Program Statements Research Articles

CGT-FL: using cooperative game theory to effective fault localization in presence of coincidental correctness

In this article we emphasize that most of the faults, appearing in real-world programs, are complicated and there exists a high interaction between faulty and other correlated statements, that is likely to cause coincidental correctness in many cases. To effectively diminish the negative impact of coincidentally correct tests on localization effectiveness, we suggest analyzing the combinatorial effect of program statements on the failure. To this end, we develop a new framework, CGT-FL, for evaluation and ranking program statements in a manner that statements which have strong discriminatory power as a group but are weak as individuals could be identified. The framework firstly evaluates the interactivity degree of each statement according to its influence on the intricate interrelation among statements by a Shapley value-based cooperative game-theoretic method. Then, statements are selected in a forward way by considering both interactivity and relevance measures. To verify the effectiveness of CGT-FL, we provide the results of our extensive experiments with different subject programs, containing seeded and real faults. The experimental results are then compared with those provided by different fault localization techniques for both single-fault and multiple-fault programs. The results prove the outperformance of CGT-FL compared to state-of-the-art techniques.

Communicating Complex STEM Program Evaluation to Diverse Stakeholders.

Visual representations, such as pathway models, are increasingly being used to both communicate higher education science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education program evaluation plans as well as accurately represent complex programs and the systems within which the educational programs reside. However, these representations can be overwhelming to audiences that are not familiar with the program’s structure or engaged in the evaluation process. The goal of this methods essay is to help both evaluators and discipline-based education researchers improve communication about program evaluation with a variety of stakeholders. We propose a three-stage method for developing progressively less complex visualizations to build affordances that help make the program evaluation process and statements of program impact more meaningful to a wider range of audiences. The creation of less complex visualizations can facilitate understanding by allowing a stakeholder to more easily “see” the structure of the program and thereby may evoke a greater willingness to take action and make meaningful programmatic changes based on strategic evaluation planning. To aid readers, we describe how we modified the Systems Evaluation Protocol (SEP) to develop simplified visualizations when evaluating a long-standing college science faculty development program, the Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching.

HMER: A Hybrid Mutation Execution Reduction approach for Mutation-based Fault Localization

Identifying the location of faults in programs has been recognized as one of the most manually and time cost activities during software debugging process. Fault localization techniques, which seek to identify faulty program statements as quickly as possible, can assist developers in alleviating the time and manual cost of software debugging. Mutation-based fault localization(MBFL) has a promising fault localization accuracy, but suffered from huge mutation execution cost. To reduce the cost of MBFL, we propose a Hybrid Mutation Execution Reduction(HMER) approach in this paper. HMER consists of two steps: Weighted Statement-Oriented Mutant Sampling(WSOME) and Dynamic Mutation Execution Strategy(DMES). In the first step, we employ Spectrum-Based Fault Localization(SBFL) techniques to calculate the suspiciousness value of statements, and guarantee that the mutants generated from statements with higher suspiciousness value will have more chance to be remained in the sampling process. Next, a dynamic mutation execution strategy is used to execute the reduced mutant set on test suite to avoid worthless execution. Empirical results on 130 versions from 9 subject programs show that HMER can reduce 74.5%-93.4% mutation execution cost while keeping almost the same fault localization accuracy with the original MBFL. A further Wilcoxonsigned−ranktest indicates that when employing HMER strategy in MBFL, the fault localization accuracy has no statistically significant difference in most cases compared with the original MBFL without any reduction techniques.

