Publications

ICSPIS 2023 Full Program
Benjamin C. M. Fung
C Benjamin
Bashar Kilani
Khalid Yaqoob
Marshall Stephen
Khalid Yaqoob
Marshall Stephen
Three research directions in cybersecurity and privacy will be presented in this session.The first research direction is on privacy-preservi… (voir plus)ng data publishing.The objective is to share large volumes of data for machine learning without compromising the privacy of individuals.We will discuss multiple data sharing scenarios in privacy-preserving data publishing.The second research direction is on authorship analysis.The objective is to identify the author or infer the author's characteristics based on his/her writing styles.The third problem is on malware analysis.Assembly code analysis is one of the critical processes for mitigating the exponentially increasing threats from malicious software.However, it is a manually intensive and time-consuming process even for experienced reverse engineers.An effective and efficient assembly code clone search engine can greatly reduce the effort of this process.I will briefly describe our award-winning assembly clone search engine.
2022-12-31
International Conference on Signal Processing and Information Security (publié)
doi.org
Identification of Substitutable Context-Free Languages over Infinite Alphabets from Positive Data
Yutaro Numaya
Diptarama Hendrian
Ryo Yoshinaka
Ayumi Shinohara
François Coste
Faissal Ouardi
Guillaume Rabusseau
This paper is concerned with the identification in the limit from positive data of sub-stitutable context-free languages cfl s) over infinit… (voir plus)e alphabets. Clark and Eyraud (2007) showed that substitutable cfl s over finite alphabets are learnable in this learning paradigm. We show that substitutable cfl s generated by grammars whose production rules may have predicates that represent sets of potentially infinitely many terminal symbols in a compact manner are learnable if the terminal symbol sets represented by those predicates are learnable, under a certain condition. This can be seen as a result parallel to Argyros and D’Antoni’s work (2018) that amplifies the query learnability of predicate classes to that of symbolic automata classes. Our result is the first that shows such amplification is possible for identifying some cfl s in the limit from positive data.
2022-12-31
ICGI (publié)
dblp.uni-trier.de
Impact in Software Engineering Activities After One Year of COVID-19 Restrictions for Startups and Established Companies
Hosna Hooshyar
Eduardo Guerra
Jorge Melegati
Dron Khanna
Abdullah Aldaeej
Gerardo Matturro
Luciana Zaina
Des Greer
Usman Rafiq
Rafael Chanin
Xiaofeng Wang
Juan Garbajosa
Pekka Abrahamsson
Foutse Khomh
Anh Nguyen-Duc
The restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic required software development teams to adapt, being forced to work remotely and adjust the… (voir plus) software engineering activities accordingly. In the studies evaluating these effects, a few have assessed the impact on software engineering activities from a broader perspective and after a period of time when teams had time to adjust to the changes. No studies have been found comparing software startups and established companies either. This paper aims to investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on software development activities after one year of the pandemic restrictions, comparing the results between startups and established companies. Our approach was to design a cross-sectional survey and distribute it online among software development companies worldwide. The participants were asked about their perception of COVID-19’s pandemic impact on different software engineering activities: requirements engineering, software architecture, user experience design, software implementation, and software quality assurance. The survey received 170 valid answers from 29 countries, and for all the software engineering activities, we found that most respondents did not observe a significant impact. The results also showed that software startups and established companies were affected differently since, in some activities, we found a negative impact in the former and a positive impact in the latter. Regarding the time spent on each software engineering activity, most of the answers reported no change, but on those that did, the result points to an increase in time. Thus, we cannot find any relation between the change in time of effort and the reported positive or negative impact.
2022-12-31
IEEE Access (publié)
doi.org
In-Context Learning for Text Classification with Many Labels
Aristides Milios
Siva Reddy
Dzmitry Bahdanau
2022-12-31
GenBench @ Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Inferring multiple consensus trees and supertrees using clustering: a review
Vladimir Makarenkov
Gayane S. Barseghyan
Nadia Tahiri
2022-12-31
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
An Intentional Forgetting-Driven Self-Healing Method for Deep Reinforcement Learning Systems
Ahmed Haj Yahmed
Rached Bouchoucha
Houssem Ben Braiek
Foutse Khomh
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is increasingly applied in large-scale productions like Netflix and Facebook. As with most data-driven sys… (voir plus)tems, DRL systems can exhibit undesirable behaviors due to environmental drifts, which often occur in constantly-changing production settings. Continual Learning (CL) is the inherent self-healing approach for adapting the DRL agent in response to the environment's conditions shifts. However, successive shifts of considerable magnitude may cause the production environment to drift from its original state. Recent studies have shown that these environmental drifts tend to drive CL into long, or even unsuccessful, healing cycles, which arise from inefficiencies such as catastrophic forgetting, warm-starting failure, and slow convergence. In this paper, we propose Dr. DRL, an effective self-healing approach for DRL systems that integrates a novel mechanism of intentional forgetting into vanilla CL (i.e., standard CL) to overcome its main issues. Dr. DRL deliberately erases the DRL system's minor behaviors to systematically prioritize the adaptation of the key problem-solving skills. Using well-established DRL algorithms, Dr. DRL is compared with vanilla CL on various drifted environments. Dr. DRL is able to reduce, on average, the healing time and fine-tuning episodes by, respectively, 18.74% and 17.72%. Dr. DRL successfully helps agents to adapt to 19.63% of drifted environments left unsolved by vanilla CL while maintaining and even enhancing by up to 45% the obtained rewards for drifted environments that are resolved by both approaches.
