TY - JOUR A1 - Mattis, Toni A1 - Beckmann, Tom A1 - Rein, Patrick A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert T1 - First-class concepts BT - Reified architectural knowledge beyond dominant decompositions JF - Journal of object technology : JOT / ETH Zürich, Department of Computer Science N2 - Ideally, programs are partitioned into independently maintainable and understandable modules. As a system grows, its architecture gradually loses the capability to accommodate new concepts in a modular way. While refactoring is expensive and not always possible, and the programming language might lack dedicated primary language constructs to express certain cross-cutting concerns, programmers are still able to explain and delineate convoluted concepts through secondary means: code comments, use of whitespace and arrangement of code, documentation, or communicating tacit knowledge.
Secondary constructs are easy to change and provide high flexibility in communicating cross-cutting concerns and other concepts among programmers. However, such secondary constructs usually have no reified representation that can be explored and manipulated as first-class entities through the programming environment.
In this exploratory work, we discuss novel ways to express a wide range of concepts, including cross-cutting concerns, patterns, and lifecycle artifacts independently of the dominant decomposition imposed by an existing architecture. We propose the representation of concepts as first-class objects inside the programming environment that retain the capability to change as easily as code comments. We explore new tools that allow programmers to view, navigate, and change programs based on conceptual perspectives. In a small case study, we demonstrate how such views can be created and how the programming experience changes from draining programmers' attention by stretching it across multiple modules toward focusing it on cohesively presented concepts. Our designs are geared toward facilitating multiple secondary perspectives on a system to co-exist in symbiosis with the original architecture, hence making it easier to explore, understand, and explain complex contexts and narratives that are hard or impossible to express using primary modularity constructs. KW - software engineering KW - modularity KW - exploratory programming KW - program KW - comprehension KW - remodularization KW - architecture recovery Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5381/jot.2022.21.2.a6 SN - 1660-1769 VL - 21 IS - 2 SP - 1 EP - 15 PB - ETH Zürich, Department of Computer Science CY - Zürich ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schmidl, Sebastian A1 - Papenbrock, Thorsten T1 - Efficient distributed discovery of bidirectional order dependencies JF - The VLDB journal N2 - Bidirectional order dependencies (bODs) capture order relationships between lists of attributes in a relational table. They can express that, for example, sorting books by publication date in ascending order also sorts them by age in descending order. The knowledge about order relationships is useful for many data management tasks, such as query optimization, data cleaning, or consistency checking. Because the bODs of a specific dataset are usually not explicitly given, they need to be discovered. The discovery of all minimal bODs (in set-based canonical form) is a task with exponential complexity in the number of attributes, though, which is why existing bOD discovery algorithms cannot process datasets of practically relevant size in a reasonable time. In this paper, we propose the distributed bOD discovery algorithm DISTOD, whose execution time scales with the available hardware. DISTOD is a scalable, robust, and elastic bOD discovery approach that combines efficient pruning techniques for bOD candidates in set-based canonical form with a novel, reactive, and distributed search strategy. Our evaluation on various datasets shows that DISTOD outperforms both single-threaded and distributed state-of-the-art bOD discovery algorithms by up to orders of magnitude; it can, in particular, process much larger datasets. KW - Bidirectional order dependencies KW - Distributed computing KW - Actor KW - programming KW - Parallelization KW - Data profiling KW - Dependency discovery Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-021-00683-4 SN - 1066-8888 SN - 0949-877X VL - 31 IS - 1 SP - 49 EP - 74 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ; Heidelberg ; New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bonifati, Angela A1 - Mior, Michael J. A1 - Naumann, Felix A1 - Noack, Nele Sina T1 - How inclusive are we? BT - an analysis of gender diversity in database venues JF - SIGMOD record / Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Management of Data N2 - ACM SIGMOD, VLDB and other database organizations have committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse community, as do many other scientific organizations. Recently, different measures have been taken to advance these goals, especially for underrepresented groups. One possible measure is double-blind reviewing, which aims to hide gender, ethnicity, and other properties of the authors.
