Semi-automatic assessment of unrestrained Java code: a Library, a DSL, and a workbench to assess exams and exercises

© ACM 2015. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2729094.2742615Automated marking of multiple-choice exams is of great interest in university courses with a large number of students. For this reason, it has been systematically implanted in almost all universities. Automatic assessment of source code is however less extended. There are several reasons for that. One reason is that almost all existing systems are based on output comparison with a gold standard. If the output is the expected, the code is correct. Otherwise, it is reported as wrong, even if there is only one typo in the code. Moreover, why it is wrong remains a mystery. In general, assessment tools treat the code as a black box, and they only assess the externally observable behavior. In this work we introduce a new code assessment method that also verifies properties of the code, thus allowing to mark the code even if it is only partially correct. We also report about the use of this system in a real university context, showing that the system automatically assesses around 50% of the work.This work has been partially supported by the EU (FEDER) and the Spanish Ministerio de Economíay Competitividad (Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación) under grant TIN2013-44742-C4-1-R and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEOII2015/013. David Insa was partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación under FPU grant AP2010-4415.Insa Cabrera, D.; Silva, J. (2015). Semi-automatic assessment of unrestrained Java code: a Library, a DSL, and a workbench to assess exams and exercises. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2729094.2742615SK. A Rahman and M. Jan Nordin. A review on the static analysis approach in the automated programming assessment systems. In National Conference on Programming 07, 2007.K. Ala-Mutka. A survey of automated assessment approaches for programming assignments. In Computer Science Education, volume 15, pages 83--102, 2005.C. Beierle, M. Kula, and M. Widera. Automatic analysis of programming assignments. In Proc. der 1. E-Learning Fachtagung Informatik (DeLFI '03), volume P-37, pages 144--153, 2003.J. Biggs and C. Tang. Teaching for Quality Learning at University : What the Student Does (3rd Edition). In Open University Press, 2007.P. Denny, A. Luxton-Reilly, E. Tempero, and J. Hendrickx. CodeWrite: Supporting student-driven practice of java. In Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education, pages 09--12, 2011.R. Hendriks. Automatic exam correction. 2012.P. Ihantola, T. Ahoniemi, V. Karavirta, and O. Seppala. Review of recent systems for automatic assessment of programming assignments. In Proceedings of the 10th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research, pages 86--93, 2010.H. Kitaya and U. Inoue. An online automated scoring system for Java programming assignments. In International Journal of Information and Education Technology, volume 6, pages 275--279, 2014.M.-J. Laakso, T. Salakoski, A. Korhonen, and L. Malmi. Automatic assessment of exercises for algorithms and data structures - a case study with TRAKLA2. In Proceedings of Kolin Kolistelut/Koli Calling - Fourth Finnish/Baltic Sea Conference on Computer Science Education, pages 28--36, 2004.Y. Liang, Q. Liu, J. Xu, and D. Wang. The recent development of automated programming assessment. In Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering, pages 1--5, 2009.K. A. Naudé, J. H. Greyling, and D. Vogts. Marking student programs using graph similarity. In Computers & Education, volume 54, pages 545--561, 2010.A. Pears, S. Seidman, C. Eney, P. Kinnunen, and L. Malmi. Constructing a core literature for computing education research. In SIGCSE Bulletin, volume 37, pages 152--161, 2005.F. Prados, I. Boada, J. Soler, and J. Poch. Automatic generation and correction of technical exercices. In International Conference on Engineering and Computer Education (ICECE 2005), 2005.M. Supic, K. Brkic, T. Hrkac, Z. Mihajlovic, and Z. Kalafatic. Automatic recognition of handwritten corrections for multiple-choice exam answer sheets. In Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO), pages 1136--1141, 2014.S. Tung, T. Lin, and Y. Lin. An exercise management system for teaching programming. In Journal of Software, 2013.T. Wang, X. Su, Y. Wang, and P. Ma. Semantic similarity-based grading of student programs. In Information and Software Technology, volume 49, pages 99--107, 2007

