Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fitness Guided Vulnerability Detection with Greybox Fuzzing

Greybox fuzzing is an automated test-input generation technique that aims to uncover program errors by searching for bug-inducing inputs using a fitness-guided search process. Existing fuzzing approaches are primarily coverage-based. That is, they regard a test input that covers a new region of code as being fit to be retained. However, a vulnerability at a program location may not get exhibited in every execution that happens to visit to this program location; only certain program executions that lead to the location may expose the vulnerability. In this paper, we introduce a unified fitness metric called headroom, which can be used within greybox fuzzers, and which is explicitly oriented towards searching for test inputs that come closer to exposing vulnerabilities. We have implemented our approach by enhancing AFL, which is a production quality fuzzing tool. We have instantiated our approach to detecting buffer overrun as well as integer-overflow vulnerabilities. We have evaluated our approach on a suite of benchmark programs, and compared it with AFL, as well as a recent extension over AFL called AFLGo. Our approach could uncover more number of vulnerabilities in a given amount of fuzzing time and also uncover the vulnerabilities faster than these two tools.
What are the Practices used by Software Practitioners on Technical Debt Payment? Results From an International Family of Surveys

Context: Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor used to describe technical decisions that can give the company a benefit in the short term but possibly hurting the overall quality of the software in the long term.Objective: This study aims to characterize the current state of practices related to TD payment from the point of view of software practitioners.Method: We used a survey research method to collect and analyze - both quantitatively and qualitatively - a corpus of responses from a survey of 432 software practitioners from Colombia, Chile, Brazil, and the United States, as a part of the InsighTD project.Results: We were able to identify that refactoring (24.3%) was the main practice related to TD payment, along with improving testing (6.2%) and improve design (5.8%). Also, we identify that small-sized systems and big-sized systems, along with young systems (less than one year) tend to use more refactoring. As a part of these results, we also could identify that some practices do not eliminate the debt by itself, but support a favorable scenario for TD payment or prevention. Additionally, after comparing the three major TD types cited (code debt, test debt and design debt) we could discover an important similarity of TD payment practices between code debt and design debt. Lastly, we identified that no matter the cause leading to TD occurrence, refactoring remained the most common practice.Conclusion: Definition of practices related to TD payment is an essential activity for software development teams. Developing healthy software systems that can be maintained in the future requires that companies find the right approaches for TD payment.
ADAPTATION TO EXCESS SALTS IN AN ALKALINE SOIL POPULATION OF CYNODON DACTYLON (L.) PERS.

Soils containing excess of salts occur extensively in the north-western parts of India; more and more are being added every year because of the use of brackish water for irrigation. An understanding of the basis of salt tolerance in plants is important for effectively counteracting salinity and alkalinity problems. Salt tolerance of species and varieties could be related either to an ability to limit intake of ions which are available in excessive amounts in the medium or to an ability to tolerate high internal levels of certain ions before suffering injury. As noted by Jennings (1968), comparative data are lacking on the concentrations of solutes in the plant tissues of salt-resistant species and populations grown in culture media of high osmotic potential. The present study deals with the differential response to excess salt in the medium of two populations (n = 18) of Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers. : one from a 'normal' soil (Gangetic alluvium) at Chandigarh (latitude 30? 44' N, longitude 76? 47' E) and one from an alkaline soil at Nilokheri (about 100 km south-east of Chandigarh).
The Influence of Plasma Magnesium Concentrations on Calcitonin Secretion in the Pig

SummaryThe effect of Mg on the secretion of CT was studied in pigs. Infusion of magnesium was shown to increase the secretion of CT. During the latter part of sustained infusions, this relationship appears directly proportional up to very high concentrations of magnesium. Increased secretion of CT occurred under conditions of decreasing plasma calcium levels. Both total and ionizable calcium decrease in response to the increased CT level elicited by the infusion of magnesium. Thus, the influence of Mg on CT secretion is an important factor to consider in evaluating CT secretion rates.
Inheritance versus Delegation: which is more energy efficient?

