The Latest Programming Innovations - Issue #9
Tags: programming, innovation
Published: 2018-07-12 19:44:36

---
title: The Latest Programming Innovations - Issue #9
published: yes
description: The Latest Programming Innovations
tags: programming, innovation
---

By <a href="https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jexia?utm_campaign=Issue&amp;utm_content=topprofilename&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=Programming+Innovations" data-href="https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jexia?utm_campaign=Issue&amp;utm_content=topprofilename&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=Programming+Innovations" class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Jexia Experts</a> • Monthly newsletter • Issue #9 • <a href="https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jexia" data-href="https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jexia" class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Subscribe here</a> for free</p><figure name="a5e2" id="a5e2" class="graf graf--figure graf-after--p"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="max-width: 600px; max-height: 248px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder-fill" style="padding-bottom: 41.3%;"></div><div class="progressiveMedia js-progressiveMedia graf-image" data-image-id="1*ulL44XxDCHVt3PZn2mUrpQ.jpeg" data-width="600" data-height="248"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/freeze/max/30/1*ulL44XxDCHVt3PZn2mUrpQ.jpeg?q=20" crossorigin="anonymous" class="progressiveMedia-thumbnail js-progressiveMedia-thumbnail"><canvas class="progressiveMedia-canvas js-progressiveMedia-canvas"></canvas><img class="progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image" data-src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*ulL44XxDCHVt3PZn2mUrpQ.jpeg"><noscript class="js-progressiveMedia-inner"><img class="progressiveMedia-noscript js-progressiveMedia-inner" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*ulL44XxDCHVt3PZn2mUrpQ.jpeg"></noscript></div>

<p><strong>In-depth research into software engineering. Leading to new tools, approaches and systems. <a href="https://www.jexia.com">Jexia</a> expert engineers <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeljuliano/">Joel Bryan Juliano</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-geller-4b859676/">Mark Geller</a> provide you with the latest articles.</strong>

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<h2>Out of stealth mode:</h2>
<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/18/pulumi-wants-to-let-you-manage-your-infrastructure-with-code/?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">1. Pulumi lets you manage your infrastructure with code</a></strong>

<a href="https://www.pulumi.com/">Pulumi</a> wants to make it easier for developers and ops team to define their infrastructure by writing code.

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/11/shiftleft-promises-to-protect-your-code-even-when-you-ignore-security-threats/?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">2. Protected code even when you ignore security threats</a></strong>

<a href="https://www.shiftleft.io/">Shiftleft</a> says they are able to do that because they conduct a study of the code and all its dependencies before run time.

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/18/zenaton-lets-you-build-and-run-workflows-with-ease/?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">3. Zenaton lets you build and run workflows with ease</a></strong>

The French company <a href="https://zenaton.com/">Zenaton</a> wants to take care of the most tedious part of your application — asynchronous jobs and background tasks.
<h2>Assessable through repos and papers:</h2>
<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://droix2017.github.io/?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">4. Droix: automatically repair crashes in Android apps</a></strong>

Android apps are omnipresent, and frequently su?er from crashes <span style="background-color: transparent;">— leading to poor UX and economic loss. Also <a href="http://www.shinhwei.com/droixicse_camera.pdf">read the paper</a>.</span>

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://devpost.com/software/chainsoft?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations#updates">5. Software development outsourcing in the blockchain</a></strong>

Scientists present ChainSoft - a platform for outsourcing software <span style="background-color: transparent;">development and automatic payments between parties that distrust </span><span style="background-color: transparent;">each other, by means of blockchain</span><span style="background-color: transparent;">. Also read <a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3211934 technology">their paper</a>.</span>

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://github.com/tum-i22/Aletheia?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">6. Automatically reducing time spend on failure analysis</a></strong>

Testing and debugging are time-consuming. Aletheia helps devs and testers to reduce time on failure analysis. Also read <a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3183486">its paper</a> and watch the video.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BP9D68DO2ZI" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<h2>Only assessable by reading the papers:</h2>
<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3194965&amp;utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">7. Automatically answering API-related questions</a></strong>

SOTU automatically finds <span style="background-color: transparent;">answers for API-related natural language questions, from tutorials and Stack Overflow. </span>

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/compsac/2018/2666/00/266601a074-abs.html?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">8. Quickly understanding source code changes</a></strong>

Developers often save multiple kinds of source code edits into a commit in a version control system, which is dif?cult to understand and revert. With a visualisation tool scientists show better details of the changes and align edits in a tree structure for expressing multiple groups of changes.