On potential cognitive abilities in the machine kingdom

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9299-6Animals, including humans, are usually judged on what they could become, rather than what they are. Many physical and cognitive abilities in the ‘animal kingdom’ are only acquired (to a given degree) when the subject reaches a certain stage of development, which can be accelerated or spoilt depending on how the environment, training or education is. The term ‘potential ability’ usually refers to how quick and likely the process of attaining the ability is. In principle, things should not be different for the ‘machine kingdom’. While machines can be characterised by a set of cognitive abilities, and measuring them is already a big challenge, known as ‘universal psychometrics’, a more informative, and yet more challenging, goal would be to also determine the potential cognitive abilities of a machine. In this paper we investigate the notion of potential cognitive ability for machines, focussing especially on universality and intelligence. We consider several machine characterisations (non-interactive and interactive) and give definitions for each case, considering permanent and temporal potentials. From these definitions, we analyse the relation between some potential abilities, we bring out the dependency on the environment distribution and we suggest some ideas about how potential abilities can be measured. Finally, we also analyse the potential of environments at different levels and briefly discuss whether machines should be designed to be intelligent or potentially intelligent.We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have helped to significantly improve this paper. This work was supported by the MEC-MINECO projects CONSOLIDER-INGENIO CSD2007-00022 and TIN 2010-21062-C02-02, GVA project PROMETEO/2008/051, the COST - European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research IC0801 AT. Finally, we thank three pioneers ahead of their time(s). We thank Ray Solomonoff (1926-2009) and Chris Wallace (1933-2004) for all that they taught us, directly and indirectly. And, in his centenary year, we thank Alan Turing (1912-1954), with whom it perhaps all began.Hernández-Orallo, J.; Dowe, DL. (2013). On potential cognitive abilities in the machine kingdom. Minds and Machines. 23(2):179-210. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9299-6S179210232Amari, S., Fujita, N., Shinomoto, S. (1992). Four types of learning curves. Neural Computation 4(4), 605–618.Aristotle (Translation, Introduction, and Commentary by Ross, W.D.) (1924). Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Barmpalias, G. & Dowe, D. L. (2012). 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Forster (Eds), Handbook of the philosophy of science—Volume 7: Philosophy of statistics (pp. 901–982). Amsterdam: Elsevier.Dowe, D. L. & Hajek, A. R. (1997a). A computational extension to the turing test. Technical report #97/322, Dept Computer Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, 9 pp, http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/publications/1997/tr-cs97-322-abs.html .Dowe, D. L. & Hajek, A. R. (1997b, September). A computational extension to the Turing Test. in Proceedings of the 4th conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society, University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia, 9 pp.Dowe, D. L. & Hajek, A. R. (1998, February). A non-behavioural, computational extension to the Turing Test. In: International conference on computational intelligence and multimedia applications (ICCIMA’98), Gippsland, Australia, pp 101–106.Dowe, D. L., Hernández-Orallo, J. (2012). IQ tests are not for machines, yet. Intelligence, 40(2), 77–81.Gallistel, C. R., Fairhurst, S., & Balsam, P. (2004). 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(Eds.), Proceedings of 3rd international conference on artificial general intelligence (pp. 25–30). New York: Atlantis Press.Hernández-Orallo, J., & Dowe, D. L. (2010). Measuring universal intelligence: Towards an anytime intelligence test. Artificial Intelligence, 174(18), 1508–1539.Hernández-Orallo, J. & Dowe, D. L. (2011, April). Mammals, machines and mind games. Who’s the smartest?. The conversation, http://theconversation.edu.au/mammals-machines-and-mind-games-whos-the-smartest-566 .Hernández-Orallo J., Dowe D. L., España-Cubillo S., Hernández-Lloreda M. V., & Insa-Cabrera J. (2011). On more realistic environment distributions for defining, evaluating and developing intelligence. In: J. Schmidhuber, K. R. Thórisson, & M. Looks (Eds.), Artificial general intelligence 2011, volume 6830, LNAI series, pp. 82–91. New York: Springer.Hernández-Orallo, J., Dowe, D. L., & Hernández-Lloreda, M. V. (2012a, March). 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Siamese hierarchical attention networks for extractive summarization

