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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Deep Learning For Hate Speech Detection: A Comparative Study, Jitendra Singh Malik, Guansong Pang, Anton Van Den Hengel Feb 2022

Deep Learning For Hate Speech Detection: A Comparative Study, Jitendra Singh Malik, Guansong Pang, Anton Van Den Hengel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated hate speech detection is an important tool in combating the spread of hate speech, particularly in social media. Numerous methods have been developed for the task, including a recent proliferation of deep-learning based approaches. A variety of datasets have also been developed, exemplifying various manifestations of the hate-speech detection problem. We present here a largescale empirical comparison of deep and shallow hate-speech detection methods, mediated through the three most commonly used datasets. Our goal is to illuminate progress in the area, and identify strengths and weaknesses in the current state-of-the-art. We particularly focus our analysis on measures of practical …


New-Media Advertising And Retail Platform Openness, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo Feb 2022

New-Media Advertising And Retail Platform Openness, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We recently have witnessed two important trends in online retailing: the advent of new media (e.g., social media and search engines) makes advertising affordable for small sellers, and large online retailers (e.g., Amazon and JD.com) opening their platforms to allow even direct competitors to sell on their platforms. We examine how new-media advertising affects retail platform openness. We develop a game-theoretic model in which a leading retailer, who has both valuation and awareness advantages, and a third-party seller, who sells an identical product, engage in price competition. We find that the availability of relatively low-cost advertising through new media plays …


Automated Reverse Engineering Of Role-Based Access Control Policies Of Web Applications, Ha Thanh Le, Lwin Khin Shar, Domenico Bianculli, Lionel C. Briand, Cu Duy Nguyen Feb 2022

Automated Reverse Engineering Of Role-Based Access Control Policies Of Web Applications, Ha Thanh Le, Lwin Khin Shar, Domenico Bianculli, Lionel C. Briand, Cu Duy Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Access control (AC) is an important security mechanism used in software systems to restrict access to sensitive resources. Therefore, it is essential to validate the correctness of AC implementations with respect to policy specifications or intended access rights. However, in practice, AC policy specifications are often missing or poorly documented; in some cases, AC policies are hard-coded in business logic implementations. This leads to difficulties in validating the correctness of policy implementations and detecting AC defects.In this paper, we present a semi-automated framework for reverse-engineering of AC policies from Web applications. Our goal is to learn and recover role-based access …


Do Sequels Outperform Or Disappoint? Insights From An Analysis Of Amazon Echo Consumer Reviews, Kyong Jin Shim, Siaw Ling Lo, Su Yee Liew Jan 2022

Do Sequels Outperform Or Disappoint? Insights From An Analysis Of Amazon Echo Consumer Reviews, Kyong Jin Shim, Siaw Ling Lo, Su Yee Liew

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rapid technological advances in recent years drastically transformed our world. Amidst modern technological inventions such as smart phones, smart watches and smart home devices, consumers of electronic digital devices experience greatly improved automation, productivity, and efficiency in conducting routine daily tasks, information searching, shopping as well as finding entertainment. In the last few years, the global smart speaker market has undergone significant growth. As technology continues to advance and smart speakers are equipped with innovative features, the adoption of smart speakers will increase and so will consumer expectations. This research paper presents an aspect-specific sentiment analysis of consumer reviews of …


Towards An Instant Structure-Property Prediction Quality Control Tool For Additive Manufactured Steel Using A Crystal Plasticity Trained Deep Learning Surrogate, Yuhui Tu, Zhongzhou Liu, Luiz Carneiro, Caitriona M. Ryan, Andrew C. Parnell, Sean B. Leen Jan 2022

Towards An Instant Structure-Property Prediction Quality Control Tool For Additive Manufactured Steel Using A Crystal Plasticity Trained Deep Learning Surrogate, Yuhui Tu, Zhongzhou Liu, Luiz Carneiro, Caitriona M. Ryan, Andrew C. Parnell, Sean B. Leen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ability to conduct in-situ real-time process-structure-property checks has the potential to overcome process and material uncertainties, which are key obstacles to improved uptake of metal powder bed fusion in industry. Efforts are underway for live process monitoring such as thermal and image-based data gathering for every layer printed. Current crystal plasticity finite element (CPFE) modelling is capable of predicting the associated strength based on a microstructural image and material data but is computationally expensive. This work utilizes a large database of input–output samples from CPFE modelling to develop a trained deep neural network (DNN) model which instantly estimates the …


