In recent years, increased attention is being given to software quality assurance and protection. With considerable verification and protection schemes proposed and deployed, today’s software unfortunately still fails to be protected from cyberattacks, especially in the presence of insecure organization of heap metadata. In this paper, we aim to explore whether heap metadata could be corrupted and

The majority of older people wish to live independently at home as long as possible despite having a range of age-related conditions including cognitive impairment. To facilitate this, there has been an extensive focus on exploring the capability of new technologies with limited success. This paper investigates whether MS Kinect (a motion-based sensing 3-D scanner device) within the MiiHome (My Intelligent

This paper addresses a task in Interactive Task Learning (Laird et al. IEEE Intell Syst 32:6–21, 2017). The agent must learn to build towers which are constrained by rules, and whenever the agent performs an action which violates a rule the teacher provides verbal corrective feedback: e.g. “No, red blocks should be on blue blocks”. The agent must learn to build rule compliant towers from these corrections

There exist many variants of guarding an orthogonal polygon in an orthogonal fashion: sometimes a guard can see within a rectangle, along a staircase, or along an orthogonal path with at most k bends. In this paper, we study all these guarding models for the special case of orthogonal polygons that have bounded treewidth in some sense. As our main result, we show that the problem of finding the minimum

Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers as a popular way to seek programming-related information from peers via the internet. The Stack Overflow community recommends users to provide the related code snippet when they are creating a question to help others better understand it and offer their help. Previous studies have shown that a significant number of these questions are of low-quality

Smart contracts are automated or self-enforcing contracts that can be used to exchange assets without having to place trust in third parties. Many commercial transactions use smart contracts due to their potential benefits in terms of secure peer-to-peer transactions independent of external parties. Experience shows that many commonly used smart contracts are vulnerable to serious malicious attacks

Raw lines of code (LOC) is a metric that does not, at first glance, seem extremely useful for automated test generation. It is both highly language-dependent and not extremely meaningful, semantically, within a language: one coder can produce the same effect with many fewer lines than another. However, relative LOC, between components of the same project, turns out to be a highly useful metric for

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing their findings, we present a large-scale study quantitatively and qualitatively investigating why developers perform refactoring in open source projects. First, we

Learning representation for source code is a foundation of many program analysis tasks. In recent years, neural networks have already shown success in this area, but most existing models did not make full use of the unique structural information of programs. Although abstract syntax tree (AST)-based neural models can handle the tree structure in the source code, they cannot capture the richness of

Many applications in emerging scenarios, such as autonomous vehicles, intelligent robots, and industrial automation, are safety-critical with strict timing requirements. However, the development of real-time systems is error prone and highly dependent on sophisticated domain expertise, making it a costly process. This article utilises the principles of model-driven engineering (MDE) and proposes two

Wireless communication standards such as Long-term Evolution (LTE) are rapidly changing to support the high data-rate of wireless devices. The physical layer baseband processing has strict real-time deadlines, especially in the next-generation applications enabled by the 5G standard. Existing basestation transceivers utilize customized DSP cores or fixed-function hardware accelerators for physical

The problem of estimating a tight and safe Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET), needed for certification in safety-critical environment, is a challenging problem for modern embedded systems. A possible solution proposed in past years is to exploit statistical tools to obtain a probability distribution of the WCET. These probabilistic real-time analyses for WCET are, however, subject to errors, even when

Critical real-time systems require strict resource provisioning in terms of memory and timing. The constant need for higher performance in these systems has led industry to recently include GPUs. However, GPU software ecosystems are by their nature closed source, forcing system engineers to consider them as black boxes, complicating resource provisioning. In this work, we reverse engineer the internal

In recent years, the next-generation non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies have emerged with DRAM-like byte addressability and disk-like durability. Computer architects have proposed to use them to build persistent memory that blurs the conventional boundary between volatile memory and non-volatile storage. However, ARM processors, ones that are widely used in embedded computing systems, start providing

This article addresses the challenges of memory safety in life-critical medical devices. Since the last decade, healthcare manufacturers have embraced the Internet of Things, pushing technological innovations to increase market share. Medical devices, including the most critical ones, tend to be increasingly connected to the Internet. Unfortunately, as critical devices often rely on unsafe programming