Extending Abstract Interpretation to Dependency Analysis of Database Applications

Dependency information (data- and/or control-dependencies) among program variables and program statements is playing crucial roles in a wide range of software-engineering activities, e.g., program slicing, information flow security analysis, debugging, code-optimization, code-reuse, code-understanding. Most existing dependency analyzers focus on mainstream languages and they do not support database applications embedding queries and data-manipulation commands. The first extension to the languages for relational database management systems, proposed by Willmor et al. in 2004, suffers from the lack of precision in the analysis primarily due to its syntax-based computation and flow insensitivity. Since then no significant contribution is found in this research direction. This paper extends the Abstract Interpretation framework for static dependency analysis of database applications, providing a semantics-based computation tunable with respect to precision. More specifically, we instantiate dependency computation by using various relational and non-relational abstract domains, yielding to a detailed comparative analysis with respect to precision and efficiency. Finally, we present a prototype $\sf{ semDDA}$ semDDA , a sem antics-based D atabase D ependency A nalyzer integrated with various abstract domains, and we present experimental evaluation results to establish the effectiveness of our approach. We show an improvement of the precision on an average of 6 percent in the interval, 11 percent in the octagon, 21 percent in the polyhedra and 7 percent in the powerset of intervals abstract domains, as compared to their syntax-based counterpart, for the chosen set of Java Server Page (JSP)-based open-source database-driven web applications as part of the GotoCode project.

“Tune in to the Affirmative”: The Family Channel and the Politics of Positive Programming

The Family Channel, which evolved out of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, created a new brand of family television and redefined the “family audience” in the 1990s. The channel capitalized on the vacuum produced by the major networks’ pursuit of advertiser-friendly demographics, and created a safe space for traditional family television viewing. By promoting “positivity” as its brand and relying on the nostalgic appeal of older television properties, the Family Channel became the first cable channel to build a “values-based” brand and audience. The Family Channel normalized an ideologically conservative model of commercial family television in an expanding cable landscape, and capitalized on social conservatives’ discontent with mainstream television content. This article analyzes the branding, programming, and public-facing statements of the channel’s executives to reveal how the Family Channel implicitly and explicitly connected this new “family audience” with the ideology and politics of social conservatism.

Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme Statement by Volker Türk

75th Meeting of the Standing Committee, Geneva, 18–20 June 2019 Agenda item 2: International Protection 18 June 2019 Mr. Chairperson, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, Thank you for the opportunity to provide an overall introduction to the more specific protection and solutions items of this Standing Committee. Since this is my last opportunity to speak before you in my current function, I would like to share some broader reflections on protection that are born out of my long-standing engagement with refugee, displacement and statelessness issues. First: it is about the primacy of the individual and communities. The compass in our work is bettering the life of the individual human being and of the communities they have formed and live in. This is what motivates us and helps us to navigate through troubled waters. This is especially the case when core humanitarian issues become politicised, as they do on occasion – for example, in the granting of asylum or envisaging refugee return. I have experienced this a lot over the years, and especially around return issues. Some see it as a logistics exercise; others as an indication that peace has returned [even when it has not]; and yet others don’t want to engage in return at all because it could be perceived as supporting a particular government or deprive them of a bargaining tool in on-going negotiations.

New legal realism

The subject of the study is one of the actively developing trends in Western legal thought over the past two decades, especially American, which is called "new legal realism" and positions itself both as a special variant of the "organizational paradigm of interdisciplinary research" and as a progressive empirical doctrine of law that overcomes the shortcomings of "traditional approaches to law".. The program of this direction is based on the idea of the possibility of effectively solving the problems of classical American legal realism by updating, first of all, the methodology of legal research. The study critically analyzes not only the content of the main ideas of the "new legal realists", but also an attempt to articulate the well-known developments of their predecessors, especially European ones, as a "new" direction in legal science. The methodology of the research is based on such methods of working with the ideas of foreign authors as the study of original texts, program statements (materials of conferences, symposiums and speeches), tracing the connection of past and modern teachings, analysis of involvement in the discussion of traditional issues and topics of legal issues. The conclusions of the essentially critical analysis of the content of the ideas of "new legal realism" are as follows: a narrowly focused behavioristic analysis of judicial activity with the pathos of the scale of the tasks being solved creates a paradox of the absence of a problem of law (even in the sense of classical realists) in the "new" legal doctrine; the methodology of "new realists" in the form of interdisciplinary practices and orientation to the analysis of "big arrays of data" is not something new, remaining within the framework of sociological approaches to law; manipulation of traditional legal issues leads to the reproduction and distortion of the ideas of predecessors.

