Kevin A. Schneider

Palash R. Roy, Ajmain I. Alam, Farouq Al-omari et al.

Semantic and Cross-language code clone generation may be useful for code reuse, code comprehension, refactoring and benchmarking. OpenAI's GPT model has potential in such clone generation as GPT is used for text generation. When developers copy/paste codes from Stack Overflow (SO) or within a system, there might be inconsistent changes leading to unexpected behaviours. Similarly, if someone possesses a code snippet in a particular programming language but seeks equivalent functionality in a different language, a semantic cross-language code clone generation approach could provide valuable assistance. In this study, using SemanticCloneBench as a vehicle, we evaluated how well the GPT-3 model could help generate semantic and cross-language clone variants for a given fragment.We have comprised a diverse set of code fragments and assessed GPT-3s performance in generating code variants.Through extensive experimentation and analysis, where 9 judges spent 158 hours to validate, we investigate the model's ability to produce accurate and semantically correct variants. Our findings shed light on GPT-3's strengths in code generation, offering insights into the potential applications and challenges of using advanced language models in software development. Our quantitative analysis yields compelling results. In the realm of semantic clones, GPT-3 attains an impressive accuracy of 62.14% and 0.55 BLEU score, achieved through few-shot prompt engineering. Furthermore, the model shines in transcending linguistic confines, boasting an exceptional 91.25% accuracy in generating cross-language clones

Md Nadim, Mohammad Hassan, Ashis Kumar Mandal et al.

Purpose: Quantum computing promises to transform problem-solving across various domains with rapid and practical solutions. Within Software Evolution and Maintenance, Quantum Machine Learning (QML) remains mostly an underexplored domain, particularly in addressing challenges such as detecting buggy software commits from code repositories. Methods: In this study, we investigate the practical application of Quantum Support Vector Classifiers (QSVC) for detecting buggy software commits across 14 open-source software projects with diverse dataset sizes encompassing 30,924 data instances. We compare the QML algorithm PQSVC (Pegasos QSVC) and QSVC against the classical Support Vector Classifier (SVC). Our technique addresses large datasets in QSVC algorithms by dividing them into smaller subsets. We propose and evaluate an aggregation method to combine predictions from these models to detect the entire test dataset. We also introduce an incremental testing methodology to overcome the difficulties of quantum feature mapping during the testing approach. Results: The study shows the effectiveness of QSVC and PQSVC in detecting buggy software commits. The aggregation technique successfully combines predictions from smaller data subsets, enhancing the overall detection accuracy for the entire test dataset. The incremental testing methodology effectively manages the challenges associated with quantum feature mapping during the testing process. Conclusion: We contribute to the advancement of QML algorithms in defect prediction, unveiling the potential for further research in this domain. The specific scenario of the Short-Term Activity Frame (STAF) highlights the early detection of buggy software commits during the initial developmental phases of software systems, particularly when dataset sizes remain insufficient to train machine learning models.

Amit Kumar Mondal, Chanchal K. Roy, Kevin A. Schneider et al.

Software architectural changes involve more than one module or component and are complex to analyze compared to local code changes. Development teams aiming to review architectural aspects (design) of a change commit consider many essential scenarios such as access rules and restrictions on usage of program entities across modules. Moreover, design review is essential when proper architectural formulations are paramount for developing and deploying a system. Untangling architectural changes, recovering semantic design, and producing design notes are the crucial tasks of the design review process. To support these tasks, we construct a lightweight tool [4] that can detect and decompose semantic slices of a commit containing architectural instances. A semantic slice consists of a description of relational information of involved modules, their classes, methods and connected modules in a change instance, which is easy to understand to a reviewer. We extract various directory and naming structures (DANS) properties from the source code for developing our tool. Utilizing the DANS properties, our tool first detects architectural change instances based on our defined metric and then decomposes the slices (based on string processing). Our preliminary investigation with ten open-source projects (developed in Java and Kotlin) reveals that the DANS properties produce highly reliable precision and recall (93-100%) for detecting and generating architectural slices. Our proposed tool will serve as the preliminary approach for the semantic design recovery and design summary generation for the project releases.

Ajmain Inqiad Alam, Palash Roy, Chanchal K. Roy et al.

The accelerating adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering (SE) has brought with it a silent crisis: unsustainable computational cost. While these models demonstrate remarkable capabilities in different SE tasks, they are unmanageably large, slow to deploy, memory-intensive, and carbon-heavy. This reality threatens not only the scalability and accessibility of AI-powered SE, but also its long-term environmental sustainability. The research challenge is clear: we must go beyond accuracy and address efficiency and environmental cost as first-class design constraints. To meet this challenge, we introduce Carbon-Taxed Transformers (CTT), a systematic multi-architectural compression principled pipeline ordering inspired by economic carbon taxation principles. Drawing from the economic concept of carbon pricing, CTT operationalizes a computational carbon tax that penalizes architectural inefficiencies and rewards deployment-ready compression. We evaluate CTT across three core SE tasks: code clone detection, code summarization, and code generation, with models spanning encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only architecture. Our results show that CTT delivers on inference: (1) up to 49x memory reduction, (2) time reduction up to 8-10x for clone detection, up to 3x for summarization, and 4-7x for generation, (3) up to 81% reduction in CO2 emissions and (4) CTT retains around 98% accuracy on clone detection, around 89% on summarization, and up to 91% (textual metrics) and 68% (pass@1) for generation. Two ablation studies show that pipeline ordering and individual component contributions are both essential, providing empirical justification for CTT's design and effectiveness. This work establishes a viable path toward responsible AI in SE through aggressive yet performance-preserving compression.