Predictive Models In Software Engineering: Challenges And Opportunities, Yanming Yang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Tingting Bi, John C. Grundy, Xiaohu Yang Jan 2022

Predictive Models In Software Engineering: Challenges And Opportunities, Yanming Yang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Tingting Bi, John C. Grundy, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Predictive models are one of the most important techniques that are widely applied in many areas of software engineering. There have been a large number of primary studies that apply predictive models and that present well-performed studies in various research domains, including software requirements, software design and development, testing and debugging, and software maintenance. This article is a first attempt to systematically organize knowledge in this area by surveying a body of 421 papers on predictive models published between 2009 and 2020. We describe the key models and approaches used, classify the different models, summarize the range of key application …


Orchestration Or Automation: Authentication Flaw Detection In Android Apps, Siqi Ma, Juanru Li, Surya Nepal, Diethelm Ostry, David Lo, Sanjay K. Jha, Robert H. Deng, Elisa Bertino Jan 2022

Orchestration Or Automation: Authentication Flaw Detection In Android Apps, Siqi Ma, Juanru Li, Surya Nepal, Diethelm Ostry, David Lo, Sanjay K. Jha, Robert H. Deng, Elisa Bertino

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Passwords are pervasively used to authenticate users' identities in mobile apps. To secure passwords against attacks, protection is applied to the password authentication protocol (PAP). The implementation of the protection scheme becomes an important factor in protecting PAP against attacks. We focus on two basic protection in Android, i.e., SSL/TLS-based PAP and timestamp-based PAP. Previously, we proposed an automated tool, GLACIATE, to detect authentication flaws. We were curious whether orchestration (i.e., involving manual-effort) works better than automation. To answer this question, we propose an orchestrated approach, AUTHEXPLOIT and compare its effectiveness GLACIATE. We study requirements for correct implementation of PAP …


Correlating Automated And Human Evaluation Of Code Documentation Generation Quality, Xing Hu, Qiuyuan Chen, Haoye Wang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Thomas Zimmermann Jan 2022

Correlating Automated And Human Evaluation Of Code Documentation Generation Quality, Xing Hu, Qiuyuan Chen, Haoye Wang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Thomas Zimmermann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic code documentation generation has been a crucial task in the field of software engineering. It not only relieves developers from writing code documentation but also helps them to understand programs better. Specifically, deep-learning-based techniques that leverage large-scale source code corpora have been widely used in code documentation generation. These works tend to use automatic metrics (such as BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE, CIDEr, and SPICE) to evaluate different models. These metrics compare generated documentation to reference texts by measuring the overlapping words. Unfortunately, there is no evidence demonstrating the correlation between these metrics and human judgment. We conduct experiments on two …


Toward Video-Conferencing Tools For Hands-On Activities In Online Teaching, Audrey Labrie, Terrance Mok, Anthony Tang, Michelle Lui, Lora Oehlberg, Lev Poretski Jan 2022

Toward Video-Conferencing Tools For Hands-On Activities In Online Teaching, Audrey Labrie, Terrance Mok, Anthony Tang, Michelle Lui, Lora Oehlberg, Lev Poretski

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many instructors in computing and HCI disciplines use hands-on activities for teaching and training new skills. Beyond simply teaching hands-on skills like sketching and programming, instructors also use these activities so students can acquire tacit skills. Yet, current video-conferencing technologies may not effectively support hands-on activities in online teaching contexts. To develop an understanding of the inadequacies of current video-conferencing technologies for hands-on activities, we conducted 15 interviews with university-level instructors who had quickly pivoted their use of hands-on activities to an online context during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on our analysis, we uncovered four pedagogical …


Partnering For Value Perfection And Business Sustainability In The Cloud Services Brokerage Market, Richard Shang, Robert John Kauffman Jan 2022

Partnering For Value Perfection And Business Sustainability In The Cloud Services Brokerage Market, Richard Shang, Robert John Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The cloud computing and services market has advanced in the past ten years. They now include most IT services from fundamental computing to cutting-edge AI capabilities. With the widespread adoption of cloud services, clients are facing the fact that they are utilizing cloud resources at a sub-optimal level. Cloud services brokers (CSBs) grew from the market to fill the needs for cloud resource management and risk mitigation. Based on analysis of the cloud market and the case of cloud services brokerage and related activities in North America, we offer theoretical analysis for how value creation works, its impacts on the …


