Software Engineering Commons^™

Assessing Generalizability Of Codebert, Xin Zhou, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pre-trained models like BERT have achieved strong improvements on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, showing their great generalizability. The success of pre-trained models in NLP inspires pre-trained models for programming language. Recently, CodeBERT, a model for both natural language (NL) and programming language (PL), pre-trained on code search dataset, is proposed. Although promising, CodeBERT has not been evaluated beyond its pre-trained dataset for NL-PL tasks. Also, it has only been shown effective on two tasks that are close in nature to its pre-trained data. This raises two questions: Can CodeBERT generalize beyond its pre-trained data? Can it generalize to …

Learning To Adversarially Blur Visual Object Tracking, Qing Guo, Ziyi Cheng, Felix Juefei-Xu, Lei Ma, Xiaofei Xie, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motion blur caused by the moving of the object or camera during the exposure can be a key challenge for visual object tracking, affecting tracking accuracy significantly. In this work, we explore the robustness of visual object trackers against motion blur from a new angle, i.e., adversarial blur attack (ABA). Our main objective is to online transfer input frames to their natural motion-blurred counterparts while misleading the state-of-the-art trackers during the tracking process. To this end, we first design the motion blur synthesizing method for visual tracking based on the generation principle of motion blur, considering the motion information and …

Covid-19 One Year On: Security And Privacy Review Of Contact Tracing Mobile Apps, Wei Yang Ang, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic caused 3.8 million deaths since December 2019. At the current vaccination pace, this global pandemic could persist for several years. Throughout the world, contact tracing (CT) apps were developed, which play a significant role in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. This work examines the current state of security and privacy landscape of mobile CT apps. Our work is the first attempt, to our knowledge, which provides a comprehensive analysis of 70 CT apps used worldwide as of year Q1 2021. Among other findings, we observed that 80% of them may have handled sensitive data without adequate …

Contrasting Third-Party Package Management User Experience, Syful Islam, Raula Kula, Christoph Treude, Takashi Ishio, Kenichi Matsumoto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The management of third-party package dependencies is crucial to most technology stacks, with package managers acting as brokers to ensure that a verified package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to dozens of package ecosystems with their own management features. While recent studies have shown that developers struggle to migrate their dependencies, the common assumption is that package ecosystems are used without any issue. In this study, we explore 13 package ecosystems to understand whether their features correlate with the experience of their users. By studying experience through the questions that …

Cloud, Edge And Fog Computing: Trends And Case Studies, Eng Lieh Ouh, Stanislaw Jarzabek, Geok Shan Lim, Masayoshi Ogawa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As it is done today, an informal – solely based on experts’ intuition – evaluation of profitability of adopting cloud services is undependable and not scalable as there are many conflicting factors and constraints such evaluation should account for. The revenue from service tenants and the cost of implementing the service architecture are the leading service factors that drive profitability. Cloud service architectures also need to handle a growing number of tenants with increasingly diverse requirements which must be weighed against the capabilities and costs of various service architectures, particularly single- versus multi-tenanted models. We believe a conceptual model enumerating …

Disambiguating Mentions Of Api Methods In Stack Overflow Via Type Scoping, Kien Luong, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow is one of the most popular venues for developers to find answers to their API-related questions. However, API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow are often ambiguous and thus it could be difficult to find the APIs and learn their usages. Disambiguating these API mentions is not trivial, as an API mention can match with names of APIs from different libraries or even the same one. In this paper, we propose an approach called DATYS to disambiguate API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow using type scoping. With type scoping, we consider API methods …

Uncovering Patterns In Reviewers' Feedback To Scene Description Authors, Rosiana Natalie, Jolene Kar Inn Loh, Huei Suen Tan, Joshua Shi-Hao Tseng, Hernisa Kacorri, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Audio descriptions (ADs) can increase access to videos for blind people. Researchers have explored different mechanisms for generating ADs, with some of the most recent studies involving paid novices; to improve the quality of their ADs, novices receive feedback from reviewers. However, reviewer feedback is not instantaneous. To explore the potential for real-time feedback through automation, in this paper, we analyze 1,120 comments that 40 sighted novices received from a sighted or a blind reviewer. We find that feedback patterns tend to fall under four themes: (i) Quality; commenting on different AD quality variables, (ii) Speech Act; the utterance or …

