Software Engineering Commons^™

Boat: An Experimental Platform For Researchers To Comparatively And Reproducibly Evaluate Bug Localization Techniques, Xinyu Wang, David Lo, Xin Xia, Xingen Wang, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Yuan Tian, Xiaohu Yang, Shanping Li, Jianling Sun, Bo Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug localization refers to the process of identifying source code files that contain defects from descriptions of these defects which are typically contained in bug reports. There have been many bug localization techniques proposed in the literature. However, often it is hard to compare these techniques since different evaluation datasets are used. At times the datasets are not made publicly available and thus it is difficult to reproduce reported results. Furthermore, some techniques are only evaluated on small datasets and thus it is not clear whether the results are generalizable. Thus, there is a need for a platform that allows …

Cross-Language Bug Localization, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xingen Wang, Chenyi Zhang, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug localization refers to the process of identifying source code files that contain defects from textual descriptions in bug reports. Existing bug localization techniques work on the assumption that bug reports, and identifiers and comments in source code files, are written in the same language (i.e., English). However, software users from non-English speaking countries (e.g., China) often use their native languages (e.g., Chinese) to write bug reports. For this setting, existing studies on bug localization would not work as the terms that appear in the bug reports do not appear in the source code. We refer to this problem as …

It's Not A Bug, It's A Feature: Does Misclassification Affect Bug Localization?, Pavneet Singh Kocchar, Tien-Duy B. Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug localization refers to the task of automatically processing bug reports to locate source code files that are responsible for the bugs. Many bug localization techniques have been proposed in the literature. These techniques are often evaluated on issue reports that are marked as bugs by their reporters in issue tracking systems. However, recent findings by Herzig et al. find that a substantial number of issue reports marked as bugs, are not bugs but other kinds of issues like refactorings, request for enhancement, documentation changes, test case creation, and so on. Herzig et al. report that these misclassifications affect bug …

The Case For Human-Centric Personal Analytics, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rich context provided by smartphones has enabled many new context-aware applications. However, these applications still need to provide their own mechanisms to interpret low-level sensing data and generate high-level user states. In this paper, we propose the idea of building a personal analytics (PA) layer that will use inputs from multiple lower layer sources, such as sensor data (accelerometers, gyroscopes, etc.), phone data (call logs, application activity, etc.), and online sources (Twitter, Facebook posts, etc.) to generate high-level user contextual states (such as emotions, preferences, and engagements). Developers can then use the PA layer to easily build a new …

A Hybrid Model Of Connectors In Cyber-Physical Systems, Xiaohong Chen, Jun Sun, Meng Sun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Compositional coordination models and languages play an important role in cyber-physical systems (CPSs). In this paper, we introduce a formal model for describing hybrid behaviors of connectors in CPSs. We extend the constraint automata model, which is used as the semantic model for the exogenous channel-based coordination language Reo, to capture the dynamic behavior of connectors in CPSs where the discrete and continuous dynamics co-exist and interact with each other. In addition to the formalism, we also provide a theoretical compositional approach for constructing the product automata for a Reo circuit, which is typically obtained by composing several primitive connectors …

Scc-Based Improved Reachability Analysis For Markov Decision Processes, Lin Gui, Jun Sun, Songzheng Song, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are extensively used to model systems with both probabilistic and nondeterministic behavior. The problem of calculating the probability of reaching certain system states (hereafter reachability analysis) is central to the MDP-based system analysis. It is known that existing approaches on reachability analysis for MDPs are often inefficient when a given MDP contains a large number of states and loops, especially with the existence of multiple probability distributions. In this work, we propose a method to eliminate strongly connected components (SCCs) in an MDP using a divide-and-conquer algorithm, and actively remove redundant probability distributions in the MDP …

Practical Analysis Framework For Software-Based Attestation Scheme, Li Li, Hong Hu, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Dong Jin Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An increasing number of ”smart” embedded devices are employed in our living environment nowadays. Unlike traditional computer systems, these devices are often physically accessible to the attackers. It is therefore almost impossible to guarantee that they are un-compromised, i.e., that indeed the devices are executing the intended software. In such a context, software-based attestation is deemed as a promising solution to validate their software integrity. It guarantees that the software running on the embedded devices are un-compromised without any hardware support. However, designing software-based attestation protocols are shown to be error-prone. In this work, we develop a framework for design …

Tauth: Verifying Timed Security Protocols, Li Li, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Quantitative timing is often relevant to the security of systems, like web applications, cyber-physical systems, etc. Verifying timed security protocols is however challenging as both arbitrary attacking behaviors and quantitative timing may lead to undecidability. In this work, we develop a service framework to support intuitive modeling of the timed protocol, as well as automatic verification with an unbounded number of sessions. The partial soundness and completeness of our verification algorithms are formally defined and proved. We implement our method into a tool called TAuth and the experiment results show that our approach is efficient and effective in both finding …

Gpu Accelerated Counterexample Generation In Ltl Model Checking, Zhimin Wu, Yang Liu, Yun Liang, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Strongly Connected Component (SCC) based searching is one of the most popular LTL model checking algorithms. When the SCCs are huge, the counterexample generation process can be time-consuming, especially when dealing with fairness assumptions. In this work, we propose a GPU accelerated counterexample generation algorithm, which improves the performance by parallelizing the Breadth First Search (BFS) used in the counterexample generation. BFS work is irregular, which means it is hard to allocate resources and may suffer from imbalanced load. We make use of the features of latest CUDA Compute Architecture-NVIDIA Kepler GK110 to achieve the dynamic parallelism and memory hierarchy …

