Multi-Scale Link Prediction

The automated analysis of social networks has become an important problem due to the proliferation of social networks, such as LiveJournal, Flickr and Facebook. The scale of these social networks is massive and continues to grow rapidly. An important problem in social network analysis is proximity estimation that infers the closeness of different users. Link prediction, in turn, is an important application of proximity estimation. However, many methods for computing proximity measures have high computational complexity and are thus prohibitive for large-scale link prediction problems. One way to address this problem is to estimate proximity measures via low-rank approximation. However, a single low-rank approximation may not be sufficient to represent the behavior of the entire network. In this paper, we propose Multi-Scale Link Prediction (MSLP), a framework for link prediction, which can handle massive networks. The basis idea of MSLP is to construct low rank approximations of the network at multiple scales in an efficient manner. Based on this approach, MSLP combines predictions at multiple scales to make robust and accurate predictions. Experimental results on real-life datasets with more than a million nodes show the superior performance and scalability of our method.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figure

Automata Tutor v3

Computer science class enrollments have rapidly risen in the past decade. With current class sizes, standard approaches to grading and providing personalized feedback are no longer possible and new techniques become both feasible and necessary. In this paper, we present the third version of Automata Tutor, a tool for helping teachers and students in large courses on automata and formal languages. The second version of Automata Tutor supported automatic grading and feedback for finite-automata constructions and has already been used by thousands of users in dozens of countries. This new version of Automata Tutor supports automated grading and feedback generation for a greatly extended variety of new problems, including problems that ask students to create regular expressions, context-free grammars, pushdown automata and Turing machines corresponding to a given description, and problems about converting between equivalent models - e.g., from regular expressions to nondeterministic finite automata. Moreover, for several problems, this new version also enables teachers and students to automatically generate new problem instances. We also present the results of a survey run on a class of 950 students, which shows very positive results about the usability and usefulness of the tool

Automated Fixing of Programs with Contracts

This paper describes AutoFix, an automatic debugging technique that can fix faults in general-purpose software. To provide high-quality fix suggestions and to enable automation of the whole debugging process, AutoFix relies on the presence of simple specification elements in the form of contracts (such as pre- and postconditions). Using contracts enhances the precision of dynamic analysis techniques for fault detection and localization, and for validating fixes. The only required user input to the AutoFix supporting tool is then a faulty program annotated with contracts; the tool produces a collection of validated fixes for the fault ranked according to an estimate of their suitability. In an extensive experimental evaluation, we applied AutoFix to over 200 faults in four code bases of different maturity and quality (of implementation and of contracts). AutoFix successfully fixed 42% of the faults, producing, in the majority of cases, corrections of quality comparable to those competent programmers would write; the used computational resources were modest, with an average time per fix below 20 minutes on commodity hardware. These figures compare favorably to the state of the art in automated program fixing, and demonstrate that the AutoFix approach is successfully applicable to reduce the debugging burden in real-world scenarios.Comment: Minor changes after proofreadin

Some aspects of grading Java code submissions in MOOCs

Recently, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been offering a new online approach in the field of distance learning and online education. A typical MOOC course consists of video lectures, reading material and easily accessible tests for students. For a computer programming course, it is important to provide interactive, dynamic, online coding exercises and more complex programming assignments for learners. It is expedient for the students to receive prompt feedback on their coding submissions. Although MOOC automated programme evaluation subsystem is capable of assessing source programme files that are in learning management systems, in MOOC systems there is a grader that is responsible for evaluating students’ assignments with the result that course staff would be required to assess thousands of programmes submitted by the participants of the course without the benefit of an automatic grader. This paper presents a new concept for grading programming submissions of students and improved techniques based on the Java unit testing framework that enables automatic grading of code chunks. Some examples are also given such as the creation of unique exercises by dynamically generating the parameters of the assignment in a MOOC programming course combined with the kind of coding style recognition to teach coding standards