Software Engineering Commons^™

Chat Component For Php Web Apps*, Linton W. Feitosa, Caleb N. Hoffman

Campus Research Month

Chat rooms are a common feature in much of today's software. While many web applications could benefit from them, developing individual chat implementations can be repetitive and time consuming. Furthermore, publicly available and integrable chat components are difficult to find.

We created a general-use chat component for PHP web applications using the Yii2 framework. Our component features chat rooms, asynchronous messaging, and contact management. It is widely applicable, customizable, documented, and can be easily extended by future developers.

Code Visualizer: An Interactive Code Visualization Tool, Tadd Trumbull

Campus Research Month

Code Visualizer is a web-based, interactive algorithm visualization tool designed to help introductory computer science students develop a deeper understanding of array searching and sorting algorithms. Code Visualizer presents a step-by-step simulation environment built on a restricted Python subset, which allows students to observe array traversal, index manipulation, and algorithmic operations in real time. The tool features two learning modes: View Mode and Predict Mode. The underlying architecture utilizes a behavioral software design pattern called command pattern.

Match-A-Fit, Brianna Mendoza, Adan Diaz De Leon, Pedro Jacobo, Juan Marco Saca Dada

Posters - 2026

Welcome to Match-a-Fit! Match-a-Fit is an iOS application that allows the user to create a digital closet by uploading images of their clothing items. With AI, the program can generate outfits based on the digital closet, the time, and the occasion. Match-a-Fit’s purpose is designed to help users who struggle to get ready, run out of time, or can’t decide on an outfit, by easily generating outfit options based on the occasion.

Maddenlite, Sergio Pena

Presentations - 2026

Problem •“What If” scenarios impossible to test accurately •Commercial games rely on arcade physics •Spreadsheets lack visual engagement

Motivation •Passion for football analytics •Desire to simulate cross-era matchups •Apply math models to real-world sports data

Solution •Python based simulation engine using historical play-by-play data •Simulates outcomes based on probability

A.I.R.E., Laurene Robinson

Presentations - 2026

•Cybersecurity analysts rely on reverse engineering to understand suspicious software. •Ghidra can surface decompiled code, but it does not fully explain function purpose, behavioral meaning, or analyst priority. •When symbols are stripped and context is weak, analysts must still reconstruct intent manually from low-level output. •That process is Time-consuming , complex and , operationally costly

Harvest Scanner, Alexander Murphy

Posters - 2026

In current times, people can find themselves at the whims of markets and may be spending more than they realize or want to on regular, everyday goods. New tools can help users keep track of the goods they are paying for. Harvest Scanner was developed to scan and track local grocery prices from stores using their publicly available website information. It was developed in Python using PyQt5 for GUI. The database is stored as an SQL file with Python using SQLite engine. Users will be able to view local grocery prices in a database interface (GUI). There are many features …

A.I.R.E. - Ai-Assisted Reverse Engineering, Laurene Robinson

Posters - 2026

Reverse engineering plays a vital role in cybersecurity by helping analysts examine unknown binaries, investigate malware, identify vulnerabilities, and better protect sensitive systems. However, once a program is compiled and stripped, the meaningful names that describe its behavior are lost, leaving behind generic function labels like FUN_00401a30. Analysts must then manually interpret decompiled code, trace call chains, and infer program behavior function by function, which is slow and mentally demanding on large binaries. To address this challenge, this project introduces A.I.R.E., a local Ghidra extension that extracts contextual evidence from stripped functions and uses a locally hosted language model to …

Topshelf, Ayden Jay Soliz

Posters - 2026

With so many great video games releasing each year, it becomes challenging to keep up with the latest. Players find it difficult to maintain an updated list of future games to play, and many existing online trackers have become too complicated to use. TopShelf is designed to be a simple video game backlogging website that will track games for the player. By connecting to an online video game database API, users can add/drop games from their personal list and enable tracking and receive emails for platform releasing. Gamers can leave all the tracking and updates responsibilities to TopShelf