Taxthemis: Interactive Mining And Exploration Of Suspicious Tax Evasion Group, Yating Lin, Kamkwai Wong, Yong Wang, Rong Zhang, Bo Dong, Huamin Qu, Qinghua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tax evasion is a serious economic problem for many countries, as it can undermine the government’s tax system and lead to an unfair business competition environment. Recent research has applied data analytics techniques to analyze and detect tax evasion behaviors of individual taxpayers. However, they have failed to support the analysis and exploration of the related party transaction tax evasion (RPTTE) behaviors (e.g., transfer pricing), where a group of taxpayers is involved. In this paper, we present TaxThemis, an interactive visual analytics system to help tax officers mine and explore suspicious tax evasion groups through analyzing heterogeneous tax-related data. A …

Computer-Aided Diagnosis Of Low Grade Endometrial Stromal Sarcoma (Lgess), Xinxin Yang, Mark Stamp

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Low grade endometrial stromal sarcoma (LGESS) accounts for about 0.2% of all uterine cancer cases. Approximately 75% of LGESS patients are initially misdiagnosed with leiomyoma, which is a type of benign tumor, also known as fibroids. In this research, uterine tissue biopsy images of potential LGESS patients are preprocessed using segmentation and stain normalization algorithms. We then apply a variety of classic machine learning and advanced deep learning models to classify tissue images as either benign or cancerous. For the classic techniques considered, the highest classification accuracy we attain is about 0.85, while our best deep learning model achieves an …

Teachers’ Engagement And Self-Efficacy In A Pk–12 Computer Science Teacher Virtual Community Of Practice, Robert Schwarzhaupt, Feng Liu, Joseph Wilson, Fanny Lee, Melissa Rasberry

Journal of Computer Science Integration

Prekindergarten to 12th-grade teachers of computer science (CS) face many challenges, including isolation, limited CS professional development resources, and low levels of CS teaching self-efficacy that could be mitigated through communities of practice (CoPs). This study used survey data from 420 PK–12 CS teacher members of a virtual CoP, CS for All Teachers, to examine the needs of these teachers and how CS teaching self-efficacy, community engagement, and sharing behaviors vary by teachers’ instructional experiences and school levels taught. Results show that CS teachers primarily join the CoP to gain high-quality pedagogical, assessment, and instructional resources. The study also found …

International Comparative Studies On The Software Testing Profession, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Pradeep Waychal, Jingdong Jia, Daniel Varona, Yadira Lizama

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

This work attempts to fill a gap by exploring the human dimension in particular, by trying to understand the motivation of software professionals for taking up and sustaining their careers as software testers. Towards that goal, four surveys were conducted in four countries—India, Canada, Cuba, and China—to try to understand how professional software engineers perceive and value work-related factors that could influence their motivation to start or move into software testing careers. From our sample of 220 software professionals, we observed that very few were keen to take up testing careers. Some aspects of software testing, such as the potential …

The Empathetic Car: Exploring Emotion Inference Via Driver Behaviour And Traffic Context, Shu Liu, Kevin Koch, Zimu Zhou, Simon Foll, Xiaoxi He, Tina Menke, Elgar Fleisch, Felix Wortmann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An empathetic car that is capable of reading the driver’s emotions has been envisioned by many car manufacturers. Emotion inference enables in-vehicle applications to improve driver comfort, well-being, and safety. Available emotion inference approaches use physiological, facial, and speech-related data to infer emotions during driving trips. However, existing solutions have two major limitations: Relying on sensors that are not built into the vehicle restricts emotion inference to those people leveraging corresponding devices (e.g., smartwatches). Relying on modalities such as facial expressions and speech raises privacy concerns. By contrast, researchers in mobile health have been able to infer affective states (e.g., …

Characterization And Automatic Updates Of Deprecated Machine-Learning Api Usages, Stefanus Agus Haryono, Thung Ferdian, David Lo, Julia Lawall, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the rise of AI applications, machine learning (ML) libraries, often written in Python, have become far more accessible. ML libraries tend to be updated periodically, which may deprecate existing APIs, making it necessary for application developers to update their usages. In this paper, we build a tool to automate deprecated API usage updates. We first present an empirical study to better understand how updates of deprecated ML API usages in Python can be done. The study involves a dataset of 112 deprecated APIs from Scikit-Learn, TensorFlow, and PyTorch. Guided by the findings of our empirical study, we propose …

Biasheal: On-The-Fly Black-Box Healing Of Bias In Sentiment Analysis Systems, Zhou Yang, Harshit Jain, Jieke Shi, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although Sentiment Analysis (SA) is widely applied in many domains, existing research has revealed that the unfairness in SA systems can be harmful to the welfare of less privileged people. Several works propose pre-processing and in-processing methods to eliminate bias in SA systems, but little attention is paid to utilizing post-processing methods to heal bias. Postprocessing methods are particularly important for systems that use third-party SA services. Systems that use such services have no access to the SA engine or its training data and thus cannot apply pre-processing nor in-processing methods. Therefore, this paper proposes a black-box post-processing method to …