Learning Directional Co-Occurrence For Human Action Classification, Hong Liu, Mengyuan Liu, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based methods have shown promising results for human action classification. However, state-of-art works typically utilize bag-of-visual words (BoVW), which focuses on the statistical distribution of features but ignores their inherent structural relationships. To solve this problem, a descriptor, namely directional pair-wise feature (DPF), is proposed to encode the mutual direction information between pairwise words, aiming at adding more spatial discriminant to BoVW. Firstly, STIP features are extracted and classified into a set of labeled words. Then in each frame, the DPF is constructed for every pair of words with different labels, according to their assigned directional …

Lifi: Line-Of-Sight Identification With Wifi, Zimu Zhou, Zheng Yang, Chenshu Wu, Wei Sun, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless LANs, especially WiFi, have been pervasively deployed and have fostered myriad wireless communication services and ubiquitous computing applications. A primary concern in designing each scenario-tailored application is to combat harsh indoor propagation environments, particularly Non-LineOf-Sight (NLOS) propagation. The ability to distinguish LineOf-Sight (LOS) path from NLOS paths acts as a key enabler for adaptive communication, cognitive radios, robust localization, etc. Enabling such capability on commodity WiFi infrastructure, however, is prohibitive due to the coarse multipath resolution with mere MAC layer RSSI. In this work, we dive into the PHY layer and strive to eliminate irrelevant noise and NLOS paths …

The Case For Open Source Software, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

You use it more often than you are aware, and you can even use it to get a job

Using Statistical Methods To Determine Geolocation Via Twitter, Christopher M. Wright

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

With the ever expanding usage of social media websites such as Twitter, it is possible to use statistical inquires to form a geographic location of a person using solely the content of their tweets. According to a study done in 2010, Zhiyuan Cheng, was able to detect a location of a Twitter user within 100 miles of their actual location 51% of the time. While this may seem like an already significant find, this study was done while Twitter was still finding its ground to stand on. In 2010, Twitter had 75 million unique users registered, as of March 2013, …

Regionalization Of An Asset Storage And Distribution Service, Cameron Dunn, Nathaniel Morrison

Computer Engineering

The existing service we work on, Asset Services, is comprised of multiple independent services which work together to provide an easy interface for internal clients to allow end users to upload their own content, and then distribute that content to both internal and external clients, with a firewall between the service and most external clients. Although Asset Services handles millions of requests a day from all over the globe, all requests and data were sent through a single data center. The objective of this project was to create new endpoints for end users to upload and download assets to/from. By …

A Framework For Constructing Serious Games, Taylor Glen Yust

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Communicating ideas and knowledge through serious games is a trend that is currently gaining in popularity. However, at present, there is a distinct lack of a game development methodology that takes a critical approach to transforming information into gameplay. This thesis presents a framework that can be followed to construct compelling serious games that are effective at transferring knowledge to the player. This is accomplished through an analysis of atomic knowledge items and their relationships to one another, followed by a meaningful and synergetic implementation of these ideas at a foundational mechanics level.

This thesis also describes the development of …

Tapjacking Threats And Mitigation Techniques For Android Applications, Vanessa Cooper

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

With the increased dependency on web applications through mobile devices, malicious attack techniques have now shifted from traditional web applications running on desktop or laptop (allowing mouse click- based interactions) to mobile applications running on mobile devices (allowing touch-based interactions). Clickjacking is a type of malicious attack originating in web applications, where victims are lured to click on seemingly benign objects in web pages. However, when clicked, unintended actions are performed without the user’s knowledge. In particular, it is shown that users are lured to touch an object of an application triggering unintended actions not actually intended by victims. This …

Development Of Etsu Student Life Android Application, Tyler L. Cox

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this thesis, the author gives a description his journey creating and developing a Student Life Application for East Tennessee State University. This thesis will document his process with development as well as reflect on the struggles and victories in creation of this application.

Distributed Gui Testing Of Ios Applications With Hadoopunit, Krissada Dechokul

Theses and Dissertations

Smartphones have become an important medium of communication for millions of people. They have come to expect high-quality mobile applications, which have increased the importance of software testing in modern software development. While software testing can ensure the quality of a system under test (SUT), it has suffered from lengthy execution time, especially for system-level GUI testing. In general, system-level GUI testing can be time-consuming because it requires walking through every user interface element and every possible variation that users could experience through the GUI of the application. In addition, this type of testing exercises the SUT from the outside …

Porting The Embedded Xinu Operating System To The Raspberry Pi, Eric Biggers

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

This thesis presents a port of a lightweight instructional operating system called Embedded Xinu to the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive credit-card-sized computer, has attracted a large community of hobbyists, researchers, and educators since its release in 2012. However, the system-level software running on the Raspberry Pi has been restricted to two ends of a spectrum: complex modern operating systems such as Linux at one end, and very simple hobbyist operating systems or simple “bare-metal” programs at the other end. This project bridges this gap by porting the Embedded Xinu operating system to the Raspberry Pi. Although simple …

A Self-Adaptive Framework For Failure Avoidance In Configurable Software, Jacob Swanson

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Many software systems today are highly-configurable, meaning the user can customize their instance of the application, adding and removing features as needed. However, this configurability makes it harder to ensure that faults will not escape testing and manifest as failures in the field. This is because many failures are configuration-dependent; they will appear under certain combinations of features configurations, but not others. Once faults are found and reported in the field, there can be a long lag time (days, weeks or even months) until patches are created and released to fix them. In the meantime, users will continue to use …