Energy consumption of software is receiving more attention as concerns regarding climate change increase. One factor that significantly impacts how much energy is expended by a software application is the design of the software itself. Existing studies find few consistent results regarding the impact of common refactorings on energy consumption, nor do they define a concrete set of metrics that measure the energy efficiency of software. In this paper, we present the results of preliminary experiments that explore the Replace Inheritance with Delegation refactoring, and its inverse, to assess the impact these design-level refactorings have on energy consumption in the Java programming language. In the tested programs, inheritance proved to be more energy efficient than delegation, with a reduction in run time of 77% and a reduction in average power consumption of 4%. We subsequently propose a research plan to further explore this problem and observe a number of specific challenges in this area. The primary goals of this research are threefold: (i) to investigate how redundancy in an object-oriented design can contribute to unnecessary energy consumption, (ii) to determine how refactoring of the software can remove this redundancy, and (iii) to develop a general-purpose automated tool to perform this refactoring.
Research Idea on How Language and Symbols (Semantics and Semiotics) Affect Emotions of Software Engineers

This is essentially a 'call for research' and collaboration between industry and academia to improve the motivation and performance of software engineers through use of language, words and symbols. How languages and symbols shape the way people think, feel and behave has been a topic of wide research. Words have powerful association with perception and cognition and throughout history, language has been used as a medium for influencing minds and for mass propaganda. While this is widely understood in politics, psychology and sociology, very little research has been to study the implicit and explicit impact of words, phrases and language on the way software engineers think, feel, behave and perform. While software engineering could be seen as a science that lends itself to a formal process and methods, it can also be seen as a craft and art which needs imagination and creativity which in turn are influenced by emotions. We propose some hypotheses, research questions and ideas to trigger formal studies of deeper connections between language/ symbols and software engineers' performance. We also draw inspiration from a wide body of research already conducted in this area which have influenced the field of psychology, sociology and mass communication. This is essentially a 'call for research' and collaboration between industry and academia to improve the motivation and performance of software engineers through use of language, words and symbols.
Behavioral Aspects of Safety-Critical Software Development

We are becoming increasingly dependent on software systems also for highly critical tasks in society. To minimize the risk of failures, regulatory institutions define standards that software organizations must meet. However, the quality of the safety-critical software is, ultimately, determined by the software engineers' behavior. Even though previous studies have recognized the significance of such behavioral aspects, research that studies them is limited. The aim of this initial study was, therefore, to identify how and in what way, behavioral aspects affect the quality of safety-critical software. Thematic analysis of interviews with six software engineers identified four themes linking developer behavior to safety. Our analysis suggests that developing safety-critical systems imposes stress on software engineers and that to reduce such pressure it is critical to enhance organizational trust. It also indicates that the agile way-of-working has the potential to improve safety by facilitating the sharing of domain knowledge. Our findings provide directions for future studies into these important aspects and can be of wider relevance, in particular for the development of secure software, but potentially also for general software engineering.
Upper bound for the thermal emission of a hot nanoemitter assisted by a cold nanoantenna

In the last decades, designs of most incandescent sources have been realized by heating the whole device. Here we propose a novel approach consisting in taking advantage of hot nanoemitters that can be cooled in a few tens of nanoseconds. It offers a new opportunity for high speed modulation and for enhanced agility in the active control of polarization, direction and wavelength of emission. To compensate the weak thermal emission of isolated nanoemitters, we propose to insert them in some complex environments, such as e.g. the gap of cold nanoantenna, which allow a significant thermal emission enhancement of the hot nanovolume. In order to optimize this kind of device, a fully vectorial upper bound for the thermal emission of a hot nanoparticle in a cold environment is derived. This criterion is very general since it is equivalent to an absorption cross-section upper bound for the nanoparticle. Moreover, it is an intrinsic characteristic of the environment regardless of the nanoparticle, so it allows to decouple the design of the environment from the one of the hot nanovolume. It thus provides a good figure of merit to compare the ability of different systems to enhance thermal emission of hot nanoemitters.
Spatial Mismatch between the Supply and Demand of Urban Leisure Services with Multisource Open Data