An Exploratory Study On The Repeatedly Shared External Links On Stack Overflow, Jiakun Liu, Haoxiang Zhang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ying Zou, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li Jan 2022

An Exploratory Study On The Repeatedly Shared External Links On Stack Overflow, Jiakun Liu, Haoxiang Zhang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ying Zou, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On Stack Overflow, users reuse 11,926,354 external links to share the resources hosted outside the Stack Overflow website. The external links connect to the existing programming-related knowledge and extend the crowdsourced knowledge on Stack Overflow. Some of the external links, so-called as repeated external links, can be shared for multiple times. We observe that 82.5% of the link sharing activities (i.e., sharing links in any question, answer, or comment) on Stack Overflow share external resources, and 57.0% of the occurrences of the external links are sharing the repeated external links. However, it is still unclear what types of external resources …


Authenticated Data Redaction With Accountability And Transparency, Jinhua Ma, Xinyi Huang, Yi Mu, Robert H. Deng Jan 2022

Authenticated Data Redaction With Accountability And Transparency, Jinhua Ma, Xinyi Huang, Yi Mu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common practice in data redaction is removing sensitive information prior to data publication or release. In data-driven applications, one must be convinced that the redacted data is still trustworthy. Meanwhile, the data redactor must be held accountable for (malicious) redaction, which could change/hide the meaning of the original data. Motivated by these concerns, we present a novel solution for authenticated data redaction based on a new Redactable Signature Scheme with Implicit Accountability (RSS - IA). In the event of a dispute, not only the original data signer but also the redactor can generate an evidence tag to unequivocally identify …


Defining Smart Contract Defects On Ethereum, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy, Xiapu Luo, Ting Chen Jan 2022

Defining Smart Contract Defects On Ethereum, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy, Xiapu Luo, Ting Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are programs running on a blockchain. They are immutable to change, and hence can not be patched for bugs once deployed. Thus it is critical to ensure they are bug-free and well-designed before deployment. A Contract defect is an error, flaw or fault in a smart contract that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. The detection of contract defects is a method to avoid potential bugs and improve the design of existing code. Since smart contracts contain numerous distinctive features, such as the gas system. decentralized, it is important …


Perceptions And Needs Of Artificial Intelligence In Health Care To Increase Adoption: Scoping Review, Han Shi Jocelyn Chew, Palakorn Achananuparp Jan 2022

Perceptions And Needs Of Artificial Intelligence In Health Care To Increase Adoption: Scoping Review, Han Shi Jocelyn Chew, Palakorn Achananuparp

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health care service delivery. However, the perceptions and needs of such systems remain elusive, hindering efforts to promote AI adoption in health care. Objective: This study aims to provide an overview of the perceptions and needs of AI to increase its adoption in health care. Methods: A systematic scoping review was conducted according to the 5-stage framework by Arksey and O’Malley. Articles that described the perceptions and needs of AI in health care were searched across nine databases: ACM Library, CINAHL, Cochrane Central, Embase, IEEE Xplore, …


Enjoy Your Observability: An Industrial Survey Of Microservice Tracing And Analysis, Bowen Li, Xin Peng, Qilin Xiang, Hanzhang Wang, Tao Xie, Jun Sun, Xuanzhe Liu Jan 2022

Enjoy Your Observability: An Industrial Survey Of Microservice Tracing And Analysis, Bowen Li, Xin Peng, Qilin Xiang, Hanzhang Wang, Tao Xie, Jun Sun, Xuanzhe Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microservice systems are often deployed in complex cloud-based environments and may involve a large number of service instances being dynamically created and destroyed. It is thus essential to ensure observability to understand these microservice systems’ behaviors and troubleshoot their problems. As an important means to achieve the observability, distributed tracing and analysis is known to be challenging. While many companies have started implementing distributed tracing and analysis for microservice systems, it is not clear whether existing approaches fulfill the required observability. In this article, we present our industrial survey on microservice tracing and analysis through interviewing developers and operation engineers …