Detection of malicious programs using hardware-based features has gained prominence recently. The tamper-resistant hardware metrics prove to be a better security feature than the high-level software metrics, which can be easily obfuscated. Hardware Performance Counters (HPC), which are inbuilt in most of the recent processors, are often the choice of researchers amongst hardware metrics. However, a

There is a growing number of application domains ranging from multimedia to machine learning where a certain level of inexactness can be tolerated. For these applications, approximate computing is an effective technique that trades off some loss in output data integrity for energy and/or performance gains. In this article, we present the approximate cache, which approximates similar values and saves

This research addresses the cockpit crew rostering problem in a low-cost airline. Through interviews with the aircrew planner, four objectives are considered vital for effective roster preparation; minimisation of nautical mile cost, balance workload among cockpit crews, maximisation of preferential requests from senior pilots and minimisation of the number of repeated flight patterns flown by individual

Context: Generally, there are more non-defective instances than defective instances in the datasets used for software defect prediction (SDP), which is referred to as the class imbalance problem. Oversampling techniques are frequently adopted to alleviate the problem by generating new synthetic defective instances. Existing techniques generate either near-duplicated instances which result in overgeneralization

Context: In search-based software engineering we often use popular heuristics with default configurations, which typically lead to suboptimal results, or we perform experiments to identify configurations on a trial-and-error basis, which may lead to better results for a specific problem. We consider the problem of generating test suites for mobile applications (apps) and rely on Sapienz, a state-of-the-art

Context: There is a growing demand for information on how IT companies look for candidates to their open positions. Objective: This paper investigates which hard and soft skills are more required in IT companies by analyzing the description of 20,000 job opportunities. Method: We applied open card sorting to perform a high-level analysis on which types of hard skills are more requested. Further, we

Context: In integration testing, the order in which classes are integrated and tested is significant for the construction of test stubs. With the existing approaches, it is usually difficult to generate the sub-optimal test orders for real applications, which have large numbers of classes. Objective: There exist moderately large numbers of classes in software systems, which is one of the main factors

Context: The prevalent application of Deep Learning (DL) models has raised concerns about their reliability. Due to the data-driven programming paradigm, the quality of test datasets is extremely important to gain accurate assessment of DL models. Recently, researchers have introduced mutation testing into DL testing, which applies mutation operators to generate mutants from DL models, and observes

Recurrent or non-recurrent temperature and humidity variations trigger various damages on the inside and outside surfaces of buildings, which eventually leads to poor insulation, additional energy consumption, and expensive repairing plan. Formal thermal inspection by professionals are expensive, often inconclusive and inconvenient for continuous or frequent monitoring. Thermal condition monitoring

Complex storage stacks providing data compression, indexing, and analytics help leverage the massive amounts of data generated today to derive insights. It is challenging to perform this computation, however, while fully utilizing the underlying storage media. This is because, while storage servers with large core counts are widely available, single-core performance and memory bandwidth per core grow

While the computing power of mobile devices has been quickly evolving in recent years, the growth of mobile storage capacity is, however, relatively slower. A common problem shared by budget-phone users is that they frequently run out of storage space. This article conducts a deep inspection of file usage of mobile applications and their potential implications on user experience. Our major findings

Erasure codes are being extensively deployed in practical storage systems to prevent data loss with low redundancy. However, these codes require excessive disk I/Os and network traffic for recovering unavailable data. Among all erasure codes, Minimum Storage Regenerating (MSR) codes can achieve optimal repair bandwidth under the minimum storage during recovery, but some open issues remain to be addressed

Hyperspectral imaging has become a significant source of valuable data for astronomers over the past decades. Current instrumental and observing time constraints allow direct acquisition of multispectral images, with high spatial but low spectral resolution, and hyperspectral images, with low spatial but high spectral resolution. To enhance scientific interpretation of the data, we propose a data fusion

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have a strong floating-point capability and a high memory bandwidth in data parallelism and have been widely used in high-performance computing (HPC). Compute unified device architecture (CUDA) is used as a parallel computing platform and programming model for the GPU to reduce the complexity of programming. The programmable GPUs are becoming popular in computational