Ashis Kumar Mandal, Md Nadim, Chanchal K. Roy et al.

Predicting software defects early in the development process not only enhances the quality and reliability of the software but also decreases the cost of development. A wide range of machine learning techniques can be employed to create software defect prediction models, but the effectiveness and accuracy of these models are often influenced by the choice of appropriate feature subset. Since finding the optimal feature subset is computationally intensive, heuristic and metaheuristic approaches are commonly employed to identify near-optimal solutions within a reasonable time frame. Recently, the quantum computing paradigm quantum annealing (QA) has been deployed to find solutions to complex optimization problems. This opens up the possibility of addressing the feature subset selection problem with a QA machine. Although several strategies have been proposed for feature subset selection using a QA machine, little exploration has been done regarding the viability of a QA machine for feature subset selection in software defect prediction. This study investigates the potential of D-Wave QA system for this task, where we formulate a mutual information (MI)-based filter approach as an optimization problem and utilize a D-Wave Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) solver as a QA solver for feature subset selection. We evaluate the performance of this approach using multiple software defect datasets from the AEEM, JIRA, and NASA projects. We also utilize a D-Wave classical solver for comparative analysis. Our experimental results demonstrate that QA-based feature subset selection can enhance software defect prediction. Although the D-Wave QPU solver exhibits competitive prediction performance with the classical solver in software defect prediction, it significantly reduces the time required to identify the best feature subset compared to its classical counterpart.

Sara Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Peyman Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Michal J. Wesolowski et al.

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer-related death after lung cancer and breast cancer worldwide. The risk of developing colorectal cancer could be reduced by early diagnosis of polyps during a colonoscopy. Computer-aided diagnosis systems have the potential to be applied for polyp screening and reduce the number of missing polyps. In this paper, we compare the performance of different deep learning architectures as feature extractors, i.e. ResNet, DenseNet, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2 and SE-ResNeXt in the encoder part of a U-Net architecture. We validated the performance of presented ensemble models on the CVC-Clinic (GIANA 2018) dataset. The DenseNet169 feature extractor combined with U-Net architecture outperformed the other counterparts and achieved an accuracy of 99.15\%, Dice similarity coefficient of 90.87%, and Jaccard index of 83.82%.

Sara Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Peyman Hosseinzadeh Kassasni, Michal J. Wesolowski et al.

The newly identified Coronavirus pneumonia, subsequently termed COVID-19, is highly transmittable and pathogenic with no clinically approved antiviral drug or vaccine available for treatment. The most common symptoms of COVID-19 are dry cough, sore throat, and fever. Symptoms can progress to a severe form of pneumonia with critical complications, including septic shock, pulmonary edema, acute respiratory distress syndrome and multi-organ failure. While medical imaging is not currently recommended in Canada for primary diagnosis of COVID-19, computer-aided diagnosis systems could assist in the early detection of COVID-19 abnormalities and help to monitor the progression of the disease, potentially reduce mortality rates. In this study, we compare popular deep learning-based feature extraction frameworks for automatic COVID-19 classification. To obtain the most accurate feature, which is an essential component of learning, MobileNet, DenseNet, Xception, ResNet, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, VGGNet, NASNet were chosen amongst a pool of deep convolutional neural networks. The extracted features were then fed into several machine learning classifiers to classify subjects as either a case of COVID-19 or a control. This approach avoided task-specific data pre-processing methods to support a better generalization ability for unseen data. The performance of the proposed method was validated on a publicly available COVID-19 dataset of chest X-ray and CT images. The DenseNet121 feature extractor with Bagging tree classifier achieved the best performance with 99% classification accuracy. The second-best learner was a hybrid of the a ResNet50 feature extractor trained by LightGBM with an accuracy of 98%.

Amit Kumar Mondal, Banani Roy, Chanchal K. Roy et al.

With the rapid advancement of Big Data platforms such as Hadoop, Spark, and Dataflow, many tools are being developed that are intended to provide end users with an interactive environment for large-scale data analysis (e.g., IQmulus). However, there are challenges using these platforms. For example, developers find it difficult to use these platforms when developing interactive and reusable data analytic tools. One approach to better support interactivity and reusability is the use of microlevel modularisation for computation-intensive tasks, which splits data operations into independent, composable modules. However, modularizing data and computation-intensive tasks into independent components differs from traditional programming, e.g., when accessing large scale data, controlling data-flow among components, and structuring computation logic. In this paper, we present a case study on modularizing real world computationintensive tasks that investigates the impact of modularization on processing large scale image data. To that end, we synthesize image data-processing patterns and propose a unified modular model for the effective implementation of computation-intensive tasks on data-parallel frameworks considering reproducibility, reusability, and customization. We present various insights of using the modularity model based on our experimental results from running image processing tasks on Spark and Hadoop clusters.