Extracting symbolic transitions from TLA+ specifications

• We formalize the notion of assignments and assignment strategies. • We present an SMT encoding from which assignment strategies are extracted. • We define a sound decomposition of a TLA+ formula into symbolic transitions. • We implement the above as part of the APALACHE model checker. • We present experimental results using several state-of-the-art TLA+ specifications. In , a system specification is written as a logical formula that restricts the system behavior. As a logic, does not have assignments and other imperative statements that are used by model checkers to compute the successor states of a system state. Model checkers compute successors either explicitly — by evaluating program statements — or symbolically — by translating program statements to an SMT formula and checking its satisfiability. To efficiently enumerate the successors, TLA's model checker TLC introduces side effects. For instance, an equality x ′ = e is interpreted as an assignment of e to the yet unbound variable x . Inspired by TLC , we introduce an automatic technique for discovering expressions in formulas such as x ′ = e and x ′ ∈ { e 1 , … , e k } that can be provably used as assignments. In contrast to TLC , our technique does not explicitly evaluate expressions, but it reduces the problem of finding assignments to the satisfiability of an SMT formula. Hence, we give a way to slice a formula in symbolic transitions, which can be used as an input to a symbolic model checker. Our prototype implementation successfully extracts symbolic transitions from a few benchmarks.

Germany and the USSR in 1933–1939: from programme statement to tactical trick

Germany and the USSR in 1933–1939: from programme statement to tactical trick

A single fault localization technique based on failed test input

Abstract Testing and debugging are very important tasks in software development. Fault localization is a very critical activity in the debugging process and also is one of the most difficult and time-consuming activities. The demand for effective fault localization techniques that can aid developers to the location of faults is high. In this paper, a fault localization technique based on complex network theory named FLCN-S is proposed to improve localization effectiveness on single-fault subject programs. The proposed technique diagnoses and ranks faulty program statements based on their behavioral anomalies and distance between statements in failed tests execution by utilizing two network centrality measures (degree centrality and closeness centrality). The proposed technique is evaluated on a well-known standard benchmark (Siemens test suite) and four Unix real-life utility subject programs (gzip, sed, flex, and grep). Overall, the results show that FLCN-S is significantly more effective in locating faults in comparison with other techniques. Furthermore, we observed that both degree and closeness centrality play a vital role in the identification of faults.

Missing voices and possible dialogues: problems and possibilities for teacher education

ABSTRACTTeacher education exists today in a context of rapid globalization, which affects the systems in which future teachers will work, the governance of teachers’ work, the students teachers will be teaching, as well as the policies, programs, curricula and students in teacher education itself. Several ideas recently have gained traction internationally and are shaping the working landscape of teaching and teacher education in many countries. This essay critically examines the circulation of what appear to be a small set of ‘core’ ideas that are influencing national and institutional policies of teacher education. I explore the emergence of new players in teacher education internationally, including individuals, corporations, and international bodies. Using policy documents, influential research studies, university program statements, and interviews, the essay provides a discursive analysis of the contradictory voices in what is becoming a global conversation of teacher education. In many ways, these ideas marginalize the voices of teachers and teacher educators. They tend to narrow the definitions of education and teaching. As a counterpoint to these widely circulating arguments, I explore how reciprocal teacher education exchange programs in China and the US create opportunities for alternative constructions of visions of teaching and teacher learning.

Coding Style of C Program from the Perspective of Software Engineering

Coding style is an important factor in measuring the program quality. The paper explores on the C program coding style of the program annotation writing, data declaration, program statement writing, and input/output design style from the perspective of software engineering. Good coding style plays an important role in improving the readability, testability and maintainability of the program.

Inforence: effective fault localization based on information-theoretic analysis and statistical causal inference

In this paper, a novel approach, Inforence, is proposed to isolate the suspicious codes that likely contain faults. Inforence employs a feature selection method, based on mutual information, to identify those bug-related statements that may cause the program to fail. Because the majority of a program faults may be revealed as undesired joint effect of the program statements on each other and on program termination state, unlike the state-of-the-art methods, Inforence tries to identify and select groups of interdependent statements which altogether may affect the program failure. The interdependence amongst the statements is measured according to their mutual effect on each other and on the program termination state. To provide the context of failure, the selected bug-related statements are chained to each other, considering the program static structure. Eventually, the resultant cause-effect chains are ranked according to their combined causal effect on program failure. To validate Inforence, the results of our experiments with seven sets of programs include Siemens suite, gzip, grep, sed, space, make and bash are presented. The experimental results are then compared with those provided by different fault localization techniques for the both single-fault and multi-fault programs. The experimental results prove the outperformance of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.

Novel Code Plagiarism Detection Based on Abstract Syntax Tree and Fuzzy Petri Nets

Those students who major in computer science and/or engineering are required to design program codes in a variety of programming languages. However, many students submit their source codes they get from the Internet or friends with no or few modifications. Detecting the code plagiarisms done by students is very time-consuming and leads to the problems of unfair learning performance evaluation. This paper proposes a novel method to detect the source code plagiarisms by using a high-level fuzzy Petri net (HLFPN) based on abstract syntax tree (AST). First, the AST of each source code is generated after the lexical and syntactic analyses have been done. Second, token sequence is generated based on the AST. Using the AST can effectively detect the code plagiarism by changing the identifier or program statement order. Finally, the generated token sequences are compared with one another using an HLFPN to determine the code plagiarism. Furthermore, the experimental results have indicated that we can make better determination to detect the code plagiarism.

Design of the research problem statement

This paper aims to provide an understanding of designing a problem statement that must be present in every research proposal or other scientific work. A study, from proposals to scientific papers, requires a problem statement. The design of the program statement is basically always present from research interests. Objectives as a translation of the problem statement will be described through a methodology that matches the answers to be given to the interests. In the industry 4.0 era, problem statement in research prioritize innovation or change to improve welfare.

LeakDoctor

With the enormous popularity of smartphones, millions of mobile apps are developed to provide rich functionalities for users by accessing certain personal data, leading to great privacy concerns. To address this problem, many approaches have been proposed to detect privacy disclosures in mobile apps, but they largely fail to automatically determine whether the privacy disclosures are necessary for the functionality of apps. As a result, security analysts may easily face with a large number of false positives when directly adopting such approaches for app analysis. In this paper, we propose LeakDoctor, an analysis system seeking to automatically diagnose privacy leaks by judging if a privacy disclosure from an app is necessary for some functionality of the app. Functionality-irrelevant privacy disclosures are not justifiable, so considered as potential privacy leak cases. To achieve this goal, LeakDoctor integrates dynamic response differential analysis with static response taint analysis. In addition, it employs a novel technique to locate the program statements of each privacy disclosure. We implement a prototype of LeakDoctor and evaluate it against 1060 apps, which contain 2,095 known disclosure cases. Our experimental results show that LeakDoctor can automatically determine that 71.9% of the privacy disclosure cases indeed serve apps' functionalities and are justifiable. Hence, with the diagnosis results of LeakDoctor, analysts may avoid analyzing many justifiable privacy disclosures and only focus on the those unjustifiable cases.

POMP++: Facilitating Postmortem Program Diagnosis with Value-set Analysis

With the emergence of hardware-assisted processor tracing, execution traces can be logged with lower runtime overhead and integrated into the core dump . In comparison with an ordinary core dump, such a new post-crash artifact provides software developers and security analysts with more clues to a program crash. However, existing works only rely on the resolved runtime information, which leads to the limitation in data flow recovery within long execution traces. In this work, we propose POMP++ , an automated tool to facilitate the analysis of post-crash artifacts. More specifically, POMP++ introduces a reverse execution mechanism to construct the data flow that a program followed prior to its crash. Furthermore, POMP++ utilizes Value-set Analysis, which helps to verify memory alias relation, to improve the ability of data flow recovery. With the restored data flow, POMP++ then performs backward taint analysis and highlights program statements that actually contribute to the crash. We have implemented POMP++ for Linux system on x86-32 platform, and tested it against various crashes resulting from 31 distinct real-world security vulnerabilities. The evaluation shows that, our work can pinpoint the root causes in 29 cases, increase the number of recovered memory addresses by 12 percent and reduce the execution time by 60 percent compared with existing reverse execution. In short, POMP++ can accurately and efficiently pinpoint program statements that truly contribute to the crashes, making failure diagnosis significantly convenient.

A Sociological Analysis of the Institutional Aspect of the Global Sociology of M. Burawoy

This article offers the institutional side of the global sociological project presented by M. Burawoy for consideration. The main critics of this approach currently ignore the role of institutions, and concentrate more often on the ideological side of the issue. In this paper, it is proposed to trace the usage of the institutional mechanisms of the ISA to promote the idea of the internationalization of sociology on a global scale. On the basis of the historical and sociological method, the connection between the ISA World Sociological Congresses, the institute of the presidency of the ISA, the presidential address, and the project of global sociology found in the approach of the British scientist will be demonstrated. Through the analysis of Burawoy’s articles, the main program statements of the development of global sociology will be defined. Special attention will be paid to the institute of the ISA presidential speech and its usage in the context of the global sociology of Burawoy. This paper postulates the problem of the excessive centralization of the project on the institutional link with the various resources provided by the ISA.

Athena: A framework to automatically generate security test oracle via extracting policies from source code and intended software behaviour

Context: Software security testing aims to check the security behaviour of a program. To determine whether the program behaves securely on a particular execution, we need an oracle who knows the expected security behaviour. Security test oracle decides whether test cases violate the intended security policies of the program. Thus, it is necessary for the oracle to model the detailed security policies. Unfortunately, these policies are usually poorly documented. Even worse, in some cases, the source code is the only available document of the program.Objective: We propose a method to automatically extract the intended security policies of the program under test from the source code and expected execution traces. We introduce a security test oracle, Athena, which utilises these policies to differentiate between the secure and potentially insecure behaviour of the program.Method: We use a hybrid analysis approach to obtain the intended security policies. We investigate the program statements (gates) in which the software communicates with the environment. We analyse the transmitted messages in the gates and the control and data flow of the program to extract some security properties. Moreover, we specify the intended navigation paths of the program. These properties and paths form the expected security policies. Athena utilises these policies to detect potential security breaches.Results: Investigating common types of software vulnerabilities illustrates the flexibility of Athena in modelling various kinds of security policies. Moreover, we show the usefulness of the method by applying it to the real web applications and evaluating its capability to detect actual attacks.Conclusions: Our proposed approach takes a step towards solving the test oracle automation problem in the domain of security testing.

Improving regression test efficiency with an awareness of refactoring changes

Context. Developers often improve software quality through refactorings—the practice of behavior-preserving changes to existing code. Recent studies showed that, despite their awareness of tool support for automated refactorings, developers prefer manual refactorings. This practice can be often error-prone and increase testing cost.Objective. To address the problem, we present the Refactorings Investigation and Testing technique, called Rit. Rit improves the testing efficiency for validating refactoring changes and providing confidence that changed parts behave as intended. As testing is expensive for developers of high-assurance software, Rit reduces a considerable amount of its costs by only identifying dependent statements on a failure in each test and by detecting specific refactoring edits responsible for testing failures.Method. Our approach identifies refactorings by analyzing original and edited versions of a program. It then uses the semantic impact of a set of identified refactoring changes to detect tests whose behavior may have been affected and modified by refactoring edits. Given each failed asserts after running regression test suites, Rit helps developers focus their attention on logically related program statements by applying program slicing for minimizing each test. For debugging purposes, Rit determines specific failure-inducing refactoring edits, separating from other changes that only affect other asserts or tests.Results. We evaluated Rit on three open source projects, and found that Rit detected tests affected by refactorings with 80.9% accuracy on average. Furthermore, it identified and formed partitions relating program statements only dependent on failed asserts with 97.2% accuracy on average.Conclusion. Rit, which combines a refactoring reconstruction technique with change impact analysis to localize failure-inducing program edits, helps developers localize fault causes by focusing on refactoring changes as opposed to all the code fragments in the new version.