A Quantum Interpretation Of Separating Conjunction For Local Reasoning Of Quantum Programs Based On Separation Logic, Xuan Bach Le, Shang-Wei Lin, Jun Sun, David Sanan Jan 2022

A Quantum Interpretation Of Separating Conjunction For Local Reasoning Of Quantum Programs Based On Separation Logic, Xuan Bach Le, Shang-Wei Lin, Jun Sun, David Sanan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is well-known that quantum programs are not only complicated to design but also challenging to verify because the quantum states can have exponential size and require sophisticated mathematics to encode and manipulate. To tackle the state-space explosion problem for quantum reasoning, we propose a Hoare-style inference framework that supports local reasoning for quantum programs. By providing a quantum interpretation of the separating conjunction, we are able to infuse separation logic into our framework and apply local reasoning using a quantum frame rule that is similar to the classical frame rule. For evaluation, we apply our framework to verify various …


Approximate K-Nn Graph Construction: A Generic Online Approach, Wan-Lei Zhao, Hui Wang, Chong-Wah Ngo Jan 2022

Approximate K-Nn Graph Construction: A Generic Online Approach, Wan-Lei Zhao, Hui Wang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nearest neighbor search and k-nearest neighbor graph construction are two fundamental issues that arise from many disciplines such as multimedia information retrieval, data-mining, and machine learning. They become more and more imminent given the big data emerge in various fields in recent years. In this paper, a simple but effective solution both for approximate k-nearest neighbor search and approximate k-nearest neighbor graph construction is presented. These two issues are addressed jointly in our solution. On one hand, the approximate k-nearest neighbor graph construction is treated as a search task. Each sample along with its k-nearest neighbors is joined into the …


Learning From Web Recipe-Image Pairs For Food Recognition: Problem, Baselines And Performance, Bin Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wing-Kwong Chan Jan 2022

Learning From Web Recipe-Image Pairs For Food Recognition: Problem, Baselines And Performance, Bin Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wing-Kwong Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cross-modal recipe retrieval has recently been explored for food recognition and understanding. Text-rich recipe provides not only visual content information (e.g., ingredients, dish presentation) but also procedure of food preparation (cutting and cooking styles). The paired data is leveraged to train deep models to retrieve recipes for food images. Most recipes on the Web include sample pictures as the references. The paired multimedia data is not noise-free, due to errors such as pairing of images containing partially prepared dishes with recipes. The content of recipes and food images are not always consistent due to free-style writing and preparation of food …


Lightweight And Expressive Fine-Grained Access Control For Healthcare Internet-Of-Things, Shengmin Xu, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng, Yinghui Zhang, Xiangyang Luo, Ximeng Liu Jan 2022

Lightweight And Expressive Fine-Grained Access Control For Healthcare Internet-Of-Things, Shengmin Xu, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng, Yinghui Zhang, Xiangyang Luo, Ximeng Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Healthcare Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm that enables embedded devices to monitor patients vital signals and allows these data to be aggregated and outsourced to the cloud. The cloud enables authorized users to store and share data to enjoy on-demand services. Nevertheless, it also causes many security concerns because of the untrusted network environment, dishonest cloud service providers and resource-limited devices. To preserve patients' privacy, existing solutions usually apply cryptographic tools to offer access controls. However, fine-grained access control among authorized users is still a challenge, especially for lightweight and resource-limited end-devices. In this paper, we propose a novel …


A Blockchain-Based Self-Tallying Voting Protocol In Decentralized Iot, Yannan Li, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Yong Yu, Dongxi Liu, Xiaojiang Du, Mohsen Guizani Jan 2022

A Blockchain-Based Self-Tallying Voting Protocol In Decentralized Iot, Yannan Li, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Yong Yu, Dongxi Liu, Xiaojiang Du, Mohsen Guizani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing explosive growth and has gained extensive attention from academia and industry in recent years. However, most of the existing IoT infrastructures are centralized, which may cause the issues of unscalability and single-point-of-failure. Consequently, decentralized IoT has been proposed by taking advantage of the emerging technology called blockchain. Voting systems are widely adopted in IoT, for example a leader election in wireless sensor networks. Self-tallying voting systems are alternatives to unsuitable, traditional centralized voting systems in decentralized IoT. Unfortunately, self-tallying voting systems inherently suffer from fairness issues, such as adaptive and abortive issues caused …


