra, Sajal K. Das, Christine Julien

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In pervasive computing environments, understanding the context of an entity is essential for adapting the application behavior to changing situations. In our view, context is a high-level representation of a user or entity's state and can capture location, activities, social relationships, capabilities, etc. Inherently, however, these high-level context metrics are difficult to capture using uni-modal sensors only and must therefore be inferred using multi-modal sensors. A key challenge in supporting context-aware pervasive computing is how to determine multiple high-level context metrics simultaneously and energy-efficiently using low-level sensor data streams collected from the environment and the entities present therein. A key …

Lifs: Low Human-Effort, Device-Free Localization With Fine-Grained Subcarrier Information, Ju Wang, Hongbo Jiang, Jie Xiong, Kyle Jamieson, Xiaojiang Chen, Dingyi Fang, Binbin Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Device-free localization of people and objects indoors not equipped with radios is playing a critical role in many emerging applications. This paper presents an accurate model-based device-free localization system LiFS, implemented on cheap commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi devices. Unlike previous COTS device-based work, LiFS is able to localize a target accurately without offline training. The basic idea is simple: channel state information (CSI) is sensitive to a target's location and by modelling the CSI measurements of multiple wireless links as a set of power fading based equations, the target location can be determined. However, due to rich multipath propagation indoors, …

Combining Word Embedding With Information Retrieval To Recommend Similar Bug Reports, Xinli Yang, David Lo, Xin Xia, Lingfeng Bao, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Similar bugs are bugs that require handling of many common code files. Developers can often fix similar bugs with a shorter time and a higher quality since they can focus on fewer code files. Therefore, similar bug recommendation is a meaningful task which can improve development efficiency. Rocha et al. propose the first similar bug recommendation system named NextBug. Although NextBug performs better than a start-of-the-art duplicated bug detection technique REP, its performance is not optimal and thus more work is needed to improve its effectiveness. Technically, it is also rather simple as it relies only upon a standard information …

Amalgam+: Composing Rich Information Sources For Accurate Bug Localization, Shaowei Wang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During the evolution of a software system, a large number of bug reports are submitted. Locating the source code files that need to be fixed to resolve the bugs is a challenging problem. Thus, there is a need for a technique that can automatically figure out these buggy files. A number of bug localization solutions that take in a bug report and output a ranked list of files sorted based on their likelihood to be buggy have been proposed in the literature. However, the accuracy of these tools still needs to be improved. In this paper, to address this need, …

Recommending Code Changes For Automatic Backporting Of Linux Device Drivers, Ferdian Thung, Xuan Bach D. Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Device drivers are essential components of any operating system (OS). They specify the communication protocol that allows the OS to interact with a device. However, drivers for new devices are usually created for a specific OS version. These drivers often need to be backported to the older versions to allow use of the new device. Backporting is often done manually, and is tedious and error prone. To alleviate this burden on developers, we propose an automatic recommendation system to guide the selection of backporting changes. Our approach analyzes the version history for cues to recommend candidate changes. We have performed …

Empirical Study On Synthesis Engines For Semantics-Based Program Repair, Le Dinh Xuan Bach, David Lo, Claire Le Goues

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic Program Repair (APR) is an emerging and rapidly growing research area, with many techniques proposed to repair defective software. One notable state-of-the-art line of APR approaches is known as semantics-based techniques, e.g., Angelix, which extract semantics constraints, i.e., specifications, via symbolic execution and test suites, and then generate repairs conforming to these constraints using program synthesis. The repair capability of such approaches-expressive power, output quality, and scalability-naturally depends on the underlying synthesis technique. However, despite recent advances in program synthesis, not much attention has been paid to assess, compare, or leverage the variety of available synthesis engine capabilities in …

Enhancing Automated Program Repair With Deductive Verification, Xuan-Bach D. Le, Quang Loc Le, David Lo, Claire Le Goues

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated program repair (APR) is a challenging process of detecting bugs, localizing buggy code, generating fix candidates and validating the fixes. Effectiveness of program repair methods relies on the generated fix candidates, and the methods used to traverse the space of generated candidates to search for the best ones. Existing approaches generate fix candidates based on either syntactic searches over source code or semantic analysis of specification, e.g., test cases. In this paper, we propose to combine both syntactic and semantic fix candidates to enhance the search space of APR, and provide a function to effectively traverse the search space. …

