Sunday, September 11, 2011

Camera-ready Versions of ASE 2011 Papers Available

See the Publications page
  1. Kai Pan, Xintao Wu, and Tao Xie.
    Generating Program Inputs for Database Application Testing.

    In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
    (ASE 2011), Lawrence, Kansas, November 2011.
    Download: [PDF][BibTeX]

  2. Qian Wu, Guangtai Liang, Qianxiang Wang, Tao Xie, and Hong Mei.
    Iterative Mining of Resource-Releasing Specifications.

    In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
    (ASE 2011), Lawrence, Kansas, November 2011.
    Download: [PDF][BibTeX]

  3. Wujie Zheng, Hao Ma, Michael R. Lyu, Tao Xie, and Irwin King.
    Mining Test Oracles of Web Search Engines.

    In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
    (ASE 2011), Short Paper, Lawrence, Kansas, November 2011.
    Download: [PDF][BibTeX]

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

A Tutorial on eXtreme Software Analytics at ASE 2011

Later register the tutorial by

Dongmei Zhang (Microsoft Research Asia) and Tao Xie (North Carolina State University).
xSA: eXtreme Software Analytics - Marriage of eXtreme Computing and Software Analytics.
A tutorial at the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011), Tutorial, Lawrence, Kansas, November 2011.

2 full papers + 1 short paper at ASE 2011

Kai Pan, Xintao Wu, and Tao Xie.
Generating Program Inputs for Database Application Testing.
In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011), Lawrence, Kansas, November 2011.
Download: [BibTeX]

Qian Wu, Guangtai Liang, Qianxiang Wang, Tao Xie, and Hong Mei.
Iterative Mining of Resource-Releasing Specifications.
In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011), Lawrence, Kansas, November 2011.
Download: [BibTeX]

Wujie Zheng, Hao Ma, Michael R. Lyu, Tao Xie, and Irwin King.
Mining Test Oracles of Web Search Engines.
In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011), Short Paper, Lawrence, Kansas, November 2011.
Download: [BibTeX]

Congratulations to Suresh Thummalapenta for his OOPSLA 2011 paper

Suresh Thummalapenta, Tao Xie, Nikolai Tillmann, Jonathan de Halleux, and Zhendong Su.
Synthesizing Method Sequences for High-Coverage Testing.
In Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2011), Portland, Oregon, October 2011.
Download: [BibTeX]

Congratulations to Kunal Taneja for his ESEC/FSE 2011 paper

Kunal Taneja, Mark Grechanik, Rayid Ghani, and Tao Xie.
Testing Software In Age Of Data Privacy: A Balancing Act.
In Proceedings of the 8th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2011), Szeged, Hungary, September 2011.
Download: [PDF][BibTeX]

A Technical Briefing on Text Analytics for Software Engineering at ESEC/FSE 2011

Register now for Technical Briefings at ESEC/FSE 2011, including

Lin Tan and Tao Xie. Text Analytics for Software Engineering: Applications of Natural Language Processing. A Technical Briefing at the 8th joint meeting of the http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifEuropeanhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2011), Szeged, Hungary, September 2011.

Abstract

Software engineering data contains a rich amount of natural language text: requirements documents, code comments, identifier names, commit logs, release notes, mailing list discussions, etc. The natural language text is essential in the software engineering process to help software engineers and researchers better understand and maintain software. Given the overwhelming amount of available natural language text, there is a high demand of text analytics including natural language processing (NLP) and text mining techniques to automatically analyze the natural language text to improve software quality and productivity. The history of applying NLP and text mining techniques to analyze software engineering data can date back to about a decade ago. In recent five years, text analytics for software engineering has become an emerging topic in the software engineering area. Various recent studies showed that automated analysis of natural language text can improve software reliability, programming productivity, software maintenance, and software quality in general.

This technical briefing (1) provides a quick overview of major text mining techniques as well as NLP techniques (e.g., Part-Of-Speech tagging, chunking, semantic labeling, semantic pattern matching, and negative-expression identification), machine learning techniques (e.g., clustering and decision-tree-based classification), and data mining techniques (e.g., frequent itemset mining); (2) introduces popular text analysis tools (e.g., WordNet and Weka); (3) summarizes major research work done in the area of text analytics for software engineering; and (4) outlines future research directions and highlights research challenges. More information on the technical briefing could be found at https://sites.google.com/site/text4se/.