[EN] In this paper, we present an extractive approach to document summarization based on Siamese Neural Networks. Specifically, we propose the use of Hierarchical Attention Networks to select the most relevant sentences of a text to make its summary. We train Siamese Neural Networks using document-summary pairs to determine whether the summary is appropriated for the document or not. By means of a sentence-level attention mechanism the most relevant sentences in the document can be identified. Hence, once the network is trained, it can be used to generate extractive summaries. The experimentation carried out using the CNN/DailyMail summarization corpus shows the adequacy of the proposal. In summary, we propose a novel end-to-end neural network to address extractive summarization as a binary classification problem which obtains promising results in-line with the state-of-the-art on the CNN/DailyMail corpus.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish MINECO and FEDER founds under project AMIC (TIN2017-85854-C4-2-R). Work of Jose-Angel Gonzalez is also financed by Universitat Politecnica de Valencia under grant PAID-01-17.González-Barba, JÁ.; Segarra Soriano, E.; García-Granada, F.; Sanchís Arnal, E.; Hurtado Oliver, LF. (2019). Siamese hierarchical attention networks for extractive summarization. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems. 36(5):4599-4607. https://doi.org/10.3233/JIFS-179011S45994607365N. Begum , M. Fattah , and F. Ren . Automatic text summarization using support vector machine 5(7) (2009), 1987–1996.J. Cheng and M. Lapata . Neural summarization by extracting sentences and words. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2016, August 7-12, 2016, Berlin, Germany, Volume 1: Long Papers, 2016.K.M. Hermann , T. Kocisky , E. Grefenstette , L. Espeholt , W. Kay , M. Suleyman , and P. Blunsom . Teaching machines to read and comprehend, CoRR, abs/1506.03340, 2015.D.P. Kingma and J. Ba . Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. CoRR, abs/1412.6980, 2014.Lloret, E., & Palomar, M. (2011). Text summarisation in progress: a literature review. Artificial Intelligence Review, 37(1), 1-41. doi:10.1007/s10462-011-9216-zLouis, A., & Nenkova, A. (2013). Automatically Assessing Machine Summary Content Without a Gold Standard. Computational Linguistics, 39(2), 267-300. doi:10.1162/coli_a_00123Miao, Y., & Blunsom, P. (2016). Language as a Latent Variable: Discrete Generative Models for Sentence Compression. Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. doi:10.18653/v1/d16-1031R. Mihalcea and P. Tarau . Textrank: Bringing order into text. In Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2004.T. Mikolov , K. Chen , G. S. Corrado , and J. Dean . Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space, CoRR, abs/1301.3781, 2013.Minaee, S., & Liu, Z. (2017). Automatic question-answering using a deep similarity neural network. 2017 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP). doi:10.1109/globalsip.2017.8309095R. Paulus , C. Xiong , and R. Socher , A deep reinforced model for abstractive summarization. CoRR, abs/1705.04304, 2017.Schuster, M., & Paliwal, K. K. (1997). Bidirectional recurrent neural networks. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 45(11), 2673-2681. doi:10.1109/78.650093See, A., Liu, P. J., & Manning, C. D. (2017). Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks. Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). doi:10.18653/v1/p17-1099Takase, S., Suzuki, J., Okazaki, N., Hirao, T., & Nagata, M. (2016). Neural Headline Generation on Abstract Meaning Representation. Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. doi:10.18653/v1/d16-1112G. Tur and R. De Mori . Spoken language understanding: Systems for extracting semantic information from speech, John Wiley & Sons, 2011

Attack-Surface Metrics, OSSTMM and Common Criteria Based Approach to “Composable Security” in Complex Systems

In recent studies on Complex Systems and Systems-of-Systems theory, a huge effort has been put to cope with behavioral problems, i.e. the possibility of controlling a desired overall or end-to-end behavior by acting on the individual elements that constitute the system itself. This problem is particularly important in the “SMART” environments, where the huge number of devices, their significant computational capabilities as well as their tight interconnection produce a complex architecture for which it is difficult to predict (and control) a desired behavior; furthermore, if the scenario is allowed to dynamically evolve through the modification of both topology and subsystems composition, then the control problem becomes a real challenge. In this perspective, the purpose of this paper is to cope with a specific class of control problems in complex systems, the “composability of security functionalities”, recently introduced by the European Funded research through the pSHIELD and nSHIELD projects (ARTEMIS-JU programme). In a nutshell, the objective of this research is to define a control framework that, given a target security level for a specific application scenario, is able to i) discover the system elements, ii) quantify the security level of each element as well as its contribution to the security of the overall system, and iii) compute the control action to be applied on such elements to reach the security target. The main innovations proposed by the authors are: i) the definition of a comprehensive methodology to quantify the security of a generic system independently from the technology and the environment and ii) the integration of the derived metrics into a closed-loop scheme that allows real-time control of the system. The solution described in this work moves from the proof-of-concepts performed in the early phase of the pSHIELD research and enrich es it through an innovative metric with a sound foundation, able to potentially cope with any kind of pplication scenarios (railways, automotive, manufacturing, ...)