Causality-Aware Safety Testing For Autonomous Driving Systems, Wenbing Tang, Mingfei Cheng, Renzhi Wang, Yuan Zhou, Chengwei Liu, Yang Liu, Zuohua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Simulation-based testing is essential for evaluating the safety of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs). Comprehensive evaluation requires testing across diverse scenarios that can trigger various types of violations under different conditions. While existing methods typically focus on individual diversity metrics, such as input scenarios, ADS-generated motion commands, and system violations, they often fail to capture the complex interrelationships among these elements. For instance, identical motion commands can produce different collision risks in varying scenes, and the same collision may result from different commands under different scenarios. This oversight leads to gaps in testing coverage, potentially missing critical issues in the ADS …

Patchgpt: Multi-Agent Patch Backporting Without Model Fine-Tuning, Ye Liu, Ruidong Han, Chengyan Ma, Yuqing Niu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Patch backporting is crucial and prevalent in the maintenance of modern open-source software such as Linux kernels and forked repositories. However, porting patches across program versions remains a challenging problem due to the complexity of synergizing diverse patches with divergent program versions. In this paper, we propose PatchGPT, an agentic patch backporting framework for fine-grained patch generation. PatchGPT encompasses three agents: Miner for decomposing a sequence of atomic change steps as the original patch plan, Adapter for adapting the patch plan, and Executor for executing the adapted patch plan according to predefined change semantics. We conduct experiments on the PPatHF’s …

Penforge: On-The-Fly Expert Agent Construction For Automated Penetration Testing, Huihui Huang, Jieke Shi, Junkai Chen, Ting Zhang, Yikun Li, Chengran Yang, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Penetration testing is essential for identifying vulnerabilities in web applications before real adversaries can exploit them. Recent work has explored automating this process with Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents, but existing approaches either rely on a single generic agent that struggles in complex scenarios or narrowly specialized agents that cannot adapt to diverse vulnerability types. We therefore introduce PenForge, a framework that dynamically constructs expert agents during testing rather than relying on those prepared beforehand. By integrating automated reconnaissance of potential attack surfaces with agents instantiated on the fly for context-aware exploitation, PenForge achieves a 30.0% exploit success rate (12/40) …

Finding Missing Input Validation In Tees Via Llm-Assisted Symbolic Execution, Chengyan Ma, Jieke Shi, Ruidong Han, Ye Liu, Yuqing Niu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) provide hardware-enforced isolation that protects sensitive code and data from untrusted software. Despite their strong security guarantees, analyzing TEE applications remains challenging due to the high cost and complexity of configuring complete TEE build and runtime environments, as well as the limited observability imposed by hardware isolation. This paper presents SymTEE, a novel large language model (LLM)-assisted symbolic execution framework for detecting missing input validation issues in TEE applications without requiring real TEE setups. SymTEE begins by leveraging Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) analysis to extract TEE code slices that may lack sufficient input validation, and then …

Fallen Light (Video Game), Joshua Do

Presentations - 2026

Problem:

•People misunderstand Lucifer’s deception

•(shown through Temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4) •Lack of engaging ways to teach theological concepts   •Background: Lucifer corrupts not through force, but subtle self-elevation and doubt   Motivation:   •Just initially wanted to make a game of how sin entered the world for fun   •Just thought it was a cool idea in general.

Solution:

•Dialogue-driven narrative game   •6+ story chapters   •10+ regions   •Focused on spiritual conflict, deception, and discernment   •Uses event-based progression   •Presents Lucifer through subtle manipulation, by being a false light by choosing self-pleasure over what is right.

Fisheasy, Jake Rankin

Presentations - 2026

Problem: 
Inexperienced and experienced anglers lack necessary tools to begin fishing

Motivation:
Fishing is a fun hobby everyone should be able to enjoy – the lack of resources makes that difficult

Solution:
An application that integrates learning tutorials with helpful practices tools for both novice and experienced anglers

Foxbuddy, Luis Eduardo Garza Jr.

Presentations - 2026

Problem:
•Many people are still unprepared incase of an emergency. (42%-46% are prepared for an emergency)
•Supplies can be scattered, expired, or forgotten.   •Reliable guidance is often not easy to access.

Fisheasy, Jake Ryan Rankin

Posters - 2026

The purpose of FishEasy is to create an all-in-one fishing application that supports both beginner and experienced anglers through education, recommendations, and data tracking. Many new anglers struggle with understanding gear, knots, bait, and locations, while existing tools often limit access through paid features. FishEasy addresses these gaps by providing:

• Educational Tutorials for knots, rigs, and beginner guidance • Smart Recommendations based on location, species, and conditions • Catch Logging & Analytics to track performance • Regulation Awareness for legal fishing practices


Overall, FishEasy aims to make fishing more accessible, efficient, and easy to learn for all users.

