Software Engineering Commons^™

Mobidroid: A Performance-Sensitive Malware Detection System On Mobile Platform, Ruitao Feng, Sen Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Guozhu Meng, Yang Liu, Shang-Wei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Currently, Android malware detection is mostly performed on the server side against the increasing number of Android malware. Powerful computing resource gives more exhaustive protection for Android markets than maintaining detection by a single user in many cases. However, apart from the Android apps provided by the official market (i.e., Google Play Store), apps from unofficial markets and third-party resources are always causing a serious security threat to end-users. Meanwhile, it is a time-consuming task if the app is downloaded first and then uploaded to the server side for detection because the network transmission has a lot of overhead. In …

Ml4iot: A Framework To Orchestrate Machine Learning Workflows On Internet Of Things Data, Jose Miguel Alves, Leonardo Honorio, Miriam A M Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Internet of Things (IoT) applications generate vast amounts of real-time data. Temporal analysis of these data series to discover behavioural patterns may lead to qualified knowledge affecting a broad range of industries. Hence, the use of machine learning (ML) algorithms over IoT data has the potential to improve safety, economy, and performance in critical processes. However, creating ML workflows at scale is a challenging task that depends upon both production and specialized skills. Such tasks require investigation, understanding, selection, and implementation of specific ML workflows, which often lead to bottlenecks, production issues, and code management complexity and even then may …

On The Yellow Brick Road, A Path To Enterprise Architecture Maturity, Avsharn Bachoo

The African Journal of Information Systems

This study concentrated on the relationship between the Enterprise Architecture (EA) maturity of an organization and the business value associated with it in the South African financial services environment. It was developed within the critical realism philosophy, which states that mechanisms generate events by accentuating the underlying EA mechanisms that lead to business value, as well as provide insights into the opportunities and challenges organizations experienced as they progressed to higher levels of maturity. Constructed using the resource-based view of the firm as the underlying theoretical framework, this research examined EA as an intangible resource and maturity as a source …

Comprehending Test Code: An Empirical Study, Chak Shun Yu, Christoph Treude, Maurício Aniche

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how developers comprehend test code specifically, despite the undisputed importance of testing. In this paper, we report on the results of an empirical study with 44 developers to understand which factors influence developers when comprehending Java test code. We measured three dependent variables: the total time spent reading a test suite, the ability to identify the overall purpose of a test suite, and the ability …

Explaining Regressions Via Alignment Slicing And Mending, Haijun Wang, Yun Lin, Zijiang Yang, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jinsong Dong, Qinghua Zheng, Ting Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Regression faults, which make working code stop functioning, are often introduced when developers make changes to the software. Many regression fault localization techniques have been proposed. However, issues like inaccuracy and lack of explanation are still obstacles for their practical application. In this work, we propose a trace-based approach to identifying not only where the root cause of a regression bug lies, but also how the defect is propagated to its manifestation as the explanation. In our approach, we keep the trace of original correct version as reference and infer the faulty steps on the trace of regression version so …

Smartembed: A Tool For Clone And Bug Detection In Smart Contracts Through Structural Code Embedding, Zhipeng Gao, Magalle Hewa Vinoj Yasanga Jayasundara, Lingxiao Jiang, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ethereum has become a widely used platform to enable secure, Blockchain-based financial and business transactions. However, a major concern in Ethereum is the security of its smart contracts. Many identified bugs and vulnerabilities in smart contracts not only present challenges to maintenance of blockchain, but also lead to serious financial loses. There is a significant need to better assist developers in checking smart contracts and ensuring their reliability. In this paper, we propose a web service tool, named SMARTEMBED, which can help Solidity developers to find repetitive contract code and clone-related bugs in smart contracts. Our tool is based on …

Towards Generating Transformation Rules Without Examples For Android Api Replacement, Ferdian Thung, Hong Jin Kang, Lingxiao Jiang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deprecation of APIs in software libraries is common when library maintainers make changes to a library and will no longer support certain APIs in the future. When deprecation occurs, developers whose programs depend on the APIs need to replace the usages of the deprecated APIs sooner or later. Often times, software documentation specifies which new APIs the developers should use in place of a deprecated API. However, replacing the usages of a deprecated API remains a challenge since developers may not know exactly how to use the new APIs. The developers would first need to understand the API changes before …

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.

