Software Engineering Commons^™

Essential Sentences For Navigating Stack Overflow Answers, Sarah Nadi, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow (SO) has become an essential resource for software development. Despite its success and prevalence, navigating SO remains a challenge. Ideally, SO users could benefit from highlighted navigational cues that help them decide if an answer is relevant to their task and context. Such navigational cues could be in the form of essential sentences that help the searcher decide whether they want to read the answer or skip over it. In this paper, we compare four potential approaches for identifying essential sentences. We adopt two existing approaches and develop two new approaches based on the idea that contextual information …

Mcdpc: Multi‐Center Density Peak Clustering, Yizhang Wang, Di Wang, Xiaofeng Zhang, Wei Pang, Chunyan Miao, Ah-Hwee Tan, You Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Density peak clustering (DPC) is a recently developed density-based clustering algorithm that achieves competitive performance in a non-iterative manner. DPC is capable of effectively handling clusters with single density peak (single center), i.e., based on DPC’s hypothesis, one and only one data point is chosen as the center of any cluster. However, DPC may fail to identify clusters with multiple density peaks (multi-centers) and may not be able to identify natural clusters whose centers have relatively lower local density. To address these limitations, we propose a novel clustering algorithm based on a hierarchical approach, named multi-center density peak clustering (McDPC). …

Ausearch: Accurate Api Usage Search In Github Repositories With Type Resolution, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, developers use APIs to implement their applications. To know how to use an API, developers may search for code examples that use the API in repositories such as GitHub. Although code search engines have been developed to help developers perform such search, these engines typically only accept a query containing the description of the task that needs to be implemented or the names of the APIs that the developer wants to use without the capability for the developer to specify particular search constraints, such as the class and parameter types that the relevant API should take. These engines are …

Automated Deprecated-Api Usage Update For Android Apps: How Far Are We?, Ferdian Thung, Stefanus Agus Haryono, Lucas Serrano, Gilles Muller, Julia Lawall, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the Android API evolves, some API methods may be deprecated, to be eventually removed. App developers face the challenge of keeping their apps up-to-date, to ensure that the apps work in both older and newer Android versions. Currently, AppEvolve is the state-of-the-art approach to automate such updates, and it has been shown to be quite effective. Still, the number of experiments reported is moderate, involving only API usage updates in 41 usage locations. In this work, we replicate the evaluation of AppEvolve and assess whether its effectiveness is generalizable. Given the set of APIs on which AppEvolve has been …

Distinguishing Similar Design Pattern Instances Through Temporal Behavior Analysis, Renhao Xiong, David Lo, Bixin Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Design patterns (DPs) encapsulate valuable design knowledge of object-oriented systems. Detecting DP instances helps to reveal the underlying rationale, thus facilitates the maintenance of legacy code. Resulting from the internal similarity of DPs, implementation variants, and missing roles, approaches based on static analysis are unable to well identify structurally similar instances. Existing approaches further employ dynamic techniques to test the runtime behaviors of candidate instances. Automatically verifying the runtime behaviors of DP instances is a challenging task in multiple aspects. This paper presents an approach to improve the verification process of existing approaches. To exercise the runtime behaviors of DP …

Are The Code Snippets What We Are Searching For? A Benchmark And An Empirical Study On Code Search With Natural-Language Queries, Shuhan Yan, Hang Yu, Yuting Chen, Beijun Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code search methods, especially those that allow programmers to raise queries in a natural language, plays an important role in software development. It helps to improve programmers' productivity by returning sample code snippets from the Internet and/or source-code repositories for their natural-language queries. Meanwhile, there are many code search methods in the literature that support natural-language queries. Difficulties exist in recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of each method and choosing the right one for different usage scenarios, because (1) the implementations of those methods and the datasets for evaluating them are usually not publicly available, and (2) some methods leverage …