Spinlock Game Engine, Shane Misley

Posters - 2026

Modern game engines prioritize developer convenience at the cost of performance and transparency. Large frameworks like Unity and Unreal Engine abstract away implementation details, which simplifies development but introduces computational overhead—often 40-50% of CPU and memory usage goes to engine infrastructure rather than the actual game. For developers targeting low-end hardware, older systems, or performance-critical applications, this overhead becomes prohibitive. The Spinlock Engine addresses this problem by adopting a "close-to-the-metal" philosophy, stripping away unnecessary abstraction layers to deliver raw speed and predictable behavior. Built in C++ with SDL3 and Raylib, Spinlock prioritizes memory efficiency, CPU optimization, and developer transparency—allowing you …

Sentra, David Aguilar

Posters - 2026

In the fast-paced space of event organization, fostering continuous collaboration among participants is essential. However, organizers often lose valuable time monitoring multiple, disconnected systems once an event is underway. Enter Sentra: an all-in-one Discord bot tailored specifically for weekend events like hackathons. Sentra bridges the gap between participants and organizers by consolidating seamless team matchmaking, robust support ticketing, and automated AI moderation into a single, unified interface.

Synapse, Nicolas Diaz, Alexander Murphy, Sonia Cerrillo, Naomi Ramirez, Jesse Kemmer

Posters - 2026

People tend to accumulate a great deal of notes throughout their lives with no coherent way to organize them. Even with the built-in notes app, the notes eventually accumulate until it becomes borderline impossible to find what is needed. Our proposed solution is Synapse, an LLM powered notes app with a tagging system that allows notes to be sorted by topic. The LLM will be able to read the user's notes and recommend tags

Chopchop: The Digital Cookbook, Dominc Mcdevitt, Shane Misley, Adolfo Duran, Katie Cerda, Kobie Henson

Posters - 2026

Many of today's home chefs still use the same limited methods of saving recipes that have been used for decades, i.e. handwritten notes, disorganized pdfs, screenshots, saved text messages, etc. Not only are these formats hard to keep track of and easily lost, but they also suffer the risk of becoming irrevocably damaged or stained in the cooking process. They are also notoriously hard to edit, which limits a chef's ability to tailor recipes to their taste, their available ingredients, or even just a different serving size. Another major issue with these approaches is the lack of easy sharing. Giving …

Agentspec: Customizable Runtime Enforcement For Safe And Reliable Llm Agents, Haoyu Wang, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Agents built on LLMs are increasingly deployed across diverse domains, automating complex decision-making and task execution. However, their autonomy introduces safety risks, including security vulnerabilities, legal violations, and unintended harmful actions. Existing mitigation methods, such as model-based safeguards and early enforcement strategies, fall short in robustness, interpretability, and adaptability. To address these challenges, we propose AgentSpec, a lightweight domain-specific language for specifying and enforcing runtime constraints on LLM agents. With AgentSpec, users define structured rules that incorporate triggers, predicates, and enforcement mechanisms, ensuring agents operate within predefined safety boundaries. We implement AgentSpec across multiple domains, including code execution, embodied agents, …

Chopchop: The Digital Cookbook, Dominc Mcdevitt, Shane Misley, Katie Cerda, Kobie Henson, Adolfo Duran

Presentations - 2026

Problem With traditional recipe organization methods,

● Recipes are scattered across paper, PDFs, Word docs, and notes

● Paper recipes can be lost, damaged, or left at home

● Digital recipes are difficult to edit, store, and organize

● Manually typing or updating recipes is time-consuming

● Sharing recipes is inconvenient and often confusing

● Limited or inconsistent cloud access reduces accessibility

● Formatting is messy and inconsistent across platforms

● No simple, centralized system for managing recipes

Budgeting Apps, Financial Literacy, And Financial Control, Max Masabo, Abdullah Mohammad Mahi

Presentations - 2026

Our paper shows the real hidden connections between budgeting app usage and financial wellbeing of U.S Households

Match-A-Fit, Adan Diaz De Leon, Juan Marco Saca Dada, Brianna Mendoza, Arsalan Kataneh, Theophile Nsabimana, Pedro Jacobo

Presentations - 2026

Welcome to Match-a-Fit! Match-a-Fit is an iOS application that allows the user to create a digital closet by uploading images of their clothing items. With AI, the program can generate outfits based on the digital closet, the time, and the occasion. Match-a-Fit’s purpose is designed to help users who struggle to get ready, run out of time, or can’t decide on an outfit, by easily generating outfit options based on the occasion.