Bilevel Model-Based Discriminative Dictionary Learning For Recognition, Pan Zhou, Chao Zhang, Lin Zhouchen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most supervised dictionary learning methods optimize the combinations of reconstruction error, sparsity prior, and discriminative terms. Thus, the learnt dictionaries may not be optimal for recognition tasks. Also, the sparse codes learning models in the training and the testing phases are inconsistent. Besides, without utilizing the intrinsic data structure, many dictionary learning methods only employ the 0 or 1 norm to encode each datum independently, limiting the performance of the learnt dictionaries. We present a novel bilevel model-based discriminative dictionary learning method for recognition tasks. The upper level directly minimizes the classification error, while the lower level uses the sparsity …

Who Is Who In The Mailing List? Comparing Six Disambiguation Heuristics To Identify Multiple Addresses Of A Participant, Igor Scaliante Wiese, José Teodoro Da Silva, Igor Steinmacher, Christoph Treude, Marco Aurélio Gerosa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many software projects adopt mailing lists for the communication of developers and users. Researchers have been mining the history of such lists to study communities' behavior, organization, and evolution. A potential threat of this kind of study is that users often use multiple email addresses to interact in a single mailing list. This can affect the results and tools, when, for example, extracting social networks. This issue is particularly relevant for popular and long-term Open Source Software (OSS) projects, which attract participation of thousands of people. Researchers have proposed heuristics to identify multiple email addresses from the same participant, however …

Satt: Tailoring Code Metric Thresholds For Different Software Architectures, Maurício Aniche, Christoph Treude, Andy Zaidman, Arie Van Deursen, Marco Aurélio Gerosa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code metric analysis is a well-known approach for assessing the quality of a software system. However, current tools and techniques do not take the system architecture (e.g., MVC, Android) into account. This means that all classes are assessed similarly, regardless of their specific responsibilities. In this paper, we propose SATT (Software Architecture Tailored Thresholds), an approach that detects whether an architectural role is considerably different from others in the system in terms of code metrics, and provides a specific threshold for that role. We evaluated our approach on 2 different architectures (MVC and Android) in more than 400 projects. We …

Repmatch: Robust Feature Matching And Pose For Reconstructing Modern Cities, Wen-Yan Lin, Siying Liu, Minh N. Do, Ping Tan, Jiangbo Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A perennial problem in recovering 3-D models from images is repeated structures common in modern cities. The problem can be traced to the feature matcher which needs to match less distinctive features (permitting wide-baselines and avoiding broken sequences), while simultaneously avoiding incorrect matching of ambiguous repeated features. To meet this need, we develop RepMatch, an epipolar guided (assumes predominately camera motion) feature matcher that accommodates both wide-baselines and repeated structures. RepMatch is based on using RANSAC to guide the training of match consistency curves for differentiating true and false matches. By considering the set of all nearest-neighbor matches, RepMatch can …

Integrated Software Fingerprinting Via Neural-Network-Based Control Flow Obfuscation, Haoyu Ma, Ruiqi Li, Xiaoxu Yu, Chunfu Jia, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dynamic software fingerprinting has been an important tool in fighting against software theft and pirating by embedding unique fingerprints into software copies. However, existing work uses methods from dynamic software watermarking as direct solutions in which secret marks are inside rather independent code modules attached to the software. This results in an intrinsic weakness against targeted collusive attacks since differences among software copies correspond directly to the fingerprint-related components. In this paper, we suggest a novel mode of dynamic fingerprinting called integrated fingerprinting, of which the goal is to ensure all fingerprinted software copies possess identical behaviors at semantic level. …

A Novel Csi Pre-Processing Scheme For Device-Free Localization Indoors, Ju Wang, Lichao Zhang, Xuan Wang, Jie Xiong, Xiaojiang Chen, Dingyi Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Device-free localization of people and objects indoors not equipped with radios is playing a critical role in many emerging applications. This paper presents a novel channel state information (CSI) pre-processing scheme that enables accurate device-free localization indoors. The basic idea is simple: CSI is sensitive to a target's location and by modelling the CSI measurements of multiple wireless links as a set of power fading based equations, the target location can be determined. However, due to rich multipaths in indoor environment, the received signal strength (RSS) or even the fine-grained CSI can not be easily modelled. We observe that even …

Hydra: Massively Compositional Model For Cross-Project Defect Prediction, Xin Xia, David Lo, Sinno Jialin Pan, Nachiappan Nagappan, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most software defect prediction approaches are trained and applied on data from the same project. However, often a new project does not have enough training data. Cross-project defect prediction, which uses data from other projects to predict defects in a particular project, provides a new perspective to defect prediction. In this work, we propose a HYbrid moDel Reconstruction Approach (HYDRA) for cross-project defect prediction, which includes two phases: genetic algorithm (GA) phase and ensemble learning (EL) phase. These two phases create a massive composition of classifiers. To examine the benefits of HYDRA, we perform experiments on 29 datasets from the …

