Automated Repair of Layout Cross Browser Issues Using Search-Based Techniques

A consistent cross-browser user experience is crucial for the success of a website. Layout Cross Browser Issues (XBIs) can severely undermine a website’s success by causing web pages to render incorrectly in certain browsers, thereby negatively impacting users’ impression of the quality and services that the web page delivers. Existing Cross Browser Testing (XBT) techniques can only detect XBIs in websites. Repairing them is, hitherto, a manual task that is labor intensive and requires significant expertise. Addressing this concern, our paper proposes a technique for automatically repairing layout XBIs in websites using guided search-based techniques. Our empirical evaluation showed that our approach was able to successfully fix 86% of layout XBIs reported for 15 different web pages studied, thereby improving their cross-browser consistency

Concurrent Program Verification with Invariant-Guided Underapproximation

Automatic verification of concurrent programs written in low-level languages like ANSI-C is an important task as multi-core architectures are gaining widespread adoption. Formal verification, although very valuable for this domain, rapidly runs into the state-explosion problem due to multiple thread interleavings. Recently, Bounded Model Checking (BMC) has been used for this purpose, which does not scale in practice. In this work, we develop a method to further constrain the search space for BMC techniques using underapproximations of data flow of shared memory and lazy demand-driven refinement of the approximation. A novel contribution of our method is that our underapproximation is guided by likely data-flow invariants mined from dynamic analysis and our refinement is based on proof-based learning. We have implemented our method in a prototype tool. Initial experiments on benchmark examples show potential performance benefit

CLAN : a tool for contract analysis and conflict discovery

As Service-Oriented Architectures are more widely adopted, it becomes more important to adopt measures for ensuring that the services satisfy functional and non-functional requirements. One approach is the use of contracts based on deontic logics, expressing obligations, permissions and prohibitions of the different actors. A challenging aspect is that of service composition, in which the contracts composed together may result in conflicting situations, so there is a need to analyse contracts and ensure their soundness. In this paper, we present CLAN, a tool for automatic analysis of conflicting clauses of contracts written in the contract language . We present a small case study of an airline check-in desk illustrating the use of the tool.peer-reviewe

Smart Blinds System

The Smart Blinds System is designed to be an automated blind control system. It will allow users to specify their own expectations for natural light entering their room, and to program specific times to open and close the blinds. It serves as an alternative to traditional blinds systems that are used daily but offer no other useful features.&nbsp

Technological and infrastructural prerequisites for the deployment of the first shared Autonomous Vehicle Pilot Test Project in Malta

Automated vehicles are leading to a significant revolution in road transportation systems, with extensive challenges to mobility through several factors, including economic, legal, social, psychological, and technological aspects. Various countries around Europe have tested and piloted autonomous vehicles on their roads and subsequently published research on their approach towards reaching such goals and also on findings from their various projects. However smaller peripheral countries tend to fall behind, whenever innovative technologies are being researched and tested. Research on Malta’s level of preparedness for the introduction of autonomous vehicles is limited. This research project deals with an analysis of the expected impacts of shared autonomous vehicles on the physical and digital road infrastructures and assesses the current infrastructure preparedness on a local scale. The project aims to provide Malta with a new mobility solution, that is sustainable and technologically advanced, that will at the same time increase the users’ choices of alternative transport. Through various meetings and consultations with local stakeholders, it emerges that Malta is still in the very initial planning stages for the introduction of Autonomous Vehicles and that an immediate intervention on Malta’s current physical and digital infrastructure is required to enable the actual implementation of shared autonomous mobility field testing. The outcomes of this research project include a roadmap and recommendations to local authorities, which shall pave the way for the first shared autonomous shuttle pilot project to take place on Maltese roads.This research work forms part of Project MISAM financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology, through the FUSION: R&I Research Excellence Programme’. The authors would also like to thank Infrastructure Malta and Debono Group, the collaborators on this project.peer-reviewe

A rubric based approach towards Automated Essay Grading : focusing on high level content issues and ideas

Assessment of a student’s work is by no means an easy task. Even if the student response is in the form of multiple choice answers, manually marking those answer sheets is a task that most teachers regard as rather tedious. The development of an automated method to grade these essays was thus an inevitable step.This thesis proposes a novel approach towards Automated Essay Grading through the use of various concepts found within the field of Narratology. Through a review of the literature, several methods in which essays are graded were identified together with some of the problems. Mainly, the issues and challenges that plague AEG systems were that those following the statistical approach needed a way to deal with more implicit features of free text, while other systems which did manage that were highly dependent on the type of student response, the systems having pre-knowledge pertaining to the subject domain in addition to requiring more computational power. It was also found that while narrative essays are one of the main methods in which a student might be able to showcase his/her mastery over the English language, no system thus far has attempted to incorporate narrative concepts into analysing these type of free text responses.It was decided that the proposed solution would be centred on the detection of Events, which was in turn used to determine the score an essay receives under the criteria of Audience, Ideas, Character and Setting and Cohesion, as defined by the NAPLAN rubric. From the results gathered from experiments conducted on the four criteria mentioned above, it was concluded that the concept of detecting Events as they were within a narrative type story when applied to essay grading, does have a relation towards the score the essay receives. All experiments achieved an average F-measure score of 0.65 and above while exact agreement rates were no lower than 70%. Chi-squared and paired T-test values all indicated that there was insufficient evidence to show that there was any significant difference between the scores generated by the computer and those of the human markers

Road-Side Based Cybersecurity in Connected and Automated Vehicle Systems

69A3551747105In this study, we develop a comprehensive framework to model the impact of cyberattacks on safety, security, and head-to-tail stability of connected and automated vehicular platoons. First, we propose a general platoon dynamics model with heterogeneous time delays that may originate from the communication channel and/or vehicle onboard sensors. Based on the proposed dynamics model, we develop an augmented state extended Kalman filter (ASEKF) to smooth sensor readings, and use it in conjunction with an anomaly detector to detect sensor anomalies. Specifically, we consider two detectors: a parametric detector, the ??2-detector, and a learning-based detector, the one class support vector machine (OCSVM). We investigate the detection power of all combinations of vehicle dynamics models (EKF and ASEKF) and detectors (??2and OCSVM). Furthermore, we introduce a novel concept in string stability, namely, pseudo string stability, to measure a platoon's string stability under cyberattacks and model uncertainties. We demonstrate the relationship between the pseudo string stability of a platoon and its detection rate, which enables us to identify the critical detection sensitivity/recall that the platoon's members should meet for the platoon to remain pseudo string stable