Saga: Efficient And Large-Scale Detection Of Near-Miss Clones With Gpu Acceleration, Guanhua Li, Yijian Wu, Chanchal K. Roy, Jun Sun, Xin Peng, Nanjie Zhan, Bin Hu, Jingyi Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Clone detection on large code repository is necessary for many big code analysis tasks. The goal is to provide rich information on identical and similar code across projects. Detecting near-miss code clones on big code is challenging since it requires intensive computing and memory resources as the scale of the source code increases. In this work, we propose SAGA, an efficient suffix-array based code clone detection tool designed with sophisticated GPU optimization. SAGA not only detects Type-l and Type-2 clones but also does so for cross-project large repositories and for the most computationally expensive Type-3 clones. Meanwhile, it also works …

Designing Fractal Line Pied-De-Poules: A Case Study In Algorithmic Design Mediating Between Culture And Fractal Mathematics, Loe M.G. Feijs

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Millions of people own and wear pied-de-poule (houndstooth) garments. The pattern has an intriguing basic figure and a typical set of symmetries. The origin of the pattern lies in a specific type of weaving. In this article I apply computational techniques to modernize this ancient decorative pattern. In particular I describe a way to enrich pied-de-poule with a fractal structure.

Although a first fractal line pied-de-poule was shown at Bridges 2015, a number of fundamental questions still remained. The following questions are addressed in this article: Does the original pied-de-poule appear as a limit case when the fractal structure is …

Learning-Guided Network Fuzzing For Testing Cyber-Physical System Defences, Yuqi Chen, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun, Sridhar Adepu, Fan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The threat of attack faced by cyber-physical systems (CPSs), especially when they play a critical role in automating public infrastructure, has motivated research into a wide variety of attack defence mechanisms. Assessing their effectiveness is challenging, however, as realistic sets of attacks to test them against are not always available. In this paper, we propose smart fuzzing, an automated, machine learning guided technique for systematically finding 'test suites' of CPS network attacks, without requiring any knowledge of the system's control programs or physical processes. Our approach uses predictive machine learning models and metaheuristic search algorithms to guide the fuzzing of …

Migrating From Monoliths To Cloud-Based Microservices: A Banking Industry Example, Alan Megargel, Venky Shankararaman, David K. Walker

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As more organizations are placing cloud computing at the heart of their digital transformation strategy, it is important that they adopt appropriate architectures and development methodologies to leverage the full benefits of the cloud. A mere “lift and move” approach, where traditional monolith applications are moved to the cloud will not support the demands of digital services. While, monolithic applications may be easier to develop and control, they are inflexible to change and lack the scalability needed for cloud environments. Microservices architecture, which adopts some of the concepts and principles from service-oriented architecture, provides a number of benefits when developing …

Certification-Driven Testing Of Safety-Critical Systems, Aiman S. Gannous

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Safety-critical systems are those systems that when they fail they could cause loss of life or significant physical damages. Since software now is an essential component of these types of systems, failures caused by software faults could come from flaws in the software development life-cycle. As a result, challenges unfold in two directions. First, in verifying that the software will not put the system in an unsafe state, and identifying external failures and mitigate them properly. Second, in providing sufficient evidence for an efficient safety certification process. In this study, we propose an approach for testing safety-critical systems called Model-Combinatorial …

Can Trait Emotional Intelligence Variables Of Well-Being, Self-Control, Emotionality, And Sociability Individually Or Collectively Predict A Software Development Engineer's Creativity?, Mwoyondishe Jonathan Mvududu

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

This quantitative research study was carried out as a partial requirement for earning a Doctor of Business Administration degree from George Fox University. The main goal of the research study was to investigate whether trait emotional intelligence variables of well-being, self-control, emotionality, and sociability can individually or collectively predict a software development engineer’s creativity or creativeness potential. Employee innovativeness is the primary focus of many organizations in today’s turbulent business environment whereby employees are increasingly gaining autonomy in self-managed teams. The study discusses the theoretical frameworks of creativity and trait emotional intelligence (Trait EI), an extension of the emotional intelligence …

Renewable Energy Integration In Distribution System With Artificial Intelligence, Yi Gu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing attention of renewable energy development in distribution power system, artificial intelligence (AI) can play an indispensiable role. In this thesis, a series of artificial intelligence based methods are studied and implemented to further enhance the performance of power system operation and control.

