Programming Languages and Compilers Commons^™

Teaching Students How To Code Qualitative Data: An Experiential Activity Sequence For Training Novice Educational Researchers, Jennifer E. Lineback

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Coursework on qualitative research methods is common in many collegiate departments, including psychology, nursing, sociology, and education. Instructors for these courses must identify meaningful activities to support their students’ learning of the domain. This paper presents the components of an experiential activity sequence centered on coding and coding scheme development. Each of the three component activities of this sequence is elaborated, as are the students’ experiences during their participation in the activities. Additionally, the issues concerning coding and coding scheme development that typically emerge from students’ participation in these activities are discussed. Results from implementations of both in-person (face-to-face) and …

Towards A Large-Scale Intelligent Mobile-Argumentation And Discovering Arguments, Controversial Topics And Topic-Oriented Focal Sets In Cyber-Argumentation, Najla Althuniyan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

User-generated content (UGC) platforms host different forms of information, such as audio, video, pictures, and text. They have many online applications, such as social media, blogs, photo and video sharing, customer reviews, debate, and deliberation platforms. Usually, the content of these platforms is provided and consumed by users. Most of these platforms, mainly social media and blogs, are often used for online discussion. These platforms offer tools for users to share and express opinions. Commonly, people from different backgrounds and origins discuss opinions about various issues over the Internet. Furthermore, discussions among users contain substantial information from which knowledge about …

Privacy-Preserving Cloud-Assisted Data Analytics, Wei Bao

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays industries are collecting a massive and exponentially growing amount of data that can be utilized to extract useful insights for improving various aspects of our life. Data analytics (e.g., via the use of machine learning) has been extensively applied to make important decisions in various real world applications. However, it is challenging for resource-limited clients to analyze their data in an efficient way when its scale is large. Additionally, the data resources are increasingly distributed among different owners. Nonetheless, users' data may contain private information that needs to be protected.

Cloud computing has become more and more popular in …

Teaching Coding In A Virtual Environment: Overcoming Challenges, Marion S. Smith

Southwestern Business Administration Journal

Educational research suggests that teaching techniques are subject matter specific. Teaching techniques in introductory programming classes are centered around two approaches used by students in learning. One approach is where students develop a thorough understanding of what they are learning. This is referred to as “deep learning”. Other students use a “surface approach” where they perform the tasks required from them. The persona of the instructor and the choice of instructional materials used within a class determines which approach the student will adopt. Active teaching techniques fosters “deep learning”. With the need to adapt active teaching techniques to a virtual …

Incorrectness Logic For Graph Programs, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Program logics typically reason about an over-approximation of program behaviour to prove the absence of bugs. Recently, program logics have been proposed that instead prove the presence of bugs by means of under-approximate reasoning, which has the promise of better scalability. In this paper, we present an under-approximate program logic for a nondeterministic graph programming language, and show how it can be used to reason deductively about program incorrectness, whether defined by the presence of forbidden graph structure or by finitely failing executions. We prove this 'incorrectness logic' to be sound and complete, and speculate on some possible future applications …

Stock Markets Performance During A Pandemic: How Contagious Is Covid-19?, Yara Abushahba

Theses and Dissertations

Background and Motivation: The coronavirus (“COVID-19”) pandemic, the subsequent policies and lockdowns have unarguably led to an unprecedented fluid circumstance worldwide. The panic and fluctuations in the stock markets were unparalleled. It is inarguable that real-time availability of news and social media platforms like Twitter played a vital role in driving the investors’ sentiment during such global shock.

Purpose:The purpose of this thesis is to study how the investor sentiment in relation to COVID-19 pandemic influenced stock markets globally and how stock markets globally are integrated and contagious. We analyze COVID-19 sentiment through the Twitter posts and investigate its …

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

Publications and Research

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

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

Publications and Research

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

Asynchronous Validations Using Programming Contracts In Java, Rahul Shukla

Master's Projects

Design by Contract is a software development methodology based on the idea of having contracts between two software components. Programming contracts are invariants specified as pre-conditions and post-conditions. The client component must ensure that all the pre-conditions are satisfied before calling the server component. The server component must guarantee the post-conditions are met before the call returns to the client component. Current work in Design by Contract in Java focuses on writing shorthand contracts using annotations that are processed serially.

