BugDoc: Algorithms to Debug Computational Processes

Data analysis for scientific experiments and enterprises, large-scale simulations, and machine learning tasks all entail the use of complex computational pipelines to reach quantitative and qualitative conclusions. If some of the activities in a pipeline produce erroneous outputs, the pipeline may fail to execute or produce incorrect results. Inferring the root cause(s) of such failures is challenging, usually requiring time and much human thought, while still being error-prone. We propose a new approach that makes use of iteration and provenance to automatically infer the root causes and derive succinct explanations of failures. Through a detailed experimental evaluation, we assess the cost, precision, and recall of our approach compared to the state of the art. Our experimental data and processing software is available for use, reproducibility, and enhancement.Comment: To appear in SIGMOD 2020. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2002.0464

A survey on online monitoring approaches of computer-based systems

This report surveys forms of online data collection that are in current use (as well as being the subject of research to adapt them to changing technology and demands), and can be used as inputs to assessment of dependability and resilience, although they are not primarily meant for this use

Quantum Symbolic Execution

With advances in quantum computing, researchers can now write and run many quantum programs. However, there is still a lack of effective methods for debugging quantum programs. In this paper, quantum symbolic execution (QSE) is proposed to generate test cases, which helps to finding bugs in quantum programs. The main idea of quantum symbolic execution is to find the suitable test cases from all possible ones (i.e. test case space). It is different from the way of classical symbol execution, which gets test cases by calculating instead of searching. QSE utilizes quantum superposition and parallelism to store the test case space with only a few qubits. According to the conditional statements in the debugged program, the test case space is continuously divided into subsets, subsubsets and so on. Elements in the same subset are suitable test cases that can test the corresponding branch in the code to be tested. QSE not only provides a possible way to debug quantum programs, but also avoids the difficult problem of solving constraints in classical symbolic execution