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3196523&amp;utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">9. Le-git-imate: automatically verify Git Repositories</a></strong>

Web-based Git hosting services such as GitHub and GitLab are popular choices to manage and interact with Git repositories. However, <span style="background-color: transparent;">they lack an important security feature — the ability to sign Git </span><span style="background-color: transparent;">commits.</span>

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3195092&amp;utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">10. DWEN: detecting duplicate bug reports in repos</a></strong>

Capturing and tagging duplicate bug reports is crucial in order to avoid assignment of the same bug to di?erent <span style="background-color: transparent;">developers.</span>

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://www.matec-conferences.org/articles/matecconf/pdf/2018/32/matecconf_smima2018_03031.pdf?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">11. Automatically assign a bug report to the best fixer</a></strong>

<span style="background-color: transparent;">It is a very time-consuming task to assign a bug report to the most suitable fixer in large open source software projects.</span>

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~lintan/publications/webapi-msr18.pdf?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">12. D2Spec: automatically extract API specifications</a></strong>

API specs are machine-readable descriptions of APIs. In combination with related tooling, they simplify <span style="background-color: transparent;">and support API use. However, despite the fast growing amount of </span><span style="background-color: transparent;">APIs, specs are rare and their creation and maintenance now heavily rely on manual e?orts by third </span><span style="background-color: transparent;">parties</span><span style="background-color: transparent;">.</span>

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3183418&amp;utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">13. Automatically compare library quality by metrics </a></strong>

To perform a specific task, there is usually a large number of libraries that o?er the de<span style="background-color: transparent;">sired function. But selecting the appropriate library is not easy since developers are often unaware of their advantages and disadvantages.</span>

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.05130.pdf?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">14. Improve virtual assistance during dev's discussions</a></strong>

Scientists advance the state of <span style="background-color: transparent;">virtual assistants in software engineering. Virtual assistant technology is growing fast, but applications in developing software </span><span style="background-color: transparent;">are behind those in other areas. The researchers test automatic detection of speech act types in developer</span><span style="background-color: transparent;"> conversations about bug repair.</span>

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://guxd.github.io/papers/deepcs.pdf?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">15. Assign similar vectors to snippets and their outlines</a></strong>

<span style="background-color: transparent;">CODEnn jointly embeds code snippets </span><span style="background-color: transparent;">and natural language descriptions into a high-dimensional vector space, in such a way that code snippet and its corresponding description have similar vectors. </span>
<h2>Mark's special recommendations:</h2>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HgDdaMy8KNE" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018/CameraReady/2406.pdf?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">16. Spot humans through walls with a small transmitter</a></strong>

This paper demonstrates accurate human pose estimation through walls and occlusions. We leverage the fact that wireless signals in the WiFi frequencies traverse walls and reflect off the human body.

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://theblog.adobe.com/spotting-image-manipulation-ai/?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">17. Spotting Image Manipulation with AI</a></strong>

Adobe researcher Vlad applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to more easily, reliably and quickly detect whether or not a part of a digital image has been manipulated, and if so, what aspects were modified.

<strong style="display: block;"><a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.04833.pdf?utm_campaign=Revue%20newsletter&amp;utm_medium=Newsletter&amp;utm_source=Programming%20Innovations">18. Humans favour book story made by machine learning</a></strong>

Human judges prefer <span style="background-color: transparent;">stories generated by algorithms, constructed by Facebook's AI researchers, to those </span><span style="background-color: transparent;">from a strong non-hierarchical model.</span>
<h2>Finally, Mark shares some additional wisdom:</h2>
<img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/revue/items/images/003/148/925/original/Jexia-Mark.jpg?1530197734" alt="" /></p>