Inferring Links Between Concerns And Methods With Multi-Abstraction Vector Space Model, Yun Zhang, David Lo, Xin Xia, Tien-Duy B. Le, Giuseppe Scanniello, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Concern localization refers to the process of locating code units that match a particular textual description. It takes as input textual documents such as bug reports and feature requests and outputs a list of candidate code units that are relevant to the bug reports or feature requests. Many information retrieval (IR) based concern localization techniques have been proposed in the literature. These techniques typically represent code units and textual descriptions as a bag of tokens at one level of abstraction, e.g., each token is a word, or each token is a topic. In this work, we propose a multi-abstraction concern …

"Automated Debugging Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful: A User Study Revisiting The Usefulness Of Spectra-Based Fault Localization Techniques With Professionals Using Real Bugs From Large Systems, Xin Xia, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the complexity of software systems, bugs are inevitable. Software debugging is tedious and time consuming. To help developers perform this crucial task, a number of spectra-based fault localization techniques have been proposed. In general, spectra-based fault localization helps developers to find the location of a bug given its symptoms (e.g., program failures). A previous study by Parnin and Orso however implies that several assumptions made by existing work on spectra-based fault localization do not hold in practice, which hinders the practical usage of these tools. Moreover, a recent study by Xie et al. claims that spectra-based fault localization …

Xd-Track: Leveraging Multi-Dimensional Information For Passive Wi-Fi Tracking, Yaxiong Xie, Jie Xiong, Mo Li, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe the design and implementation of xD-Track, the first practical Wi-Fi based device-free localization system that employs a simultaneous and joint estimation of time-of-flight, angle-of-arrival, angle-of-departure, and Doppler shift to fully characterize the wireless channel between a sender and receiver. Using this full characterization, xD-Track introduces novel methods to measure and isolate the signal path that reflects off a person of interest, allowing it to localize a human with just a single pair of access points, or a single client-access point pair. Searching the multiple dimensions to accomplish the above is highly computationally burdensome, so xD-Track introduces novel methods …

Crowdservice: Serving The Individuals Through Mobile Crowdsourcing And Service Composition, Xin Peng, Jingxiao Gu, Tian Huat Tan, Jun Sun, Yijun Yu, Bashar Nuseibeh, Wenyun Zhao Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Some user needs in real life can only be accomplished by leveraging the intelligence and labor of other people via crowdsourcing tasks. For example, one may want to confirm the validity of the description of a secondhand laptop by asking someone else to inspect the laptop on site. To integrate these crowdsourcing tasks into user applications, it is required that crowd intelligence and labor be provided as easily accessible services (e.g., Web services), which can be called crowd services. In this paper, we develop a framework named CROWDSERVICE which supplies crowd intelligence and labor as publicly accessible crowd services via …

Hifocap: An Android App For Wearable Health Devices, Yoonsik Cheon, Rodrigo A. Romero

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Android is becoming a platform for mobile health-care devices and apps. However, there are many challenges in developing soft real-time, health-care apps for non-dedicated mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In this paper we share our experiences in developing the HifoCap app, a mobile app for receiving electroencephalogram (EEG) wave samples from a wearable device, visualizing the received EEG samples, and transmitting them to a cloud storage server. The app is network and data-intensive. We describe the challenges we faced while developing the HifoCap app---e.g., ensuring the soft real-time requirement in the presence of uncertainty on the Android platform---along …

Critical Success Factors To Improve The Game Development Process From A Developer's Perspective, Saiqa Alemm, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The growth of the software game development industry is enormous and is gaining importance day by day. This growth imposes severe pressure and a number of issues and challenges on the game development community. Game development is a complex process, and one important game development choice is to consider the developer’s perspective to produce good-quality software games by improving the game development process. The objective of this study is to provide a better understanding of the developer’s dimension as a factor in software game success. It focuses mainly on an empirical investigation of the effect of key developer’s factors on …

How Software Development Group Leaders Influence Team Members’ Behavior, Fabio Queda Silva, Cleviton Monteiro, Igor Ebrahim Santos, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Evidence in the literature from several business sectors shows that exploratory and exploitative innovation strategies are complementarily important for competitiveness. Our empirical findings reinforced those evidences in the context of software development companies. The innovative behaviour of individuals is an essential ingredient to success in both types of innovations strategies and leaders can have a big influence on this behaviour. Adopting a leadership style that combines transactional and transformational practices is more likely to produce effective results in supporting innovative behaviour. In software development, project managers and other group leaders should be stimulated and supported in adopting such practices to …

