Design Rule Spaces: A new form of architectural insight - Xiao et al. ICSE '14 Continuing the theme of looking at ICSE 2016 papers, I want to share with you some interesting work by Xiao et al. on "Identifying and quantifying architectural debt." That paper however draws heavily on two previous works that it makes … Continue reading Design Rule Spaces: A new form of architectural insight
On the “naturalness” of buggy code
On the 'naturalness' of buggy code - Ray, Hellendoorn, et al. ICSE 2016 Last week we looked at a simpler approach to building static code checkers that by understanding less about the overall code structure and just focusing in on the things that really mattered was able to produce competitive results from very small checker … Continue reading On the “naturalness” of buggy code
BigDebug: Debugging primitives for interactive big data processing in Spark
BigDebug: Debugging primitives for interactive big data processing in Spark - Gulzar et al. ICSE 2016 BigDebug provides real-time interactive debugging support for Data-Intensive Scalable Computing (DISC) systems, or more particularly, Apache Spark. It provides breakpoints, watchpoints, latency monitoring, forward and backward tracing, crash monitoring, and a real-time fix-and-resume capability. The overheads are low for … Continue reading BigDebug: Debugging primitives for interactive big data processing in Spark
From Aristotle to Ringelmann
From Aristotle to Ringelmann: A large-scale analysis of team productivity and coordination in open-source software projects - Scholtes et al. ICSE 2016 A slightly different flavour of papers this week as we dip into the ICSE 2016 conference proceedings. We kick things off with a study looking at the effect of development team size on … Continue reading From Aristotle to Ringelmann
Semi-supervised sequence learning
Semi-supervised sequence learning - Dai & Le, NIPS 2015. The sequence to sequence learning approach we looked at yesterday has been used for machine translation, text parsing, image captioning, video analysis, and conversational modeling. In Semi-supervised sequence learning, Dai & Le use a clever twist on the sequence-to-sequence approach to enable it to be used … Continue reading Semi-supervised sequence learning
Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks
Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks Sutskever et al. NIPS, 2014 Yesterday we looked at paragraph vectors which extend the distributed word vectors approach to learn a distributed representation of a sentence, paragraph, or document. Today's paper tackles what must be one of the sternest tests of all when it comes to assessing how … Continue reading Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks
Distributed representations of sentences and documents
Distributed representations of sentences and documents - Le & Mikolov, ICML 2014 We've previously looked at the amazing power of word vectors to learn distributed representation of words that manage to embody meaning. In today's paper, Le and Mikolov extend that approach to also compute distributed representations for sentences, paragraphs, and even entire documents. They … Continue reading Distributed representations of sentences and documents
How to build static checking systems using orders of magnitude less code
How to build static checking systems using orders of magnitude less code Brown et al., ASPLOS '16 You start with something simple. Then over time things get more and more complex and before you know it, it's hard to know what's going on. Today's paper is a delightful reminder of the power of stripping back … Continue reading How to build static checking systems using orders of magnitude less code
Why do record/replay tests of web applications break?
Why do Record/Replay Tests of Web Applications Break? - Hammoudi et al. ICST '16 Your web application regression tests created using record/replay tools are fragile and keep breaking. Hammoudi et al. set out to find out why. If we knew that, perhaps we could design mechanisms to automatically repair broken tests, or to build more … Continue reading Why do record/replay tests of web applications break?
A DNA-based archival storage system
A DNA-Based Archival Storage System - Bornholt et al. ASPLOS '16 It's pretty cool that a paper on DNA-based storage makes a conference such as ASPLOS. And as you'll see, there are good reasons we should be taking it very seriously indeed. DNA has some very interesting properties - it's extremely dense (1 exabyte (109 … Continue reading A DNA-based archival storage system
the morning paper 