Which Variables Should I Log?, Zhongxin Liu, Xin Xia, David Lo, Zhenchang Xing, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers usually depend on inserting logging statements into the source code to collect system runtime information. Such logged information is valuable for software maintenance. A logging statement usually prints one or more variables to record vital system status. However, due to the lack of rigorous logging guidance and the requirement of domain-specific knowledge, it is not easy for developers to make proper decisions about which variables to log. To address this need, in this work, we propose an approach to recommend logging variables for developers during development by learning from existing logging statements. Different from other prediction tasks in software …

Injecting Descriptive Meta-Information Into Pre-Trained Language Models With Hypernetworks, Wenying Duan, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Hong Rao, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pre-trained language models have been widely adopted as backbones in various natural language processing tasks. However, existing pre-trained language models ignore the descriptive meta-information in the text such as the distinction between the title and the mainbody, leading to over-weighted attention to insignificant text. In this paper, we propose a hypernetwork-based architecture to model the descriptive meta-information and integrate it into pre-trained language models. Evaluations on three natural language processing tasks show that our method notably improves the performance of pre-trained language models and achieves the state-of-the-art results on keyphrase extraction.

Sediqa: Sound Emitting Document Image Quality Assessment In A Reading Aid For The Visually Impaired, Jane Courtney

Articles

For visually impaired people (VIPs), the ability to convert text to sound can mean a new level of independence or the simple joy of a good book. With significant advances in optical character recognition (OCR) in recent years, a number of reading aids are appearing on the market. These reading aids convert images captured by a camera to text which can then be read aloud. However, all of these reading aids suffer from a key issue—the user must be able to visually target the text and capture an image of sufficient quality for the OCR algorithm to function—no small task …

Software For The Frontiers Of Quantum Chemistry: An Overview Of Developments In The Q-Chem 5 Package, Evgeny Epifanovsky, Andrew T.B. Gilbert, Xintian Feng, Joonho Lee, Yuezhi Mao, Narbe Mardirossian, Pavel Pokhilko, Alec F. White, Marc P. Coons, Adiran L. Dempwolff, Zhengting Gan, Diptarka Hait, Paul R. Horn, Leif D. Jacobson, Ilya Kaliman, Jorg Kussmann, Adrian W. Lange, Ka Un Lao, Daniel S. Levine, Jie Liu, Simon C. Mckenzie, Adrian F. Morrison, Kaushik D. Nanda, Felix Plasser, Dirk R. Rehn, Marta L. Vidal, Zhi-Qiang You, Ying Zhu, Bushra Alam, Benjamin J. Albrecht, Abdulrahman Aldossary

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Research

This article summarizes technical advances contained in the fifth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program package, covering developments since 2015. A comprehensive library of exchange–correlation functionals, along with a suite of correlated many-body methods, continues to be a hallmark of the Q-Chem software. The many-body methods include novel variants of both coupled-cluster and configuration-interaction approaches along with methods based on the algebraic diagrammatic construction and variational reduced density-matrix methods. Methods highlighted in Q-Chem 5 include a suite of tools for modeling core-level spectroscopy, methods for describing metastable resonances, methods for computing vibronic spectra, the nuclear–electronic orbital method, and …

Automated Statistical Structural Testing Techniques And Applications, Yang Shi

Dissertations and Theses

Statistical structural testing(SST) is an effective testing technique that produces random test inputs from probability distributions. SST shows superiority in fault-revealing power over random testing and deterministic approaches since it heritages the merits from both of them. SST ensures testing thoroughness by setting up a probability lower-bound criterion for each structural cover element and test inputs that exercise a structural cover element sampled from the probability distribution, ensuring testing randomness. Despite the advantages, SST is not a widely used approach in practice. There are two major limitations. First, to construct probability distributions, a tester must understand the underlying software's structure, …

Ensemble Data Fitting For Bathymetric Models Informed By Nominal Data, Samantha Zambo

Dissertations

Due to the difficulty and expense of collecting bathymetric data, modeling is the primary tool to produce detailed maps of the ocean floor. Current modeling practices typically utilize only one interpolator; the industry standard is splines-in-tension.

In this dissertation we introduce a new nominal-informed ensemble interpolator designed to improve modeling accuracy in regions of sparse data. The method is guided by a priori domain knowledge provided by artificially intelligent classifiers. We recast such geomorphological classifications, such as ‘seamount’ or ‘ridge’, as nominal data which we utilize as foundational shapes in an expanded ordinary least squares regression-based algorithm. To our knowledge …