Understanding the balance between the supply and demand of leisure services (LSs) in urban areas can benefit urban spatial planning and improve the quality of life of residents. In cities in developing countries, the pursuit of rapid economic growth has ignored residents’ demand for LSs, thereby leading to a high demand for and short supply of these services. However, due to the lack of relevant research data, few studies have focused on the spatial mismatch in the supply and demand of LSs in urban areas. As typical representatives of multisource geographic data, social sensing data are readily available at various temporal and spatial scales, thus making social sensing data ideal for quantitative urban research. The objectives of this study are to use openly accessible datasets to explore the spatial pattern of the supply and demand of LSs in urban areas and then to depict the relationship between the supply and demand by using correlation analysis. Therefore, taking Beijing, China, as an example, the LS supply index (SI) and societal needs index (SNI) are proposed based on open data to reflect the supply and demand of LSs. The results show that the spatial distribution of the LS supply and demand in Beijing varies with a concentric pattern from the urban center to suburban areas. There is a strong correlation between the supply and demand of commercial and multifunctional services in Chaoyang, Fengtai, Haidian and Shijingshan, but there is no obvious correlation between the supply and demand of ecological and cultural services in Beijing. Especially in Dongcheng and Xicheng, there is no obvious correlation between the supply and demand of all services. The proposed approach provides an effective urban LS supply and demand evaluation method. In addition, the research results can provide a reference for the construction of “happy cities” in China.
Editorial for Special Issue: Test and Evaluation Methods for Human-Machine Interfaces of Automated Vehicles

Today, OEMs and suppliers can rely on commonly agreed and standardized test and evaluation methods for in-vehicle human–machine interfaces (HMIs). These have traditionally focused on the context of manually driven vehicles and put the evaluation of minimizing distraction effects and enhancing usability at their core (e.g., AAM guidelines or NHTSA visual-manual distraction guidelines). However, advances in automated driving systems (ADS) have already begun to change the driver’s role from actively driving the vehicle to monitoring the driving situation and being ready to intervene in partially automated driving (SAE L2). Higher levels of vehicle automation will likely only require the driver to act as a fallback ready user in case of system limits and malfunctions (SAE L3) or could even act without any fallback within their operational design domain (SAE L4). During the same trip, different levels of automation might be available to the driver (e.g., L2 in urban environments, L3 on highways). These developments require new test and evaluation methods for ADS, as available test methods cannot be easily transferred and adapted. The shift towards higher levels of vehicle automation has also moved the discussion towards the interaction between automated and non-automated road users using exterior HMIs. This Special Issue includes theoretical papers a well as empirical studies that deal with these new challenges by proposing new and innovative test methods in the evaluation of ADS HMIs in different areas.
Subspace transform induced robust similarity measure for facial images

Similarity measure has long played a critical role and attracted great interest in various areas such as pattern recognition and machine perception. Nevertheless, there remains the issue of developing an efficient two-dimensional (2D) robust similarity measure method for images. Inspired by the properties of subspace, we develop an effective 2D image similarity measure technique, named transformation similarity measure (TSM), for robust face recognition. Specifically, the TSM method robustly determines the similarity between two well-aligned frontal facial images while weakening interference in the face recognition by linear transformation and singular value decomposition. We present the mathematical features and some odds to reveal the feasible and robust measure mechanism of TSM. The performance of the TSM method, combined with the nearest neighbor rule, is evaluated in face recognition under different challenges. Experimental results clearly show the advantages of the TSM method in terms of accuracy and robustness.
On the Feasibility of Adversarial Sample Creation Using the Android System API

Due to its popularity, the Android operating system is a critical target for malware attacks. Multiple security efforts have been made on the design of malware detection systems to identify potentially harmful applications. In this sense, machine learning-based systems, leveraging both static and dynamic analysis, have been increasingly adopted to discriminate between legitimate and malicious samples due to their capability of identifying novel variants of malware samples. At the same time, attackers have been developing several techniques to evade such systems, such as the generation of evasive apps, i.e., carefully-perturbed samples that can be classified as legitimate by the classifiers. Previous work has shown the vulnerability of detection systems to evasion attacks, including those designed for Android malware detection. However, most works neglected to bring the evasive attacks onto the so-called problem space, i.e., by generating concrete Android adversarial samples, which requires preserving the app’s semantics and being realistic for human expert analysis. In this work, we aim to understand the feasibility of generating adversarial samples specifically through the injection of system API calls, which are typical discriminating characteristics for malware detectors. We perform our analysis on a state-of-the-art ransomware detector that employs the occurrence of system API calls as features of its machine learning algorithm. In particular, we discuss the constraints that are necessary to generate real samples, and we use techniques inherited from interpretability to assess the impact of specific API calls to evasion. We assess the vulnerability of such a detector against mimicry and random noise attacks. Finally, we propose a basic implementation to generate concrete and working adversarial samples. The attained results suggest that injecting system API calls could be a viable strategy for attackers to generate concrete adversarial samples. However, we point out the low suitability of mimicry attacks and the necessity to build more sophisticated evasion attacks.
Spatiotemporal Varying Effects of Built Environment on Taxi and Ride-Hailing Ridership in New York City

