
Tesla S Autopilot [Photo credit: Marco Verch, used under CC BY 2.0]
Tesla S Autopilot [Photo credit: Marco Verch, used under CC BY 2.0]
This week I gave a research seminar at Dalhousie University and at Mount Allison University on “Automating Software Development Using Artificial Intelligence (AI).” The intersection of AI and Software Engineering is an active research area and has lead to a number of effective and novel applications of machine learning, metaheuristic algorithms and deep learning. Many of these applications of AI to software development can be categorized as:
Not all Software Engineering research problems can be suitably addressed by AI techniques. A good first step to determine if a given software development problem can be addressed with AI is to see if it can be re-framed in terms of optimization, classification, prediction, etc. That is, can it be re-framed in terms of the type of problems that AI methods are effective at solving?
To find out more about the Software Quality Research Lab‘s work in this area please see the abstract and slides from my talk below. Continue reading
PhD student and SQR Lab member Michael Miljanovic was selected as a finalist in the 2017 Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition at UOIT. Michael’s 3MT talk discussed his PhD research into the use of adaptive serious games to improve Computer Science education. The goal of his research is to adapt games to an individual player in an effort to improve learning and engagement.
This semester I decided to try using Slack as an alternative communication channel in an upper-year university course that I teach. I’d already been using Slack in my research lab and I was familiar with the features and I thought it might translate well to the university class setting. The one disclaimer I would offer to anybody considering using Slack is to make sure that you use any technology to improve learning don’t just use technology for the sake of it.
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The Heartbleed bug is a recently identified bug in the OpenSSL security protocol toolkit. OpenSSL is widely used on web servers to encrypt user data.In general, software bugs are computer program error that cause the software to behave in an unexpected way (e.g., crash, produce a wrong output). Security bugs are a special kind of bug that can lead to a security vulnerability which allows the software system or the data stored in the system to be accessed in a way that was unintended.
Today I read an op-ed article in the New York Times titled “How To Get a Job at Google”.
The article cites an interview with Laszlo Bock, Google’s Senior VP of People Operations, and identifies the five hiring attributes that Google considers when evaluating potential job applicants: Continue reading
The following quote is one of my favorite quotes regarding the right way to conduct Software Engineering (SE) research. It summarizes the importance of utilizing empirical methods to inspire and guide the development of new SE tools and techniques:
“In all fields of SE, empirical methods should enable the development of scientific knowledge about how useful different SE technologies are, for different kinds of actors, performing different kinds of activities, on different kinds of systems. Such scientific knowledge should guide the development of new SE technology and be a major input to important SE decisions in industry and services.”
– Dag I. K. Sjoberg, Tore Dyba, Magne Jorgensen. The future of empirical methods in software engineering research. In Proc. of ICSE 2007, Future of Soft. Eng. (FOSE ’07), pages 358-378, 2007.
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Last week my MSc student, Kevin Jalbert, presented his early thesis results at the Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering (RAISE 2012). The workshop took place in Zurich Switzerland and was colocated with ICSE 2012. The title of the presentation (and the paper that appears in the proceedings) was “Predicting Mutation Score Using Source Code and Test Suite Metrics.” The paper was awarded the Best Paper Award at the workshop.
Mutation testing can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of test suites and can also be used as an oracle during the creation or improvement of test suites. Mutation testing works by creating many versions of a program each with a single syntactic fault. These program versions are created using mutation operators which are based on an existing fault taxonomy (i.e., a set of known fault types that we are trying to find during testing). One mutation operator, Relational Operator Replacement (ROR), could create a new mutant version of the program in which one of the instance of a relational operator (e.g., <) is replaced with a different operator. For example, line 3 of the following Java source code: Continue reading
With the increase in multicore processors there has been an increase in demand for concurrent programming and an increase in books and resources that focus on programming with concurrency. Below I will outline some of the books on my own bookshelf that have been useful.
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