Beyond Textual Issues: Understanding the Usage and Impact of GitHub Reactions

Recently, GitHub introduced a new social feature, named reactions, which are "pictorial characters" similar to emoji symbols widely used nowadays in text-based communications. Particularly, GitHub users can use a pre-defined set of such symbols to react to issues and pull requests. However, little is known about the real usage and impact of GitHub reactions. In this paper, we analyze the reactions provided by developers to more than 2.5 million issues and 9.7 million issue comments, in order to answer an extensive list of nine research questions about the usage and adoption of reactions. We show that reactions are being increasingly used by open source developers. Moreover, we also found that issues with reactions usually take more time to be handled and have longer discussions.Comment: 10 page

Sensing in the Urban Technological Deserts-A Position Paper for Smart Cities in Least Developed Countries

Technological progress in recent years have allowed to produce sensors, on macroscopic and microscopic scales, that are now essential to ubiquitous computing. This paradigm has made the concept of smart cities a reality that is now in synchrony with the needs and requirements for living in this era. Whether it concerns commuters in public transportations or users of existential services such as hospitals, the implementation of smart cities is equally important in developed countries than in the least developed countries. Unfortunately, in the latter, sensors and the associated technologies are not readily available to implement smart cities. It is therefore necessary to identify surrogate ways of sensing the ambiant environment. In this position paper, we discuss the situations in least developed countries and the obstacles to common implementations of smart cities. We also provide a preliminary enumeration of how mobile-phones with SMS-based services and the cultural model can be leveraged to build smart cities in such urban technological deserts

Towards a Generic Framework for Automating Extensive Analysis of Android Applications

ABSTRACT Despite much effort in the community, the momentum of Android research has not yet produced complete tools to perform thorough analysis on Android apps, leaving users vulnerable to malicious apps. Because it is hard for a single tool to efficiently address all of the various challenges of Android programming which make analysis difficult, we propose to instrument the app code for reducing the analysis complexity, e.g., transforming a hard problem to a easy-resolvable one. To this end, we introduce in this paper Apkpler, a plugin-based framework for supporting such instrumentation. We evaluate Apkpler with two plugins, demonstrating the feasibility of our approach and showing that Apkpler can indeed be leveraged to reduce the analysis complexity of Android apps