We report the preliminary results of a gender diversity analysis of publications of the database community across several peer-reviewed venues, and also compare women's authorship percentages in both single-blind and double-blind venues along the years. We also obtained a cross comparison of the obtained results in data management with other relevant areas in Computer Science. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3516431.3516438 SN - 0163-5808 SN - 1943-5835 VL - 50 IS - 4 SP - 30 EP - 35 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Roostapour, Vahid A1 - Neumann, Aneta A1 - Neumann, Frank A1 - Friedrich, Tobias T1 - Pareto optimization for subset selection with dynamic cost constraints JF - Artificial intelligence N2 - We consider the subset selection problem for function f with constraint bound B that changes over time. Within the area of submodular optimization, various greedy approaches are commonly used. For dynamic environments we observe that the adaptive variants of these greedy approaches are not able to maintain their approximation quality. Investigating the recently introduced POMC Pareto optimization approach, we show that this algorithm efficiently computes a phi=(alpha(f)/2)(1 - 1/e(alpha)f)-approximation, where alpha(f) is the submodularity ratio of f, for each possible constraint bound b <= B. Furthermore, we show that POMC is able to adapt its set of solutions quickly in the case that B increases. Our experimental investigations for the influence maximization in social networks show the advantage of POMC over generalized greedy algorithms. We also consider EAMC, a new evolutionary algorithm with polynomial expected time guarantee to maintain phi approximation ratio, and NSGA-II with two different population sizes as advanced multi-objective optimization algorithm, to demonstrate their challenges in optimizing the maximum coverage problem. Our empirical analysis shows that, within the same number of evaluations, POMC is able to perform as good as NSGA-II under linear constraint, while EAMC performs significantly worse than all considered algorithms in most cases. KW - Subset selection KW - Submodular function KW - Multi-objective optimization KW - Runtime analysis Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2021.103597 SN - 0004-3702 SN - 1872-7921 VL - 302 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Taleb, Aiham A1 - Rohrer, Csaba A1 - Bergner, Benjamin A1 - De Leon, Guilherme A1 - Rodrigues, Jonas Almeida A1 - Schwendicke, Falk A1 - Lippert, Christoph A1 - Krois, Joachim T1 - Self-supervised learning methods for label-efficient dental caries classification JF - Diagnostics : open access journal N2 - High annotation costs are a substantial bottleneck in applying deep learning architectures to clinically relevant use cases, substantiating the need for algorithms to learn from unlabeled data. In this work, we propose employing self-supervised methods. To that end, we trained with three self-supervised algorithms on a large corpus of unlabeled dental images, which contained 38K bitewing radiographs (BWRs). We then applied the learned neural network representations on tooth-level dental caries classification, for which we utilized labels extracted from electronic health records (EHRs). Finally, a holdout test-set was established, which consisted of 343 BWRs and was annotated by three dental professionals and approved by a senior dentist. This test-set was used to evaluate the fine-tuned caries classification models. Our experimental results demonstrate the obtained gains by pretraining models using self-supervised algorithms. These include improved caries classification performance (6 p.p. increase in sensitivity) and, most importantly, improved label-efficiency. In other words, the resulting models can be fine-tuned using few labels (annotations). Our results show that using as few as 18 annotations can produce >= 45% sensitivity, which is comparable to human-level diagnostic performance. This study shows that self-supervision can provide gains in medical image analysis, particularly when obtaining labels is costly and expensive. KW - unsupervised methods KW - self-supervised learning KW - representation learning KW - dental caries classification KW - data driven approaches KW - annotation KW - efficient deep learning Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics12051237 SN - 2075-4418 VL - 12 IS - 5 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lambers, Leen A1 - Orejas, Fernando T1 - Transformation rules with nested application conditions BT - critical pairs, initial conflicts & minimality JF - Theoretical computer science N2 - Recently, initial conflicts were introduced in the framework of M-adhesive categories as an important optimization of critical pairs. In particular, they represent a proper subset such that each conflict is represented in a minimal context by a unique initial one. The theory of critical pairs has been extended in the framework of M-adhesive categories to rules with nested application conditions (ACs), restricting the applicability of a rule and generalizing the well-known negative application conditions. A notion of initial conflicts for rules with ACs does not exist yet. In this paper, on the one hand, we extend the theory of initial conflicts in the framework of M-adhesive categories to transformation rules with ACs. They represent a proper subset again of critical pairs for rules with ACs, and represent each conflict in a minimal context uniquely. They are moreover symbolic because we can show that in general no finite and complete set of conflicts for rules with ACs exists. On the other hand, we show that critical pairs are minimally M-complete, whereas initial conflicts are minimally complete. Finally, we introduce important special cases of rules with ACs for which we can obtain finite, minimally (M-)complete sets of conflicts. KW - Graph transformation KW - Critical pairs KW - Initial conflicts KW - Application KW - conditions Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2021.07.023 SN - 0304-3975 SN - 1879-2294 VL - 884 SP - 44 EP - 67 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Koßmann, Jan A1 - Papenbrock, Thorsten A1 - Naumann, Felix T1 - Data dependencies for query optimization BT - a survey JF - The VLDB journal : the international journal on very large data bases / publ. on behalf of the VLDB Endowment N2 - Effective query optimization is a core feature of any database management system. While most query optimization techniques make use of simple metadata, such as cardinalities and other basic statistics, other optimization techniques are based on more advanced metadata including data dependencies, such as functional, uniqueness, order, or inclusion dependencies. This survey provides an overview, intuitive descriptions, and classifications of query optimization and execution strategies that are enabled by data dependencies. We consider the most popular types of data dependencies and focus