Parametric Timed Model Checking For Guaranteeing Timed Opacity, Étienne André, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information leakage can have dramatic consequences on systems security. Among harmful information leaks, the timing information leakage is the ability for an attacker to deduce internal information depending on the system execution time. We address the following problem: given a timed system, synthesize the execution times for which one cannot deduce whether the system performed some secret behavior. We solve this problem in the setting of timed automata (TAs). We first provide a general solution, and then extend the problem to parametric TAs, by synthesizing internal timings making the TA secure. We study decidability, devise algorithms, and show that our …

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 …

Inferring Accurate Bus Trajectories From Noisy Estimated Arrival Time Records, Lakmal Meegahapola, Noel Athaide, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Shili Xiang, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Urban commuting data has long been a vital source of understanding population mobility behaviour and has been widely adopted for various applications such as transport infrastructure planning and urban anomaly detection. While individual-specific transaction records (such as smart card (tap-in, tap-out) data or taxi trip records) hold a wealth of information, these are often private data available only to the service provider (e.g., taxicab operator). In this work, we explore the utility in harnessing publicly available, albeit noisy, transportation datasets, such as noisy “Estimated Time of Arrival" (ETA) records (commonly available to commuters through transit Apps or electronic signages). We …

Nonuniform Timeslicing Of Dynamic Graphs Based On Visual Complexity, Yong Wang, Daniel Archambault, Hammad Haleem, Torsten Moeller, Yanhong Wu, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Uniform timeslicing of dynamic graphs has been used due to its convenience and uniformity across the time dimension. However, uniform timeslicing does not take the data set into account, which can generate cluttered timeslices with edge bursts and empty timeslices with few interactions. The graph mining filed has explored nonuniform timeslicing methods specifically designed to preserve graph features for mining tasks. In this paper, we propose a nonuni-form timeslicing approach for dynamic graph visualization. Our goal is to create timeslices of equal visual complexity. To this end, we adapt histogram equalization to create timeslices with a similar number of events, …

Supporting Software Architecture Maintenance By Providing Task-Specific Recommendations, Matthias Galster, Christoph Treude, Kelly Blincoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During software maintenance, developers have different information needs (e.g., to understand what type of maintenance activity to perform, the impact of a maintenance activity and its effort). However, information to support developers may be distributed across various sources. Furthermore, information captured in formal architecture documentation may be outdated. In this paper, we put forward a late breaking idea and outline a solution to improve the productivity of developers by providing task-specific recommendations based on concrete information needs that arise during software maintenance.

Tracy: A Business-Driven Technical Debt Prioritization Framework, Rodrigo Rebouças De Almeida, Christoph Treude, Uirá Kulesza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technical debt is a pervasive problem in software development. Software development teams have to prioritize debt items and determine whether they should address debt or develop new features at any point in time. This paper presents "Tracy", a framework for the prioritization of technical debt using a business-driven approach built on top of business processes. The current stage of the proposed framework is at the beginning of the third phase of Design Science Research, which is usually divided into the phases of exploration, engineering, and evaluation. The exploration and engineering phases involved the participation of 49 professionals from 12 different …

Duplicate Pull Request Detection: When Time Matters, Qingye Wang, Bowen Xu, Xin Xia, Ting Wang, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In open source communities (e.g., GitHub), developers frequently submit pull requests to fix bugs or add new features during development process. Since the process of pull request is uncoordinated and distributed, it causes massive duplication. Usually, only the first pull request qualified by reviewers can be merged to the main branch of the repository, and the others are regarded as duplication by maintainers. Since the duplication largely aggravates workloads of project reviewers and maintainers, the evolutionary process of open source repositories is delayed. To identify the duplicate pull requests automatically, Ren et al. proposed a state-of-the-art approach that models a …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …