Murtuza Shahzad

Murtuza Shahzad, Hamed Alhoori, Reva Freedman et al.

Research articles are being shared in increasing numbers on multiple online platforms. Although the scholarly impact of these articles has been widely studied, the online interest determined by how long the research articles are shared online remains unclear. Being cognizant of how long a research article is mentioned online could be valuable information to the researchers. In this paper, we analyzed multiple social media platforms on which users share and/or discuss scholarly articles. We built three clusters for papers, based on the number of yearly online mentions having publication dates ranging from the year 1920 to 2016. Using the online social media metrics for each of these three clusters, we built machine learning models to predict the long-term online interest in research articles. We addressed the prediction task with two different approaches: regression and classification. For the regression approach, the Multi-Layer Perceptron model performed best, and for the classification approach, the tree-based models performed better than other models. We found that old articles are most evident in the contexts of economics and industry (i.e., patents). In contrast, recently published articles are most evident in research platforms (i.e., Mendeley) followed by social media platforms (i.e., Twitter).

Murtuza Shahzad, Joseph Wilson, Ibrahim Al Azher et al.

The increasing complexity and volume of software systems have heightened the importance of identifying and mitigating security vulnerabilities. The existing software vulnerability datasets frequently fall short in providing comprehensive, detailed code snippets explicitly linked to specific vulnerability descriptions, reducing their utility for advanced research and hindering efforts to develop a deeper understanding of security vulnerabilities. To address this challenge, we present a novel dataset that provides examples of vulnerable code snippets corresponding to Common Attack Pattern Enumerations and Classifications (CAPEC) and Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) descriptions. By employing the capabilities of Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models, we have developed a robust methodology for generating these examples. Our approach utilizes GPT-4o, Llama and Claude models to generate code snippets that exhibit specific vulnerabilities as described in CAPEC and CWE documentation. This dataset not only enhances the understanding of security vulnerabilities in code but also serves as a valuable resource for training machine learning models focused on automatic vulnerability detection and remediation. Preliminary evaluations suggest that the dataset generated by Large Language Models demonstrates high accuracy and can serve as a reliable reference for vulnerability identification systems. We found consistent results across the three models, with 0.98 cosine similarity among codes. The final dataset comprises 615 CAPEC code snippets in three programming languages: Java, Python, and JavaScript, making it one of the most extensive and diverse resources in this domain.

Murtuza Shahzad, Hamed Alhoori

Social media users share their ideas, thoughts, and emotions with other users. However, it is not clear how online users would respond to new research outcomes. This study aims to predict the nature of the emotions expressed by Twitter users toward scientific publications. Additionally, we investigate what features of the research articles help in such prediction. Identifying the sentiments of research articles on social media will help scientists gauge a new societal impact of their research articles.