The aim of this study is to analyse whether motivation, Internet attitudes, Internet skills, social support resources, and disability status impact users’ online engagement levels by examining the Internet activity of smartphone users based on certain variables and disability status. The study also reports on the effects of these independent variables according to disability status. Secondary data

In this work we present a novel computational method for embedding arbitrary curved one-dimensional (1D) fibers into three-dimensional (3D) solid volumes, as e.g. in fiber-reinforced materials. The fibers are explicitly modeled with highly efficient 1D geometrically exact beam finite elements, based on various types of geometrically nonlinear beam theories. The surrounding solid volume is modeled with

The identification of safe faults (i.e., faults which are guaranteed not to produce any failure) in an electronic system is a crucial step when analyzing its dependability and its test plan development. Unfortunately, safe fault identification is poorly supported by available EDA tools, and thus remains an open problem. The complexity growth of modern systems used in safety-critical applications further

Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM) is a promising alternative to SRAM in on-chip caches due to several advantages. These advantages include non-volatility, low leakage, high integration density, and CMOS compatibility. Prior studies have shown that relaxing and adapting the STTRAM retention time to runtime application needs can substantially reduce overall cache energy without significant latency overheads

C/C++/OpenCL-based high-level synthesis (HLS) becomes more and more popular for field-programmable gate array (FPGA) accelerators in many application domains in recent years, thanks to its competitive quality of result (QoR) and short development cycle compared with the traditional register-transfer level (RTL) design approach. Yet, limited by the sequential C semantics, it remains challenging to adopt

A novel approach is presented to describe the dynamic interaction system of a large-diameter floating pipe pile and surrounding soils, taking the three-dimensional wave effects into account. The corresponding analytical solutions for longitudinal complex impedance are obtained and subsequently validated via comparisons with existing solutions. Comparative analyses are also performed to illustrate the

The Container Drayage Problem (CDP) aims at routing a fleet of trucks, based at a common terminal, to serve customers while minimizing the total travel distance. Each trip starts from and ends at the terminal, and handles a subset of customers. Each customer requires either that a container is picked up or delivered. We introduce a more realistic variant, i.e., the Multi-trip Multi-period CDP with

With the rapid development of e-commerce and the new retail, the same-day or even same-half day delivery service is provided to compete for market share. Recently, an increased number of e-commerce companies implement the unmanned smart warehouses to improve the logistics efficiency. In order to further reduce the demand response time, a novel picking strategy is designed to firstly split the orders

Identifying key quality characteristics (QCs) in production processes is essential for product quality control and improvement. This paper proposes a multiobjective wrapper-based feature selection (FS) method for key QC (KQC) identification on unbalanced production data using a novel modified nondominated-sorting-based whale optimization algorithm (MNSWOA) and the ideal point method (IPM). In the proposed

The rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic has affected many people worldwide. Due to the high infectivity, countries make calls to stay at home or take measures such as lockdowns to ensure that people are least affected by the virus. Meanwhile, infected people are getting treatments: people who are slightly affected are quarantined at home, and those who are heavily affected are treated in hospitals

Capturing mutation patterns of each individual influenza virus sequence is often challenging; in this paper, we demonstrated that using a binary encoding scheme coupled with dimension reduction technique, we were able to capture the intrinsic mutation pattern of the virus. Our approach looks at the variance between sequences instead of the commonly used p-distance or Hamming distance. We first convert

The QR factorization is one of the most important operations in dense linear algebra, offering a numerically stable method for solving linear systems of equations including overdetermined and underdetermined systems. Modern implementations of the QR factorization, such as the one in the LAPACK library, suffer from performance limitations due to the use of matrix–vector type operations in the phase

High-throughput sequencing (CHIP-Seq) data exhibit binding events with possible binding locations and their strengths, followed by interpretation of the locations of peaks. Recent methods tend to summarize all CHIP-Seq peaks detected within a limited up and down region of each gene into one real-valued score in order to quantify the probability of regulation in a region. Applying subspace clustering

In high-performance computing on distributed-memory systems, communication often represents a significant part of the overall execution time. The relative cost of communication will certainly continue to rise as compute-density growth follows the current technology and industry trends. Design of lower-communication alternatives to fundamental computational algorithms has become an important field of

