26,098 papers · page 325 of 1,305
Abstract Session types describe patterns of interaction on communicating channels. Traditional session types include a form of choice whereby servers offer a collection of options, of which each client picks exactly one. This sort of choice constitutes a particular case of separa…
Abstract We develop a theory for two recently-proposed spreadsheet mechanisms: gridlets allow for abstraction and reuse in spreadsheets, and build on spilled arrays, where an array value spills out of one cell into nearby cells. We present the first formal calculus of spreadsheet…
Application-level packet filtering is a technique for network access control in which an “application-level gateway” intercepts network packets at the application level (e.g., HTTP, FTP), scans them for security concerns and optionally logs, rewrites or discards them. Existing ap…
Software systems that share potentially sensitive data are subjected to laws, regulations, policies and/or contracts. The monitoring, control and enforcement processes applied to these systems are currently to a large extent manual, which we rather automate by embedding the proce…
Software product lines are increasingly used to handle the growing demand of custom-tailored software variants. They provide systematic reuse of software paired with variability mechanisms in the code to implement whole product families rather than single software products. A com…
This paper is concerned with synthesizing programs based on black-box oracles: we are interested in the case where there exists an executable implementation of a component or library, but its internal structure is unknown. We are provided with just an API or function signature, a…
Model-based development approaches, such as Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), heavily rely on the use of modelling languages to achieve and automate software development tasks. To enable the definition of model variants (e.g., supporting the compact description of system families),…
Object-oriented programming, functional programming, and metaprogramming each offer a unique axis of abstraction that enables modular code. Macros, a common technique for metaprogramming, capture ASTs as quotes to let users manipulate them in the host language. However, macros ar…
Programmers declare variables to serve specific implementation purposes that we refer to as variable usage semantics (VUS). Understanding VUS is required for various software engineering tasks, including program comprehension, code audits, and vulnerability detection. To help pro…
Language-integrated query has attracted much attention from researchers and engineers. It enables one to write a database query with high-level abstractions, which makes it possible to compose, iterate, and reuse queries. An important issue in language-integrated query is the N+1…
Multi-stage programming (MSP) holds great promise, allowing the reliable generation of specialized, partially-evaluated code with static type- and scope-safety guarantees. Yet, we argue that MSP has not reached its full potential yet, as it has been traditionally limited to gener…
Satisfying real-time requirements in cyber-physical systems is challenging as timing behaviour depends on the application software, the embedded hardware, as well as the execution environment. This challenge is exacerbated as real-world, industrial systems often use unpredictable…
GUIs often contain structures that are incidental, not properly manipulatable through well-defined APIs. For example, modifying a list of items in a GUI's model may require extraneous bookkeeping operations in the view, such as adding and removing event handlers, and updating the…
Formal methods and tools have a long history of successful applications in the design of safety-critical railway products. However, most of the experiences focused on the application of a single method at once, and little work has been performed to compare the applicability of th…
Multithreaded programs can have deadlocks, even after deployment, so users may want to run deadlock tools on deployed programs. However, current deadlock predictors such as MagicLock and UnDead have large overheads that make them impractical for end-user deployment and confine th…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are the core component of modern autonomous driving systems. To date, it is still unrealistic that a DNN will generalize correctly to all driving conditions. Current testing techniques consist of offline solutions that identify adversarial or corner ca…
Test-based automated program repair has been a prolific field of research in software engineering in the last decade. Many approaches have indeed been proposed, which leverage test suites as a weak, but affordable, approximation to program specifications. Although the literature …
Context: Following on other scientific disciplines, such as health sciences, the use of Grey Literature (GL) has become widespread in Software Engineering (SE) research. Whilst the number of papers incorporating GL in SE is increasing, there is little empirically known about diff…
A user's review of an app often describes the user's interactions with the app. These interactions, which we interpret as mini stories, are prominent in reviews with negative ratings. In general, a story in an app review would contain at least two types of events: user actions an…
Floating point is widely used in software to emulate arithmetic over reals. Unfortunately, floating point leads to rounding errors that propagate and accumulate during execution. Generating inputs to maximize the numerical error is critical when evaluating the accuracy of floatin…