SEDec 21, 2020Code
AC2 -- Towards Understanding Architectural Changes in Rapid ReleasesA Eashaan Rao, Dheeraj Vagavolu, Sridhar Chimalakonda
Open source projects are adopting faster release cycles that reflect various changes. Therefore, comprehending the effects of these changes on software's architecture over the releases becomes necessary. However, it is challenging to keep architecture in-check and add new changes simultaneously for every release. To this end, we propose a visualization tool called AC2, which allows its users to examine the alterations in the architecture at both higher and lower levels of abstraction for the python projects. AC2 uses call graphs and collaboration graphs to show the interaction between different architectural components. The tool provides four different views to see the architectural changes. The user can examine two releases at a time to comprehend the architectural changes between the releases. AC2 can support the maintainers and developers to observe changes in the project and its influence on the architecture, which allow them to see its increasing complexity over the releases at the component level. AC2 can be downloaded at https://github.com/dheerajrox/AC2 and its demo can be seen at the website https://dheerajrox.github.io/AC2doc or on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNrJfZ0RCVI
HCJun 22, 2021
MuseumViz -- Towards Visualizing Online Museum CollectionsDheeraj Vagavolu, Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Sridhar Chimalakonda
Despite the growth of online museums for India's cultural heritage data, there is limited increase in terms of visitors. Over the years, online museums adopted many techniques to improve the overall user experience. However, many Indian online museums display artifacts as lists and grids with basic search functionality, making it less visually appealing and difficult to comprehend. Our work aims to enhance the user experience of accessing Indian online museums by utilizing advancements in information visualization. Hence, we propose MuseumViz, a framework which processes data from online museums and visualizes it using four different interactive visualizations: the Network Graph, TreepMap, Polygon Chart and SunBurst Chart. We demonstrate MuseumViz on a total of 723 cultural heritage artifacts present in the Archaeological Survey of India, Goa. Based on our evaluation with 25 users, about 83% of them find it easier and more comprehensible to browse cultural heritage artifacts through MuseumViz.
SEJun 21, 2021
On the Impact of Multiple Source Code Representations on Software Engineering Tasks -- An Empirical StudyKarthik Chandra Swarna, Noble Saji Mathews, Dheeraj Vagavolu et al.
Efficiently representing source code is crucial for various software engineering tasks such as code classification and clone detection. Existing approaches primarily use Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), and only a few focus on semantic graphs such as Control Flow Graph (CFG) and Program Dependency Graph (PDG), which contain information about source code that AST does not. Even though some works tried to utilize multiple representations, they do not provide any insights about the costs and benefits of using multiple representations. The primary goal of this paper is to discuss the implications of utilizing multiple code representations, specifically AST, CFG, and PDG. We modify an AST path-based approach to accept multiple representations as input to an attention-based model. We do this to measure the impact of additional representations (such as CFG and PDG) over AST. We evaluate our approach on three tasks: Method Naming, Program Classification, and Clone Detection. Our approach increases the performance on these tasks by 11% (F1), 15.7% (Accuracy), and 9.3% (F1), respectively, over the baseline. In addition to the effect on performance, we discuss timing overheads incurred with multiple representations. We envision this work providing researchers with a lens to evaluate combinations of code representations for various tasks.
HCApr 17, 2021
SurviveCovid-19++ : A collaborative healthcare game towards educating people about safety measures and vaccination for Covid-19Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Dheeraj Vagavolu, Sridhar Chimalakonda
Covid-19 has been affecting population across the world for more than an year, with diverse strains of this virus being identified in many countries. Vaccines to help in curbing the virus are being developed and administered. Preventing the spread of the disease requires collaborative efforts from everyone. People with varied professional backgrounds have varied responsibilities in controlling the pandemic. It is important that everyone is aware of their respective responsibilities and also empathize with efforts and duties of other individuals. It is here, we wish to leverage the potential of games in healthcare domain, towards educating about Covid-19. With an aim to educate the population about vaccination against Covid-19, responsibilities of citizens with varied professional backgrounds, and emphasize on the need for collaboration to fight against the pandemic, by following safety measures, we present SurviveCovid-19++, a collaborative multiplayer desktop based game. The game essentially revolves around four roles - doctor, sanitation worker, citizen and law enforcer, delivering their duties, following safety measures and collaboratively clearing multiple stages in the game. We have performed a preliminary evaluation of the game through a qualitative and quantitative user survey. The results of the user survey were encouraging, with volunteers expressing their increased empathy towards efforts of individuals with varied professional backgrounds, and better understanding of the importance of safety measures against Covid-19.
HCApr 21, 2020
SurviveCovid-19 -- An Educational Game to Facilitate Habituation of Social Distancing and Other Health Measures for Covid-19 PandemicAkhila Sri Manasa Venigalla, Dheeraj Vagavolu, Sridhar Chimalakonda
Covid-19 has been causing severe loss to the human race. Considering the mode of spread and severity, it is essential to make it a habit to follow various safety precautions such as using sanitizers and masks and maintaining social distancing to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Individuals are widely educated about the safety measures against the disease through various modes such as announcements through online or physical awareness campaigns, advertisements in the media and so on. The younger generations today spend considerably more time on mobile phones and games. However, there are very few applications or games aimed to help in practicing safety measures against a pandemic, which is much lesser in the case of Covid-19. Hence, we propose a 2D survival-based game, SurviveCovid-19, aimed to educate people about safety precautions to be taken for Covid-19 outside their homes by incorporating social distancing and usage of masks and sanitizers in the game. SurviveCovid-19 has been designed as an Android-based mobile game, along with a desktop (browser) version, and has been evaluated through a remote quantitative user survey, with 30 volunteers using the questionnaire based on the MEEGA+ model. The survey results are promising, with all the survey questions having a mean value greater than 3.5. The game's quality factor was 69.3, indicating that the game could be classified as excellent quality, according to the MEEGA+ model.