Due to the large volume of heterogeneous data provided by both the customer and the grid side, a big data visualization platform is built to feature out the hidden useful knowledge for smart grid (SG) operation, control and situation awareness. An open source cluster calculation framework with Apache Spark is used to discover big data …

Edge-Cloud Computing For Iot Data Analytics: Embedding Intelligence In The Edge With Deep Learning, Ananda Mohon M. Ghosh, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Rapid growth in numbers of connected devices including sensors, mobile, wearable, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is creating an explosion of data that are moving across the network. To carry out machine learning (ML), IoT data are typically transferred to the cloud or another centralized system for storage and processing; however, this causes latencies and increases network traffic. Edge computing has the potential to remedy those issues by moving computation closer to the network edge and data sources. On the other hand, edge computing is limited in terms of computational power and thus is not well suited for …

The Unpopularity Of The Software Tester Role Among Software Practitioners: A Case Study, Yadira Lizama, Daniel Varona, Pradeep Waychal, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

As software systems are becoming more pervasive, they are also becoming more susceptible to failures, resulting in potentially lethal combinations. Software testing is critical to preventing software failures but is, arguably, the least understood part of the software life cycle and the toughest to perform correctly. Adequate research has been carried out in both the process and technology dimensions of testing, but not in the human dimensions. This work attempts to fill in the gap by exploring the human dimension, i.e., trying to understand the motivation/de-motivation of software practitioners to take up and sustain testing careers. One hundred and forty …

Recommender System Projects, T. Marlowe, G. Chang

Petersheim Academic Exposition

No abstract provided.

Development Of Machine Learning Tutorials For R, John Pintar

All Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Machine learning (ML) techniques developed in computer science have revolutionized nearly every sector of industry. Despite the prevalence and usefulness of ML, students outside of computer science rarely receive training in ML. Students frequently receive training in statistical analysis, often using the software package R, which is free, open source, and has additional downloadable modules. A popular module is the ML package caret, which contains 238 different ML algorithms, each with 0-9 hyperparameters. caret is powerful, flexible, and provides consistent syntax across algorithms. In the hands of an experienced practitioner, this tunability is welcomed and can increase accuracy. However, when …

Safe Automated Refactoring For Intelligent Parallelization Of Java 8 Streams, Raffi Khatchadourian, Yiming Tang, Mehdi Bagherzadeh

Publications and Research

Streaming APIs are becoming more pervasive in mainstream Object-Oriented programming languages and platforms. For example, the Stream API introduced in Java 8 allows for functional-like, MapReduce-style operations in processing both finite, e.g., collections, and infinite data structures. However, using this API efficiently involves subtle considerations such as determining when it is best for stream operations to run in parallel, when running operations in parallel can be less efficient, and when it is safe to run in parallel due to possible lambda expression side-effects. ics-preserving fashion. The approach, based on a novel data ordering and typestate analysis, consists of preconditions and …

Building Something With The Raspberry Pi, Richard Kordel

Harrisburg University Presidential Research Grants

In 2017 Ryan Korn and I submitted a grant proposal in the annual Harrisburg University President’s Grant process. Our proposal was to partner with a local high school to install a classroom of 20 Raspberry Pi’s, along with the requisite peripherals. In that classroom students would be challenged to design something that combined programming with physical computing. In our presentation to the school we suggested that this project would give students the opportunity to be “amazing.”

As part of the grant, the top three students would be given scholarships to HU and the top five finalists would all be permitted …

Emoco: Visual Analysis Of Emotion Coherence In Presentation Videos, Haipeng Zeng, Xingbo Wang, Aoyu Wu, Yong Wang, Quan Li, Alex Endert, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Emotions play a key role in human communication and public presentations. Human emotions are usually expressed through multiple modalities. Therefore, exploring multimodal emotions and their coherence is of great value for understanding emotional expressions in presentations and improving presentation skills. However, manually watching and studying presentation videos is often tedious and time-consuming. There is a lack of tool support to help conduct an efficient and in-depth multi-level analysis. Thus, in this paper, we introduce EmoCo, an interactive visual analytics system to facilitate efficient analysis of emotion coherence across facial, text, and audio modalities in presentation videos. Our visualization system features …