Intelligent Deep Learning-Based Sign Language Translation System, Nada Rasem Shahin

Dissertations

The Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) community uses sign language as a primary means of communication. However, the shortage of sign language interpreters and the existence of hundreds of sign languages limit accessibility and inclusion. Sign Language Machine Translation (SLMT) systems present a promising solution for bridging the communication gap between the DHH and the hearing individuals, supporting inclusive societies. In smart cities, such systems play an essential role in improving the quality of life on a community level. In particular, as the population’s well-being is critical, developing intelligent assistive technologies, such as SLMT systems, is necessary to provide …

Conflogger: Enhance Systems’ Configuration Diagnosability Through Configuration Logging, Shiwen Shan, Yintong Huo, Yuxin Su, Zhining Wang, Dan Li, Zibin Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern configurable systems offer customization via intricate configuration spaces, yet such flexibility introduces pervasive configuration-related issues such as misconfigurations and latent softwarebugs. Existing diagnosability supports focus on post-failure analysis of software behavior to identify configuration issues, but none of these approaches look into whether the software clue sufficient failure information for diagnosis. To fill in the blank, we propose the idea of configuration logging to enhance existing logging practices at the source code level. We develop ConfLogger, the first tool that unifies configuration-aware static taint analysis with LLM-based log generation to enhance software configuration diagnosability. Specifically, our method 1) identifies …

Managing Reproducibility Debt In Scientific Software: A Practical Framework, Zara Hassan, Christoph Treude, Graham Williams, Michael Norrish, Alex Potanin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Scientific software includes end-user applications, modelling tools, research software for publications, and production systems for real users. It plays a key role across various scientific disciplines by enabling large-scale computation, simulation, and data analysis. Unlike commercial software, scientific software is often developed in dynamic research environments with limited engineering practices, documentation, or testing. This makes it fragile and difficult to reproduce results, even when code and data are available, conditions in which Reproducibility Debt (RpD) accumulates. This paper presents the Reproducibility Debt Management Framework (RpD-MF), which is grounded in evidence from a systematic literature review, practitioner interviews, and a global …

Prompting Frameworks For Large Language Models: A Survey, Xiaoxia Liu, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Xiaohan Yuan, Guoliang Dong, Peng Di, Wenhai Wang, Dongxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where “prompt” plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: (1) temporal lag of training data, and (2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power …

Bridging Bug Localization And Issue Fixing: A Hierarchical Localization Framework Leveraging Large Language Models, Jianming Chang, Xin Zhou, Lulu Wang, David Lo, Bixin Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated issue fixing is a critical task in software debugging and has recently garnered significant attention from academia and industry. However, existing fixing techniques predominantly focus on the repair phase, often overlooking the importance of improving the preceding bug localization phase. As a foundational step in issue fixing, bug localization plays a pivotal role in determining the overall effectiveness of the entire process. To enhance the precision of issue fixing by accurately identifying bug locations in large-scale projects, this paper presents BugCerberus, the first hierarchical bug localization framework powered by three customized large language models. First, BugCerberus analyzes intermediate representations …

Trace: Securing Smart Contract Repository Against Access Control Vulnerability, Chong Chen, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Yanlin Wang, Zhenyu Shan, Ting Chen, Guangqiang Yin, Jianxing Yu, Zibin Zheng, Jiachi Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to billions of dollars in economic losses. Among these, improper Access Control, which allows unauthorized users to execute restricted functions, is particularly prevalent and has caused significant financial damage. Smart contract repositories contain source code, documentation, configuration files, and other artifacts necessary for building and deploying smart contracts. GitHub hosts numerous open-source repositories of this kind, which serve as intermediate artifacts in development and require compilation and packaging to produce deployable contracts. Third-party developers often reference, reuse, or fork code from these repositories during custom development. However, if the referenced code contains vulnerabilities, it can …