Delta Debugging Microservice Systems With Parallel Optimization, Xiang Zhou, Xin Peng, Tao Xie, Jun Sun, Chao Ji, Wenha Li, Dan Ding Jan 2022

Delta Debugging Microservice Systems With Parallel Optimization, Xiang Zhou, Xin Peng, Tao Xie, Jun Sun, Chao Ji, Wenha Li, Dan Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microservice systems are complicated due to their runtime environments and service communications. Debugging a failure involves the deployment and manipulation of microservice systems on a containerized environment and faces unique challenges due to the high complexity and dynamism of microservices. To address these challenges, we propose a debugging approach for microservice systems based on the delta debugging algorithm, which is to minimize failure-inducing deltas of circumstances (e.g., deployment, environmental configurations). Our approach includes novel techniques for defining, deploying/manipulating, and executing deltas during delta debugging. In particular, to construct a (failing) circumstance space for delta debugging to minimize, our approach defines …


Cross-Modal Food Retrieval: Learning A Joint Embedding Of Food Images And Recipes With Semantic Consistency And Attention Mechanism, Hao Wang, Doyen Sahoo, Chenghao Liu, Ke Shu, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee-Peng Lim, Steven C. H. Hoi Jan 2022

Cross-Modal Food Retrieval: Learning A Joint Embedding Of Food Images And Recipes With Semantic Consistency And Attention Mechanism, Hao Wang, Doyen Sahoo, Chenghao Liu, Ke Shu, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee-Peng Lim, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food retrieval is an important task to perform analysis of food-related information, where we are interested in retrieving relevant information about the queried food item such as ingredients, cooking instructions, etc. In this paper, we investigate cross-modal retrieval between food images and cooking recipes. The goal is to learn an embedding of images and recipes in a common feature space, such that the corresponding image-recipe embeddings lie close to one another. Two major challenges in addressing this problem are 1) large intra-variance and small inter-variance across cross-modal food data; and 2) difficulties in obtaining discriminative recipe representations. To address these …


"More Than Deep Learning": Post-Processing For Api Sequence Recommendation, Chi Chen, Xin Peng, Bihuan Chen, Jun Sun, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Wang, Wenyun Zhao Jan 2022

"More Than Deep Learning": Post-Processing For Api Sequence Recommendation, Chi Chen, Xin Peng, Bihuan Chen, Jun Sun, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Wang, Wenyun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the daily development process, developers often need assistance in finding a sequence of APIs to accomplish their development tasks. Existing deep learning models, which have recently been developed for recommending one single API, can be adapted by using encoder-decoder models together with beam search to generate API sequence recommendations. However, the generated API sequence recommendations heavily rely on the probabilities of API suggestions at each decoding step, which do not take into account other domain-specific factors (e.g., whether an API suggestion satisfies the program syntax and how diverse the API sequence recommendations are). Moreover, it is difficult for developers …


Lessons Learnt Conducting Capture The Flag Cybersecurity Competition During Covid-19, Kee Hock Tan, Eng Lieh Ouh Jan 2022

Lessons Learnt Conducting Capture The Flag Cybersecurity Competition During Covid-19, Kee Hock Tan, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative practice full paper describes our experiences conducting cybersecurity capture the flag (CTF) competition for cybersecurity enthusiast participants (inclusive of both tertiary students and working professionals) local and abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning and appreciation of cybersecurity concepts for our participants with little to no technical background can be challenging. Gamification methods such as capture the flag competition style is a popular form of cybersecurity education to help participants overcome this challenge and identify talents. Participants get to apply theoretical concepts in a controlled environment, solve hands-on tasks in an informal, game-like setting and gain hands-on active learning …


Novel Secure Outsourcing Of Modular Inversion For Arbitrary And Variable Modulus, Chengliang Tian, Jia Yu, Hanlin Zhang, Haiyang Xue, Cong Wang, Kui Ren Jan 2022

Novel Secure Outsourcing Of Modular Inversion For Arbitrary And Variable Modulus, Chengliang Tian, Jia Yu, Hanlin Zhang, Haiyang Xue, Cong Wang, Kui Ren