The rapid growth of transportation network companies (TNCs) has reshaped the traditional taxi market in many modern cities around the world. This study aims to explore the spatiotemporal variations of built environment on traditional taxis (TTs) and TNC. Considering the heterogeneity of ridership distribution in spatial and temporal aspects, we implemented a geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model, which was improved by parallel computing technology, to efficiently evaluate the effects of local influencing factors on the monthly ridership distribution for both modes at each taxi zone. A case study was implemented in New York City (NYC) using 659 million pick-up points recorded by TT and TNC from 2015 to 2017. Fourteen influencing factors from four groups, including weather, land use, socioeconomic and transportation, are selected as independent variables. The modeling results show that the improved parallel-based GTWR model can achieve better fitting results than the ordinary least squares (OLS) model, and it is more efficient for big datasets. The coefficients of the influencing variables further indicate that TNC has become more convenient for passengers in snowy weather, while TT is more concentrated at the locations close to public transportation. Moreover, the socioeconomic properties are the most important factors that caused the difference of spatiotemporal patterns. For example, passengers with higher education/income are more inclined to select TT in the western of NYC, while vehicle ownership promotes the utility of TNC in the middle of NYC. These findings can provide scientific insights and a basis for transportation departments and companies to make rational and effective use of existing resources.
Monitoring of Urban Growth Patterns in Rapidly Growing Bahir Dar City of Northwest Ethiopia with 30 year Landsat Imagery Record

Monitoring urban growth patterns is an important measure to improve our understanding of land use/land cover (LULC) changes and a central part in the proper development of any city. In this study, we analyzed the changes over a period of 30 years (1985–2015) in Bahir Dar, one of the rapidly growing cities of northwest Ethiopia. Satellite images of Landsat TM (1985, 1995, and 2008), and OLI (2015) were used. The classification was carried out using the object-based image analysis technique and a change analysis was undertaken using post-classification comparison in GIS as a novel framework. An accuracy assessment was conducted for each reference year. Eight LULC types were successfully captured with overall accuracies ranging from 88.3% to 92.9% and a Kappa statistic of 0.85 to 0.92. The classification result revealed that cropland (66%), water (12.5%), and grassland (6%) were the dominant LULC types with a small share of areas covered by built-up areas (2.4%) in 1985. In 2015, cropland and water continued to be dominant followed by built-up areas. The change result shows that a rapid reduction in natural forest cover followed by grassland and wetland occurred between the first (1985–1995), second (1995–2008), and third (2008–2015) study periods. On the contrary, build-ups increased in all three periods by 9.3%, 121.3%, and 44.8%, respectively. Although the conversion between the LULC classes varied substantially, analysis of the 30-year change matrix revealed that about 31% was subject to intensive change between the classes. Specifically, the built-up area has increased by 250.5% during the study years. The framed approach used in this research is a good repeatable example of how to assess and monitor urban growth at the local level, by combining remote sensing and GIS technologies. Further study is suggested to investigate detailed drivers, consequences of changes, and future options.
The Management of Telecommunications: Business Solutions to Business Problems

From the Publisher: Intended for a telecommunications course taught in MIS departments in business schools at the undergraduate or MBA level. Students taking the business telecommunications course should have already taken an introductory MIS course and have a basic knowledge of computing and computer terminology. Rather than solely concentrating on the technology of telecommunications,Carr and Snyder's new textbook caters more to the needs of today's business students. MANAGEMENT OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS is the ideal textbook for exposing students to all facets of being a telecommunications end-user; It stresses the importance of the managerial decision-making side of telecommunications by applying the use of an integrated continuing case to illustrate key concepts and show the decision process. This book will provide business students with the technical vocabulary,technical understanding,and decision-making ability necessary to be an effective business telecommunications manager. Students using Carr and Snyder's book will lead the decision-making process by having an understanding of technology tradeoffs in relation to costs,marketing,customer service,and competition. Students will learn how telecommunications and telecommunications-intensive information systems,in particular,are part of the strategic,tactical,and operational decision processes of an organization.