What Security Questions Do Developers Ask? A Large-Scale Study Of Stack Overflow Posts, Xinli Yang, David Lo, Xin Xia, Zhi-Yuan Wan, Jian-Ling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Security has always been a popular and critical topic. With the rapid development of information technology, it is always attracting people’s attention. However, since security has a long history, it covers a wide range of topics which change a lot, from classic cryptography to recently popular mobile security. There is a need to investigate security-related topics and trends, which can be a guide for security researchers, security educators and security practitioners. To address the above-mentioned need, in this paper, we conduct a large-scale study on security-related questions on Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a popular on-line question and answer site …

How Practitioners Perceive The Relevance Of Esem Research, Jeffrey C. Carver, Oscar Dieste, Nicholas A. Kraft, David Lo, Thomas Zimmermann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: The relevance of ESEM research to industry practitioners is key to the long-term health of the conference. Aims: The goal of this work is to understand how ESEM research is perceived within the practitioner community and provide feedback to the ESEM community ensure our research remains relevant. Method: To understand how practitioners perceive ESEM research, we replicated previous work by sending a survey to several hundred industry practitioners at a number of companies around the world. We asked the survey participants to rate the relevance of the research described in 156 ESEM papers published between 2011 and 2015. Results: …

Metaflow: A Scalable Metadata Lookup Service For Distributed File Systems In Data Centers, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Haiyong Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In large-scale distributed file systems, efficient metadata operations are critical since most file operations have to interact with metadata servers first. In existing distributed hash table (DHT) based metadata management systems, the lookup service could be a performance bottleneck due to its significant CPU overhead. Our investigations showed that the lookup service could reduce system throughput by up to 70%, and increase system latency by a factor of up to 8 compared to ideal scenarios. In this paper, we present MetaFlow, a scalable metadata lookup service utilizing software-defined networking (SDN) techniques to distribute lookup workload over network components. MetaFlow tackles …

Incentive Mechanism Design For Heterogeneous Crowdsourcing Using All-Pay Contests, Tie Luo, Salil S. Kanhere, Sajal K. Das, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many crowdsourcing scenarios are heterogeneous in the sense that, not only the workers' types (e.g., abilities, costs) are different, but the beliefs (probabilistic knowledge) about their respective types are also different. In this paper, we design an incentive mechanism for such scenarios using an asymmetric all-pay contest (or auction) model. Our design objective is an optimal mechanism, i.e., one that maximizes the crowdsourcing revenue minus cost. To achieve this, we furnish the contest with a prize tuple which is an array of reward functions for each potential winner (worker). We prove and characterize the unique equilibrium of this contest, and …

Pada: Power-Aware Development Assistant For Mobile Sensing Applications, Chulhong Min, Seungchul Lee, Changhun Lee, Youngki Lee, Seungwoo Kang, Seungpyo Choi, Wonjung Kim, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose PADA, a new power evaluation tool to measure and optimize power use of mobile sensing applications. Our motivational study with 53 professional developers shows they face huge challenges in meeting power requirements. The key challenges are from the significant time and effort for repetitive power measurements since the power use of sensing applications needs to be evaluated under various real-world usage scenarios and sensing parameters. PADA enables developers to obtain enriched power information under diverse usage scenarios in development environments without deploying and testing applications on real phones in real-life situations. We conducted two user studies with 19 …

Dynamic-Music: Accurate Device-Free Indoor Localization, Xiang Li, Shengjie Li, Daqing Zhang, Jie Xiong, Yasha Wang, Hong Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Device-free passive indoor localization is playing a critical role in many applications such as elderly care, intrusion detection, smart home, etc. However, existing device-free localization systems either suffer from labor-intensive offline training or require dedicated special-purpose devices. To address the challenges, we present our system named MaTrack, which is implemented on commodity off-the-shelf Intel 5300 Wi-Fi cards. MaTrack proposes a novel Dynamic-MUSIC method to detect the subtle reflection signals from human body and further differentiate them from those reflected signals from static objects (furniture, walls, etc.) to identify the human target's angle for localization. MaTrack does not require any offline …

Mining Revision Histories To Detect Cross-Language Clones Without Intermediates, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhiming Peng, Lingxiao Jiang, Hao Zhong, Haibo Yu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To attract more users on different platforms, many projects release their versions in multiple programming languages (e.g., Java and C#). They typically have many code snippets that implement similar functionalities, i.e., cross-language clones. Programmers often need to track and modify cross-language clones consistently to maintain similar functionalities across different language implementations. In literature, researchers have proposed approaches to detect cross-language clones, mostly for languages that share a common intermediate language (such as the .NET language family) so that techniques for detecting single-language clones can be applied. As a result, those approaches cannot detect cross-language clones for many projects that are …