2022-12-31
2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Invasion of Ukraine Discourse on TikTok Dataset
Benjamin D. Steel
Sara J. Parker
Derek Ruths
We present a dataset of videos and comments from the social media platform TikTok, centred around the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an event … (voir plus)that launched TikTok into the geopolitical arena. The discourse around the invasion exposed myriad political behaviours and dynamics that are unexplored on this platform. To this end we provide a mass scale language and interaction dataset for further research into these processes. An initial investigation of language and social interaction dynamics are explored in this paper. The dataset and the library used to collect it are open sourced to the public.
2022-12-31
arXiv.org (prépublication)
doi.org
Invited commentary on Stoehr J et al: The personal impact of involvement in international global health outreach: A national survey of former operation smile student volunteers.
Dan Poenaru
2022-12-31
Journal of Pediatric Surgery (publié)
doi.org
Iorl: Inductive-Offline-Reinforcement-Learning for Traffic Signal Control Warmstarting
François-Xavier Devailly
Denis Larocque
Laurent Charlin
2022-12-31
Social Science Research Network (publié)
doi.org
ivadomed: A Medical Imaging Deep Learning Toolbox
Charley Gros
Andréanne Lemay
Olivier Vincent
Lucas Rouhier
Anthime Bucquet
Julien Cohen-Adad
Julien Cohen-Adad
Julien Cohen-Adad
ivadomed is an open-source Python package for designing, end-to-end training, and evaluating deep learning models applied to medical imaging… (voir plus) data. The package includes APIs, command-line tools, documentation, and tutorials. ivadomed also includes pre-trained models such as spinal tumor segmentation and vertebral labeling. Original features of ivadomed include a data loader that can parse image metadata (e.g., acquisition parameters, image contrast, resolution) and subject metadata (e.g., pathology, age, sex) for custom data splitting or extra information during training and evaluation. Any dataset following the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) convention will be compatible with ivadomed without the need to manually organize the data, which is typically a tedious task. Beyond the traditional deep learning methods, ivadomed features cutting-edge architectures, such as FiLM and HeMis, as well as various uncertainty estimation methods (aleatoric and epistemic), and losses adapted to imbalanced classes and non-binary predictions. Each step is conveniently configurable via a single file. At the same time, the code is highly modular to allow addition/modification of an architecture or pre/post-processing steps. Example applications of ivadomed include MRI object detection, segmentation, and labeling of anatomical and pathological structures. Overall, ivadomed enables easy and quick exploration of the latest advances in deep learning for medical imaging applications. ivadomed's main project page is available at https://ivadomed.org.
2022-12-31
Zenodo (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Learning Syntactic Monoids from Samples by extending known Algorithms for learning State Machines
Simon Dieck
Sicco Verwer
François Coste
Faissal Ouardi
Guillaume Rabusseau
For the inference of regular languages, most current methods learn a version of deterministic finite automata. Syntactic monoids are an alte… (voir plus)rnative representation of regular languages, which have some advantages over automata. For example, traces can be parsed starting from any index and the star-freeness of the language they represent can be checked in polynomial time. But, to date, there existed no passive learning algorithm for syntactic monoids. In this paper, we prove that known state-merging algorithms for learning deterministic finite automata can be instrumented to learn syntactic monoids instead, by using as the input a special structure proposed in this paper: the interfix-graph. Further, we introduce a method to encode frequencies on the interfix-graph, such that models can also be learned from only positive traces. We implemented this structure and performed experiments with both traditional data and data containing only positive traces. As such this work answers basic theoretical and experimental questions regarding a novel passive learning algorithm for syntactic monoids.
2022-12-31
International Conference on Graphics and Interaction (publié)
dblp.uni-trier.de
List-GRAND: A Practical Way to Achieve Maximum Likelihood Decoding
Syed Mohsin Abbas
Marwan Jalaleddine
Warren J. Gross
Guessing random additive noise decoding (GRAND) is a recently proposed universal maximum likelihood (ML) decoder for short-length and high-r… (voir plus)ate linear block codes. Soft-GRAND (SGRAND) is a prominent soft-input GRAND variant, outperforming the other GRAND variants in decoding performance; nevertheless, SGRAND is not suitable for parallel hardware implementation. Ordered Reliability Bits-GRAND (ORBGRAND) is another soft-input GRAND variant that is suitable for parallel hardware implementation; however, it has lower decoding performance than SGRAND. In this article, we propose List-GRAND (LGRAND), a technique for enhancing the decoding performance of ORBGRAND to match the ML decoding performance of SGRAND. Numerical simulation results show that LGRAND enhances ORBGRAND’s decoding performance by 0.5–0.75 dB for channel codes of various classes at a target frame error rate (FER) of 10−7. For linear block codes of length 127/128 and different code rates, LGRAND’s VLSI implementation can achieve an average information throughput of 47.27–51.36 Gb/s. In comparison to ORBGRAND’s VLSI implementation, the proposed LGRAND hardware has a 4.84% area overhead.
2022-12-31
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org