Modern software systems require a lot of business rules validations on complicated domain objects. Often, such validations are in the …

A Zenith Z-100 Emulator, Joseph Matta

Master’s Theses and Projects

The Zenith Z-100 computer was released by the Zenith Data Systems Corporation in 1982 as a competitor to the IBM PC. There are no known complete software emulations of the system. A Z-100 emulator is considered to be complete if it runs all functions of its monitor ROM BIOS program and is able to boot and run its two operating systems. One reason previous emulation attempts are not complete is that they ineffectively implement the floppy disk controller, preventing a proper transfer of the operating system from disk into memory. This project is an attempt to write a complete emulation …

Visual Analysis Of Historical Lessons Learned During Exercises For The United States Air Force Europe (Usafe), Samantha O'Rourke

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Within the United States Air Force, there are repeated patterns of differences observed during exercises. After an exercise is completed, forms are filled out detailing observations, successes, and recommendations seen throughout the exercise. At the most, no two reports are identical and must be analyzed by personnel and then categorized based on common themes observed. Developing a computer application will greatly reduce the time and resources used to analyze each After Action Report. This application can visually represent these observations and optimize the effectiveness of these exercises. The visualization is done through graphs displaying the frequency of observations and recommendations. …

City Goers: An Exploration Into Creating Seemingly Intelligent A.I. Systems, Matthew Brooke

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Artificial Intelligence systems have come a long way over the years. One particular application of A.I. is its incorporation in video games. A key goal of creating an A.I. system in a video game is to convey a level of intellect to the player. During playtests for Halo: Combat Evolved, the developers at Bungie noticed that players deemed tougher enemies as more intelligent than weaker ones, despite the fact that there were no differences in behavior in the enemies. The tougher enemies provided a greater illusion of intelligence to the players. Inspired by this, I set out to create a …

Retrieval-Augmented Generation For Code Summarization Via Hybrid Gnn, Shangqing Liu, Yu Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Jingkai Siow, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Source code summarization aims to generate natural language summaries from structured code snippets for better understanding code functionalities. However, automatic code summarization is challenging due to the complexity of the source code and the language gap between the source code and natural language summaries. Most previous approaches either rely on retrieval-based (which can take advantage of similar examples seen from the retrieval database, but have low generalization performance) or generation-based methods (which have better generalization performance, but cannot take advantage of similar examples). This paper proposes a novel retrieval-augmented mechanism to combine the benefits of both worlds. Furthermore, to mitigate …

Sguard: Towards Fixing Vulnerable Smart Contracts Automatically, Tai D. Nguyen, Long H. Pham, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are distributed, self-enforcing programs executing on top of blockchain networks. They have the potential to revolutionize many industries such as financial institutes and supply chains. However, smart contracts are subject to code-based vulnerabilities, which casts a shadow on its applications. As smart contracts are unpatchable (due to the immutability of blockchain), it is essential that smart contracts are guaranteed to be free of vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, smart contract languages such as Solidity are Turing-complete, which implies that verifying them statically is infeasible. Thus, alternative approaches must be developed to provide the guarantee. In this work, we develop an approach …

Mapping Renewal: How An Unexpected Interdisciplinary Collaboration Transformed A Digital Humanities Project, Elise Tanner, Geoffrey Joseph

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Funded by a National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations Grant, the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s “Mapping Renewal” pilot project focused on creating access to and providing spatial context to archival materials related to racial segregation and urban renewal in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, from 1954-1989. An unplanned interdisciplinary collaboration with the UA Little Rock Arkansas Economic Development Institute (AEDI) has proven to be an invaluable partnership. One team member from each department will demonstrate the Mapping Renewal website and discuss how the collaborative process has changed and shaped …

Student Academic Conference, Caitlin Brooks

Student Academic Conference

No abstract provided.

Generative Art, Caleb Harmon

Honors Theses

Generative Art is systems that produce complex structures and visuals through computation.

Sql Injection & Web Application Security: A Python-Based Network Traffic Detection Model, Nyki Anderson

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents a great many challenges in cybersecurity as the world grows more and more digitally dependent. Personally identifiable information (PII) (i,e., names, addresses, emails, credit card numbers) is stored in databases across websites the world over. The greatest threat to privacy, according to the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) is SQL injection attacks (SQLIA) [1]. In these sorts of attacks, hackers use malicious statements entered into forms, search bars, and other browser input mediums to trick the web application server into divulging database assets. A proposed technique against such exploitation is convolution neural network …

Lecture 11: The Road To Exascale And Legacy Software For Dense Linear Algebra, Jack Dongarra

Mathematical Sciences Spring Lecture Series

In this talk, we will look at the current state of high performance computing and look at the next stage of extreme computing. With extreme computing, there will be fundamental changes in the character of floating point arithmetic and data movement. In this talk, we will look at how extreme-scale computing has caused algorithm and software developers to change their way of thinking on implementing and program-specific applications.

Lecture 00: Opening Remarks: 46th Spring Lecture Series, Tulin Kaman

Mathematical Sciences Spring Lecture Series

Opening remarks for the 46th Annual Mathematical Sciences Spring Lecture Series at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.