on optimization strategies that target the optimization of relational database queries. The survey supports database vendors to identify optimization opportunities as well as DBMS researchers to find related work and open research questions. KW - Query optimization KW - Query execution KW - Data dependencies KW - Data profiling KW - Unique column combinations KW - Functional dependencies KW - Order dependencies KW - Inclusion dependencies KW - Relational data KW - SQL Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-021-00676-3 SN - 1066-8888 SN - 0949-877X VL - 31 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 22 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ; Heidelberg ; New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Quinzan, Francesco A1 - Göbel, Andreas A1 - Wagner, Markus A1 - Friedrich, Tobias T1 - Evolutionary algorithms and submodular functions BT - benefits of heavy-tailed mutations JF - Natural computing : an innovative journal bridging biosciences and computer sciences ; an international journal N2 - A core operator of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) is the mutation. Recently, much attention has been devoted to the study of mutation operators with dynamic and non-uniform mutation rates. Following up on this area of work, we propose a new mutation operator and analyze its performance on the (1 + 1) Evolutionary Algorithm (EA). Our analyses show that this mutation operator competes with pre-existing ones, when used by the (1 + 1) EA on classes of problems for which results on the other mutation operators are available. We show that the (1 + 1) EA using our mutation operator finds a (1/3)-approximation ratio on any non-negative submodular function in polynomial time. We also consider the problem of maximizing a symmetric submodular function under a single matroid constraint and show that the (1 + 1) EA using our operator finds a (1/3)-approximation within polynomial time. This performance matches that of combinatorial local search algorithms specifically designed to solve these problems and outperforms them with constant probability. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the (1 + 1) EA using our operator experimentally by considering two applications: (a) the maximum directed cut problem on real-world graphs of different origins, with up to 6.6 million vertices and 56 million edges and (b) the symmetric mutual information problem using a four month period air pollution data set. In comparison with uniform mutation and a recently proposed dynamic scheme, our operator comes out on top on these instances. KW - Evolutionary algorithms KW - Mutation operators KW - Submodular functions KW - Matroids Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-021-09841-7 SN - 1572-9796 VL - 20 IS - 3 SP - 561 EP - 575 PB - Springer Science + Business Media B.V. CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Oosthoek, Kris A1 - Dörr, Christian T1 - Cyber security threats to bitcoin exchanges BT - adversary exploitation and laundering techniques JF - IEEE transactions on network and service management : a publication of the IEEE N2 - Bitcoin is gaining traction as an alternative store of value. Its market capitalization transcends all other cryptocurrencies in the market. But its high monetary value also makes it an attractive target to cyber criminal actors. Hacking campaigns usually target an ecosystem's weakest points. In Bitcoin, the exchange platforms are one of them. Each exchange breach is a threat not only to direct victims, but to the credibility of Bitcoin's entire ecosystem. Based on an extensive analysis of 36 breaches of Bitcoin exchanges, we show the attack patterns used to exploit Bitcoin exchange platforms using an industry standard for reporting intelligence on cyber security breaches. Based on this we are able to provide an overview of the most common attack vectors, showing that all except three hacks were possible due to relatively lax security. We show that while the security regimen of Bitcoin exchanges is subpar compared to other financial service providers, the use of stolen credentials, which does not require any hacking, is decreasing. We also show that the amount of BTC taken during a breach is decreasing, as well as the exchanges that terminate after being breached. Furthermore we show that overall security posture has improved, but still has major flaws. To discover adversarial methods post-breach, we have analyzed two cases of BTC laundering. Through this analysis we provide insight into how exchange platforms with lax cyber security even further increase the intermediary risk introduced by them into the Bitcoin ecosystem. KW - Bitcoin KW - Computer crime KW - Cryptography KW - Ecosystems KW - Currencies KW - Industries KW - Vocabulary KW - cryptocurrency exchanges KW - cyber KW - security KW - cyber threat intelligence KW - attacks KW - vulnerabilities KW - forensics Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2020.3046145 SN - 1932-4537 VL - 18 IS - 2 SP - 1616 EP - 1628 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schneider, Sven A1 - Lambers, Leen A1 - Orejas, Fernando T1 - A logic-based incremental approach to graph repair featuring delta preservation JF - International journal on software tools for technology transfer : STTT N2 - We introduce a logic-based incremental approach to graph repair, generating a sound and complete (upon termination) overview of least-changing graph repairs from which a user may select a graph repair based on non-formalized further requirements. This incremental approach features delta preservation as it allows to restrict the generation of graph repairs to delta-preserving graph repairs, which do not revert the additions and deletions of the most recent consistency-violating graph update. We specify consistency of graphs using the logic of nested graph conditions, which is equivalent to first-order logic on graphs. Technically, the incremental approach encodes if and how the graph under repair satisfies a graph condition using the novel data structure of satisfaction trees, which are adapted incrementally according to the graph updates applied. In addition to the incremental approach, we also present two state-based graph repair algorithms, which restore consistency of a graph independent of the most recent graph update and which generate additional graph repairs using a global perspective on the graph under repair. We evaluate the developed algorithms using our prototypical implementation in the tool AutoGraph and illustrate our incremental approach using a case study from the graph database domain. KW - Nested graph conditions KW - Graph repair KW - Model repair KW - Consistency KW - restoration KW - Delta preservation KW - Graph databases KW - Model-driven KW - engineering Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-020-00584-x SN - 1433-2779 SN - 1433-2787 VL - 23 IS - 3 SP - 369 EP - 410 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ; Heidelberg ER -