Sara Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Peyman Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Michal J. Wesolowski et al.

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death across the world in women. Early diagnosis of this type of cancer is critical for treatment and patient care. Computer-aided detection (CAD) systems using convolutional neural networks (CNN) could assist in the classification of abnormalities. In this study, we proposed an ensemble deep learning-based approach for automatic binary classification of breast histology images. The proposed ensemble model adapts three pre-trained CNNs, namely VGG19, MobileNet, and DenseNet. The ensemble model is used for the feature representation and extraction steps. The extracted features are then fed into a multi-layer perceptron classifier to carry out the classification task. Various pre-processing and CNN tuning techniques such as stain-normalization, data augmentation, hyperparameter tuning, and fine-tuning are used to train the model. The proposed method is validated on four publicly available benchmark datasets, i.e., ICIAR, BreakHis, PatchCamelyon, and Bioimaging. The proposed multi-model ensemble method obtains better predictions than single classifiers and machine learning algorithms with accuracies of 98.13%, 95.00%, 94.64% and 83.10% for BreakHis, ICIAR, PatchCamelyon and Bioimaging datasets, respectively.

Sara Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Peyman Hosseinzadeh kassani, Michal J. Wesolowski et al.

Automatic detection of leukemic B-lymphoblast cancer in microscopic images is very challenging due to the complicated nature of histopathological structures. To tackle this issue, an automatic and robust diagnostic system is required for early detection and treatment. In this paper, an automated deep learning-based method is proposed to distinguish between immature leukemic blasts and normal cells. The proposed deep learning based hybrid method, which is enriched by different data augmentation techniques, is able to extract high-level features from input images. Results demonstrate that the proposed model yields better prediction than individual models for Leukemic B-lymphoblast classification with 96.17% overall accuracy, 95.17% sensitivity and 98.58% specificity. Fusing the features extracted from intermediate layers, our approach has the potential to improve the overall classification performance.

Sara Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Peyman Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Michal J. Wesolowski et al.

Breast cancer is one of the most common causes of cancer-related death in women worldwide. Early and accurate diagnosis of breast cancer may significantly increase the survival rate of patients. In this study, we aim to develop a fully automatic, deep learning-based, method using descriptor features extracted by Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) models and pooling operation for the classification of hematoxylin and eosin stain (H&E) histological breast cancer images provided as a part of the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (ICIAR) 2018 Grand Challenge on BreAst Cancer Histology (BACH) Images. Different data augmentation methods are applied to optimize the DCNN performance. We also investigated the efficacy of different stain normalization methods as a pre-processing step. The proposed network architecture using a pre-trained Xception model yields 92.50% average classification accuracy.

Rodrigo F. G. Silva, Chanchal K. Roy, Mohammad Masudur Rahman et al.

Developers often search for relevant code examples on the web for their programming tasks. Unfortunately, they face two major problems. First, the search is impaired due to a lexical gap between their query (task description) and the information associated with the solution. Second, the retrieved solution may not be comprehensive, i.e., the code segment might miss a succinct explanation. These problems make the developers browse dozens of documents in order to synthesize an appropriate solution. To address these two problems, we propose CROKAGE (Crowd Knowledge Answer Generator), a tool that takes the description of a programming task (the query) and provides a comprehensive solution for the task. Our solutions contain not only relevant code examples but also their succinct explanations. Our proposed approach expands the task description with relevant API classes from Stack Overflow Q&A threads and then mitigates the lexical gap problems. Furthermore, we perform natural language processing on the top quality answers and then return such programming solutions containing code examples and code explanations unlike earlier studies. We evaluate our approach using 48 programming queries and show that it outperforms six baselines including the state-of-art by a statistically significant margin. Furthermore, our evaluation with 29 developers using 24 tasks (queries) confirms the superiority of CROKAGE over the state-of-art tool in terms of relevance of the suggested code examples, benefit of the code explanations and the overall solution quality (code + explanation).

Uchi Ugobame Uchibeke, Sara Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Kevin A. Schneider et al.

In recent years, the advancement in modern technologies has experienced an explosion of huge data sets being captured and recorded in different fields, but also given rise to concerns the security and protection of data storage, transmission, processing, and access to data. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that records transactions in a secure, flexible, verifiable and permanent way. Transactions in a blockchain can be an exchange of an asset, the execution of the terms of a smart contract, or an update to a record. In this paper, we have developed a blockchain access control ecosystem that gives asset owners the sovereign right to effectively manage access control of large data sets and protect against data breaches. The Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric blockchain is used to run the business network while the Hyperledger composer tool is used to implement the smart contracts or transaction processing functions that run on the blockchain network.