The ESEC/FSE program includes a complementary technical briefing on “Management of Unstructured Information during Software Evolution: Applications of Text Retrieval”, by Andrian Marcus. We recommend attending both of them.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Congratulations to Kunal Taneja for his ISSTA 2011 paper

Kunal Taneja, Tao Xie, Nikolai Tillmann, and Jonathan de Halleux.
eXpress: Guided Path Exploration for Efficient Regression Test Generation.
In Proceedings of the 2011 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
(ISSTA 2011), Toronto, Canada, July 2011. Acceptance ratio: 29% (35/121)
Download: [BibTeX]
[Project Web]

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Xiao Selected for Cascadia Innovation Fellowship

http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/news/1138

Xusheng Xiao, a doctoral student in the NC State Department of Computer Science, has been selected one of 10 recipients of the Cascadia Innovation Fellowship. Xiao was selected out of 20 finalists and almost 300 applicants from colleges in the U.S. and Canada.
The Cascadia Innovation Fellowship connects world-class computer science and engineering students with some of Seattle’s top technology startups. The paid summer internships and $5,000 scholarships are a small part of the rich experience the Fellowship will create for the participants. The Seattle technology community will support the fellows and provide them with networking, education, and insights that will benefit them as they finish school and well beyond into their career.

Xiao is advised by Dr. Tao Xie.

For more information on the Cascadia Innovation Fellowship, click here.

For more information on Xusheng Xiao, click here.

Hwang and Xiao Finalists in National Security Competition

http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/news/1141

Congratulations to NC State Computer Science PhD students JeeHyun Hwang and Xusheng Xiao for being selected as finalists for the Fifth Annual National Security Innovation Competition (NSIC) at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO on April 29, 2011.
Their project, “Construction and Validation of Access Control Policies via Natural Language Processing and Policy Verification,” is one of 10 out of 25 that were assessed by a set of over 40 first-round peer-review judges who are scientists and technologists with industry and government.

The 10 finalists must prepare a project-briefing poster, and will have 30 minutes to present their projects (20 minutes for the presentation, five minutes for questions and answers, and five minutes for judges to record scores and notes). The top three projects will be chosen and prizes awarded as follows: first place - $10,000 scholarship; second place - $5,000 scholarship; and third place - $2,500 scholarship.

The purpose of the NSIC is to stimulate college student interest to address national security problem solving by exposing their university-sponsored projects to a broad audience including industry, academic, and government organizations involved in aerospace, defense, security, and first responder activities.

Hwang and Xiao are advised by Dr. Tao Xie.

For more information on the NSIC competition, click here.

For more information on Hwang, click here.

For more information on Xiao, click here.

Gorham Selected to Attend Richard Tapia Conference

http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/news/1134

Justin Gorham, a doctoral student in the NC State Department of Computer Science, has been sponsored for participation in the 2011 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity Conference (Tapia Conference) to be held on April 3-5, 2011 in San Francisco, CA. Through the Tapia Conference Scholarship Program, he has received a scholarship to cover conference registration, hotel, and travel expenses.
On April 2 immediately preceding the Tapia 2011 Conference, Gorham will participate in the Doctoral Consortium, a one-day workshop that will provide an opportunity for PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives with a panel of established researchers in computing and in computational mathematics, science and engineering.

At the Tapia 2011 Doctoral Consortium, Gorham will present his PhD research on "Recovering Configuration Information for Configurable Systems via Symbolic Execution".

Gorham is advised by Dr. Tao Xie.

For more information on the Tapia 2011 Conference, click here.

For more information on Justin Gorham, click here.

Xie Named ACM Distinguished Speaker

http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/news/1130

Dr. Tao Xie, associate professor of computer science at NC State University, has been named an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Speaker.
The ACM Distinguished Speaker Program (DSP) is an outreach program of ACM that brings distinguished speakers from academia, industry, and government to give presentations to ACM chapters, members, and the greater IT community in a variety of venues and formats. DSP has always operated in the spirit of service and outreach. Its goals are to provide some of the best content ACM has to offer through its network of high quality speakers and to facilitate professional networking.

The DSP Committee votes on the acceptability of a nominated speaker based on his or her CV and most recent three years' talks/speeches/short courses/presentations. Additionally, speakers must have a minimum of five years experience (either in academia or industry or a combination of both).

For more information on the Distinguished Speaker Program, click here.

To view Dr. Xie's entry in the Distinguished Speaker Program, click here.

For more information on Dr. Xie, click here.

Congratulations to Hao Zhong and Suresh Thummalapenta for their respective articles accepted in ASEJ - A special issue of selected papers of ASE 09

Hao Zhong, Lu Zhang, Tao Xie, and Hong Mei. Inferring Specifications for Resources from Natural Language API Documentation. Automated Software Engineering Journal, 2011. A special issue of selected papers from the ASE 2009 conference.
A previous version appeared in Proceedings of ASE 2009. Received the Best Paper Award and ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.