Tackling computationally challenging problems with high efficiency often requires the combination of algorithmic innovation, advanced architecture, and thorough exploitation of parallelism. We demonstrate this synergy through synthetic aperture radar (SAR) via backprojection, an image reconstruction method that can require hundreds of TFLOPS. Computation cost is significantly reduced by our new algorithm

Text analysis tools are nowadays required to process increasingly large corpora which are often organized as small files (abstracts, news articles, etc.). Cloud computing offers a convenient, on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing environment for solving such problems. We investigate provisioning on the Amazon EC2 cloud from the user perspective, attempting to provide a scheduling strategy that is both

The development of grid and workflow technologies has enabled complex, loosely coupled scientific applications to be executed on distributed resources. Many of these applications consist of large numbers of short-duration tasks whose runtimes are heavily influenced by delays in the execution environment. Such applications often perform poorly on the grid because of the large scheduling overheads commonly

Scientific computing has entered a new era of scale and sharing with the arrival of cyberinfrastructure facilities for computational experimentation. A key emerging concept is scientific workflows, which provide a declarative representation of complex scientific applications that can be automatically managed and executed in distributed shared resources. In the coming decades, computational experimentation

With the recent advent of new heterogeneous computing architectures there is still a lack of parallel problem solving environments that can help scientists to use easily and efficiently hybrid supercomputers. Many scientific simulations that use structured grids to solve partial differential equations in fact rely on stencil computations. Stencil computations have become crucial in solving many challenging

The Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model of Unified Parallel C (UPC) can help users express and manage application data locality on non-uniform memory access (NUMA) multi-core shared-memory systems to get good performance. First, we describe several UPC program optimization techniques that are important to achieving good performance on NUMA multi-core computers with examples and quantitative

Node level heterogeneous architectures have become attractive during the last decade for several reasons: compared to traditional symmetric CPUs, they offer high peak performance and are energy and/or cost efficient. With the increase of fine-grained parallelism in high-performance computing, as well as the introduction of parallelism in workstations, there is an acute need for a good overview and

We present a parallel implementation of an algorithm for calculating the two-point angular correlation function as applied in the field of computational cosmology. The algorithm has been specifically developed for a reconfigurable computer. Our implementation utilizes a microprocessor and two reconfigurable processors on a dual-MAP SRC-6 system. The two reconfigurable processors are used as two application-specific

The technical papers program for SC13 received 449 submissions of which 90 where selected for the program giving an acceptance rate of 20%. A rigorous peer review process, including author rebuttals and a 1.5 day face-to-face program committee meeting ensured that selected papers were the very best in our field. One of the tasks at the face-to-face meeting was also to select finalists for the best

In the area of network performance and discovery, network tomography focuses on reconstructing network properties using only end-to-end measurements at the application layer. One challenging problem in network tomography is reconstructing available bandwidth along all links during multiple source/multiple destination transmissions. The traditional measurement procedures used for bandwidth tomography

The Computational Fluid Dynamics code OVERFLOW includes as one of its solver options an algorithm which is a fairly small piece of code but which accounts for a significant portion of the total computational time. This paper studies some of the issues in accelerating this piece of code by using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The algorithm needs to be modified to be suitable for a GPU and attention

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This paper describes and evaluates a scalable and efficient resilience scheme based on the concept of containment domains. Containment domains are a programming construct that enable applications to express resilience needs and to interact with the system to tune and specialize error detection, state preservation and restoration, and recovery schemes. Containment domains have weak transactional semantics

High performance computing (HPC) systems use checkpoint-restart to tolerate failures. Typically, applications store their states in checkpoints on a parallel file system (PFS). As applications scale up, checkpoint-restart incurs high overheads due to contention for PFS resources. The high overheads force large-scale applications to reduce checkpoint frequency, which means more compute time is lost

The safety of dikes in The Netherlands, located in the delta of the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt, has been the subject of debate for more than ten years. The safety (or flood risk) of a particular area may depend on the safety of other areas. This is referred to as effects of river system behaviour on flood risk (quantified as the estimated number of casualties and economic damage). A computational

An approach for incorporating embedded simulation and analysis capabilities in complex simulation codes through template-based generic programming is presented. This approach relies on templating and operator overloading within the C++ language to transform a given calculation into one that can compute a variety of additional quantities that are necessary for many state-of-the-art simulation and analysis