Cross-situational personality consistency has been of interest in social psychology since the 1960s. With the advent of the Internet, a new range of “situations” has been presented for investigating human behavior in online environments.
In order to produce effective fault-localization, debugging, failure-clustering, and test-suite maintenance techniques, researchers would benefit from a deeper understanding of how faults (i.e., bugs) behave and interact with each other. Some faults, even if executed, may or may not propagate to the output, and even still may or may not influence the output in a way to cause failure. Furthermore, in the presence of multiple faults, faults may interact in a way to obscure each other or in a way to produce behavior not seen in their isolation.
Recent introduction of a dynamic permission model in Android, allowing the users to grant and revoke permissions a at the installation of an app, has made it much harder to properly test apps. Since an app's behavior may change depending on the granted permissions, it needs to be tested under a wide range of granted permission combinations.
One method of facilitating developers to understand the complex inner nature of software that we have employed is the use of information visualization. Software is often so complex that even the developers who initially created it cannot understand all of the possible runtime behaviors that it can exhibit --- specifically, all of the bugs that it may contain. In order to present large code bases with innumerable characteristics and relationships of its components (e.g., instructions, variables, values, and timings) we have developed a number of novel visualizations of software.
One of the most difficult tasks in debugging software for a developer is to understand the nature of the fault. Techniques have been proposed by researchers that can help *locate* the fault, but mostly neglected is a way to describe the nature of the fault. We are developing software models, visualizations, and techniques to aid in the diagnosis of the faults in the software.
The number of malicious Android apps is increasing rapidly. Android malware can damage or alter other files or settings, install additional applications, etc. To determine such behaviors, a security analyst can significantly benefit from identifying the family to which an Android malware belongs, rather than only detecting if an app is malicious. Techniques for detecting Android malware, and determining their families, lack the ability to handle certain obfuscations that aim to thwart detection.
Over the last several years we have been studying how digital media affects people’s lives. Rather than bring people into a laboratory, I view the real world as a living laboratory--I go where people live, study, and work, to study them as they go about their normal activities. Digital media use affects people’s mood, stress, and behavior quite significantly. In particular, people experience disruptions when working with digital media due to multi-tasking and interruptions.
Spacetime is a framework for developing time-stepped, multi-worker applications based on the tuplespace model. Workers compute within spacetimed frames -- a fixed portion of the shared data during a fixed period of time. The locally modified data may be pushed back to the shared store at the end of each step.
ISR