Suresh Thummalapenta and Tao Xie. Alattin: Mining Alternative Patterns for Defect Detection. Automated Software Engineering Journal, 2011. A special issue of selected papers from the ASE 2009 conference.
A previous version appeared in Proceedings of ASE 2009.

Monday, March 7, 2011

A CSEE&T 2011 Tutorial on Pex4Fun: Teaching and Learning Computer Science via Social Gaming

Time: May 22 Sunday Afternoon Session 2 3:30-5:00 (CSEE&T 2011)

Presenters Nikolai Tillmann (Microsoft Research), Jonathan de Halleux (Microsoft Research), and Tao Xie (North Carolina State University)

Tutorial Web

Tutorial Summary


Pex4Fun from Microsoft Research is a web-based serious gaming environment for teaching computer science. Pex4Fun can be used to teach and learn computer programming at many levels, from high school all the way through graduate courses. With Pex4Fun, a student edits code in any browser – with Intellisense – and Pex4Fun executes it and analyzes it in the cloud. Pex4Fun connects teachers, curriculum authors, and students in a unique social experience, tracking and streaming progress updates in real time. In particular, Pex4Fun finds interesting and unexpected input values that help students understand what their code is actually doing. The real fun starts with coding duels where students write code to implement a teacher’s specification. Pex4Fun finds any discrepancies in behavior between the student’s code and the specification.

This tutorial equips participants with skills and knowledge of using Pex4Fun in teaching and learning, such as solving puzzles, solving coding duels, exploring course materials in feature courses, creating and teaching a course, creating and publishing coding duels, and learning advanced topics behind Pex4Fun.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

A New Post on "Student Advising + Critical Skills for Research/Career Development "

Student Advising + Critical Skills for Research/Career Development

Congratulations to Xusheng Xiao for his ICSE 2011 Research Track Paper, Demo Paper, and ACM Student Research Competition Paper

Congratulations to Xusheng Xiao for his ICSE 2011 Research Track Paper, Demo Paper, and ACM Student Research Competition Paper!!! A great turnout at ICSE 2011 as a second-year PhD student!

[ICSE 11] Xusheng Xiao, Tao Xie, Nikolai Tillmann, and Jonathan de Halleux. Precise Identification of Problems for Structural Test Generation. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011), Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2011. [BibTeX]

[ICSE 11 DE] Xusheng Xiao, Tao Xie, Nikolai Tillmann, and Jonathan de Halleux. Covana: Precise Identification of Problems in Pex. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011), Demonstration, Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2011. [BibTeX]

[ICSE 11 SRC] Xusheng Xiao. Problem Identification for Structural Test Generation: First Step Towards Cooperative Developer Testing. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011), ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2011. [PDF] [BibTex]

Congratulations to Xusheng Xiao, Xi Ge, and Kunal Taneja for 2*ICSE 2011 Demos

Out of 60 submissions, the Demonstration Track for ICSE 2011 accepted 22 submissions. Congratulations to Xusheng Xiao, Xi Ge, and Kunal Taneja for 2*ICSE 2011 Demos!

[ICSE 11 DE] Xusheng Xiao, Tao Xie, Nikolai Tillmann, and Jonathan de Halleux. Covana: Precise Identification of Problems in Pex. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011), Demonstration, Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2011. [BibTeX]

[ICSE 11 DE] Xi Ge, Kunal Taneja, Tao Xie, and Nikolai Tillmann. DyTa: Dynamic Symbolic Execution Guided with Static Verification Results. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011), Demonstration, Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2011. [BibTeX]

Xie Named IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor

NCSU CSC Dept News

Dr. Tao Xie, associate professor of computer science at NC State University, has been named an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor for 2011-2013.
The IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitors Program (DVP) was initiated in 1971 by Dr. Stephen Yau. It is a popular offering of first quality speakers serving IEEE Computer Society professional and student chapters. The DVP owes its success to the many volunteers and staff members of the Computer Society who generously contribute their time and talent.

Speakers are selected by the DVP Committee, and are recognized authorities in their respective fields. They must be members of the Computer Society, and offer topics of interest to the general membership.

For more information on the Distinguished Visitor Program, click here.

To view Dr. Xie's entry in the Distinguished Visitor Program, click here.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Two FASE 2011 papers are online

Suresh Thummalapenta, Madhuri Marri, Tao Xie, Nikolai Tillmann, and Jonathan de Halleux. Retrofitting Unit Tests for Parameterized Unit Testing. In Proceedings of International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE 2011), Saarbrücken, Germany, March-April 2011.
Download: [BibTeX][PDF]

Lin Shi, Hao Zhong, Tao Xie, and Mingshu Li. An Empirical Study on Evolution of API Documentation. In Proceedings of International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE 2011), Saarbrücken, Germany, March-April 2011.
Download: [BibTeX][PDF]

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