Theoretical Design and Analysis of Multivolume Digital Assays with Wide Dynamic Range Validated Experimentally with Microfluidic Digital PCR

This paper presents a protocol using theoretical methods and free software to design and analyze multivolume digital PCR (MV digital PCR) devices; the theory and software are also applicable to design and analysis of dilution series in digital PCR. MV digital PCR minimizes the total number of wells required for “digital” (single molecule) measurements while maintaining high dynamic range and high resolution. In some examples, multivolume designs with fewer than 200 total wells are predicted to provide dynamic range with 5-fold resolution similar to that of single-volume designs requiring 12 000 wells. Mathematical techniques were utilized and expanded to maximize the information obtained from each experiment and to quantify performance of devices and were experimentally validated using the SlipChip platform. MV digital PCR was demonstrated to perform reliably, and results from wells of different volumes agreed with one another. No artifacts due to different surface-to-volume ratios were observed, and single molecule amplification in volumes ranging from 1 to 125 nL was self-consistent. The device presented here was designed to meet the testing requirements for measuring clinically relevant levels of HIV viral load at the point-of-care (in plasma, 1 000 000 molecules/mL), and the predicted resolution and dynamic range was experimentally validated using a control sequence of DNA. This approach simplifies digital PCR experiments, saves space, and thus enables multiplexing using separate areas for each sample on one chip, and facilitates the development of new high-performance diagnostic tools for resource-limited applications. The theory and software presented here are general and are applicable to designing and analyzing other digital analytical platforms including digital immunoassays and digital bacterial analysis. It is not limited to SlipChip and could also be useful for the design of systems on platforms including valve-based and droplet-based platforms. In a separate publication by Shen et al. (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2011, DOI: 10.1021/ja2060116), this approach is used to design and test digital RT-PCR devices for quantifying RNA

An Approach for Actions to Prevent Suicides on Commuter and Metro Rail Systems in the United States, MTI Report 12-33

The primary goals of this report are to discuss measures to prevent suicides on commuter and metro rail systems, and to outline an approach for suicide prevention on rail systems. Based on existing literature and analysis of data obtained from the Metrolink system in Southern California, it was found that most suicides occur near station platforms and near access points to the track. Suicides occurred most frequently when relatively more trains were in operation and in areas of high population density. There do not appear to be suicide “hot spots” (e.g., linked to mental hospitals in the proximity, etc.), based on data analyzed for U.S. systems. The suicide prevention measures range from relatively inexpensive signs posting call-for-help suicide hotline information to costly platform barriers that physically prevent people from jumping onto tracks in front of trains. Other prevention measures fall within this range, such as hotlines available at high frequency suicide locations, or surveillance systems that can report possible suicide attempts and provide the opportunity for intervention tactics. Because of the relatively low number of suicides on rail systems, as compared to the overall number of suicides in general, a cost-effective strategy for preventing suicides on rail systems should be approached in a very focused manner. The prevention measures executed by the rail authorities should be focused on the suicides occurring on the rail systems themselves, while the broader problem of suicides should be left to community-based prevention efforts. Moreover, prevention measures, such as surveillance and response, could “piggyback” on surveillance and response systems used for other purposes on the rail systems to make such projects economically feasible

Measuring information-transfer delays

In complex networks such as gene networks, traffic systems or brain circuits it is important to understand how long it takes for the different parts of the network to effectively influence one another. In the brain, for example, axonal delays between brain areas can amount to several tens of milliseconds, adding an intrinsic component to any timing-based processing of information. Inferring neural interaction delays is thus needed to interpret the information transfer revealed by any analysis of directed interactions across brain structures. However, a robust estimation of interaction delays from neural activity faces several challenges if modeling assumptions on interaction mechanisms are wrong or cannot be made. Here, we propose a robust estimator for neuronal interaction delays rooted in an information-theoretic framework, which allows a model-free exploration of interactions. In particular, we extend transfer entropy to account for delayed source-target interactions, while crucially retaining the conditioning on the embedded target state at the immediately previous time step. We prove that this particular extension is indeed guaranteed to identify interaction delays between two coupled systems and is the only relevant option in keeping with Wiener’s principle of causality. We demonstrate the performance of our approach in detecting interaction delays on finite data by numerical simulations of stochastic and deterministic processes, as well as on local field potential recordings. We also show the ability of the extended transfer entropy to detect the presence of multiple delays, as well as feedback loops. While evaluated on neuroscience data, we expect the estimator to be useful in other fields dealing with network dynamics