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In cryptography and algorithmic number theory, modular inversion is viewed as one of the most common and time-consuming operations. It is hard to be directly accomplished on resource-constrained clients (e.g., mobile devices and IC cards) since modular inversion involves a great amount of operations on large numbers in practice. To address the above problem, this paper proposes a novel unimodular matrix transformation technique to realize secure outsourcing of modular inversion. This technique makes our algorithm achieve several amazing properties. First, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first secure outsourcing computation algorithm that supports arbitrary and variable modulus, …


Contextualized Knowledge-Aware Attentive Neural Network: Enhancing Answer Selection With Knowledge, Yang Deng, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li, Min Yang, Wai Lam, Ying Shen Jan 2022

Contextualized Knowledge-Aware Attentive Neural Network: Enhancing Answer Selection With Knowledge, Yang Deng, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li, Min Yang, Wai Lam, Ying Shen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Answer selection, which is involved in many natural language processing applications, such as dialog systems and question answering (QA), is an important yet challenging task in practice, since conventional methods typically suffer from the issues of ignoring diverse real-world background knowledge. In this article, we extensively investigate approaches to enhancing the answer selection model with external knowledge from knowledge graph (KG). First, we present a context-knowledge interaction learning framework, Knowledge-aware Neural Network, which learns the QA sentence representations by considering a tight interaction with the external knowledge from KG and the textual information. Then, we develop two kinds of knowledge-aware …


Contextual Documentation Referencing On Stack Overflow, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard Jan 2022

Contextual Documentation Referencing On Stack Overflow, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software engineering is knowledge-intensive and requires software developers to continually search for knowledge, often on community question answering platforms such as Stack Overflow. Such information sharing platforms do not exist in isolation, and part of the evidence that they exist in a broader software documentation ecosystem is the common presence of hyperlinks to other documentation resources found in forum posts. With the goal of helping to improve the information diffusion between Stack Overflow and other documentation resources, we conducted a study to answer the question of how and why documentation is referenced in Stack Overflow threads. We sampled and classified …


Just-In-Time Defect Identification And Localization: A Two-Phase Framework, Meng Yan, Xin Xia, Yuanrui Fan, Ahmed E. Hassan, David Lo, Shanping Li Jan 2022

Just-In-Time Defect Identification And Localization: A Two-Phase Framework, Meng Yan, Xin Xia, Yuanrui Fan, Ahmed E. Hassan, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Defect localization aims to locate buggy program elements (e.g., buggy files, methods or lines of code) based on defect symptoms, e.g., bug reports or program spectrum. However, when we receive the defect symptoms, the defect has been exposed and negative impacts have been introduced. Thus, one challenging task is: whether we can locate buggy program prior to appearance of the defect symptom at an early time (e.g., when buggy program elements are being checked-in). We refer to this type of defect localization as “Just-In-Time (JIT) Defect localization”. Although many prior studies have proposed various JIT defect identification methods to identify …


Just-In-Time Defect Prediction On Javascript Projects: A Replication Study, Chao Ni, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang, Ahmed E. Hassan Jan 2022

Just-In-Time Defect Prediction On Javascript Projects: A Replication Study, Chao Ni, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang, Ahmed E. Hassan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Change-level defect prediction is widely referred to as just-in-time (JIT) defect prediction since it identifies a defect-inducing change at the check-in time, and researchers have proposed many approaches based on the language-independent change-level features. These approaches can be divided into two types: supervised approaches and unsupervised approaches, and their effectiveness has been verified on Java or C++ projects. However, whether the language-independent change-level features can effectively identify the defects of JavaScript projects is still unknown. Additionally, many researches have confirmed that supervised approaches outperform unsupervised approaches on Java or C++ projects when considering inspection effort. However, whether supervised JIT defect …


Why Do Smart Contracts Self-Destruct? Investigating The Selfdestruct Function On Ethereum, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy Jan 2022

Why Do Smart Contracts Self-Destruct? Investigating The Selfdestruct Function On Ethereum, Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The selfdestruct function is provided by Ethereum smart contracts to destroy a contract on the blockchain system. However, it is a double-edged sword for developers. On the one hand, using the selfdestruct function enables developers to remove smart contracts (SCs) from Ethereum and transfers Ethers when emergency situations happen, e.g., being attacked. On the other hand, this function can increase the complexity for the development and open an attack vector for attackers. To better understand the reasons why SC developers include or exclude the selfdestruct function in their contracts, we conducted an online survey to collect feedback from them and …