In this article, we study the evolution of the computer science research community over the past 30 years. Analyzing data from the full Scopus database, we investigate how aspects such as the ...community size, gender composition, and academic seniority of its members changed over time. We also shed light on the varying popularity of specific research areas, as derived from the ACM’s Special Interest Groups and IEEE classifications. Our analysis spans 19 nations (all members of the G20 group, excluding the EU) and involves a total of 728,374 authors and 8,412,543 publications. This work shows that the overall size of the computer science community has increased by a factor of ten in the time period 1991–2020, with China and India enjoying the highest growth. At the same time, this increase has not been uniform across research areas. Female participation has also increased, but more slowly than expected and not uniformly across countries and areas.
Due to its quantitative nature, bibliometrics is becoming increasingly popular among policy makers for academic hiring and career promotions. In this article, we quantitatively assess the impact that ...the granularity level in the classification of scientific areas would entail on research evaluation based on bibliometric indicators. We use as a case study the Italian national habilitation system (ASN), which classifies faculty members according to their academic discipline and relies on journal counts, citations, and h-indices as a basis for promoting tenure track researchers to associate professors and associate to full professors. The assessment checks whether the individual indicators of a researcher are above a certain threshold, e.g., the median over the population of researchers working in the same discipline. Our investigation focuses on two related, rather broad disciplines: computer science and computer engineering. We show that the ASN practice of using the same thresholds for all members of a scientific discipline can favor certain sub-communities that are characterized by higher bibliometric indicators, and disfavor others. We report evidence that up to 30% of Italian faculty members of certain sub-communities would see their indicators drop below the threshold, thus becoming not eligible for promotion, if the ASN were conducted on a more accurate, fine-grained classification. Conversely, in the same scenario, up to 11% of faculty members, in different sub-communities, would see their indicators rise above the threshold, granting them eligibility. Our data set includes 1685 authors, 89,185 distinct publications, and 262,286 author-publication pairs.
Research assessment exercises have enjoyed ever-increasing popularity in many countries in recent years, both as a method to guide public funds allocation and as a validation tool for adopted ...research support policies. Italy’s most recently completed evaluation effort (VQR 2011–14) required each university to submit to the Ministry for Education, University, and Research (MIUR) 2 research products per author (3 in the case of other research institutions), chosen in such a way that the same product is not assigned to two authors belonging to the same institution. This constraint suggests that larger institutions, where collaborations among colleagues may be more frequent, could suffer a size-related bias in their evaluation scores. To validate our claim, we investigate the outcome of artificially splitting Sapienza University of Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe, in a number of separate partitions, according to several criteria, noting significant score increases for several partitioning scenarios.
Symbolic execution is a program analysis technique that aims to automatically identify interesting inputs for an application, using them to generate program executions covering different parts of the ...code. It is widely used in the context of vulnerability discovery and reverse engineering. In this paper we present SENinja, a symbolic execution plugin for the BinaryNinja disassembler. The tool allows the user to perform symbolic execution analyses directly within the user interface of the disassembler, and can be used to support a variety of reverse engineering tasks.
Abstract
Aims
The need for right ventricular assist device (RVAD) support after left ventricular assist device (LVAD) therapy is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. We used 2D ...echocardiographic strain analysis to assess right atrial (RA) and right ventricular (RV) mechanics and predict the need for RV mechanical support after LVAD implantation.
Methods and results
Seventy advanced chronic heart failure (ACHF) patients 59 male, age 47 ± 12 years, 79% dilated cardiomyopathy, left ventricular ejection fraction 23 ± 10% received continuous-flow LVAD as a bridge to transplantation over an 18 month period. A retrospective analysis of RV and RA strain and right heart dyssynchrony was performed comparing those requiring RVAD (20%, n = 14) with those who did not (non-RVAD 80%, n = 56). One-year survival was significantly lower in the RVAD group (50% vs. 79%; P < 0.03). Independent predictors of RVAD support were: low peak RA longitudinal strain (RALS) odds ratio (OR) 2.5, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.37–2.0; P = 0.03, low RV free-wall longitudinal strain (RVFWLS) (OR 1.3, 95% CI 1.03–2.3; P = 0.04), and degree of intra-RV dyssynchrony (DRVFW-IVS, OR 1.3, 95% CI 1.02–1.3; P = 0.04).
Conclusion
In LVAD recipients needing RVAD support, there was lower RALS and RVFWLS in addition to greater RV free-wall mechanical delay. We conclude that RA and RV strain and dyssynchrony analysis have the potential to add incremental value to the pre-VAD-implantation assessment made using conventional echo measurements.
In the last few years, a large variety of approaches and methodologies have been explored in the context of software testing, ranging from black-box techniques, such as fuzzing, to white-box ...techniques, such as concolic execution, with a full spectrum of instances in between. Using these techniques, developers and security researchers have been able to identify in the last decade a large number of critical vulnerabilities in thousands of software projects.
In this article, we investigate how to improve the performance and effectiveness of concolic execution, proposing two main enhancements to the original approach. On one side, we devise a novel concolic executor that can analyze complex binary programs while running under QEMU and efficiently produce symbolic queries, which could generate valuable program inputs when solved. On the other side, we investigate whether techniques borrowed from the fuzzing domain can be applied to solve the symbolic queries generated by concolic execution, providing a viable alternative to accurate but expensive SMT solving techniques. We show that the combination of our concolic engine, Fuzzolic, and our approximate solver, Fuzzy-Sat, can perform better in terms of code coverage than popular state-of-the-art fuzzers on a variety of complex programs and can identify different unknown bugs in several real-world applications.
We investigate the accuracy of how author names are reported in bibliographic records excerpted from four prominent sources:
WoS
,
Scopus
,
PubMed
, and
CrossRef
. We take as a case study 44,549 ...publications stored in the internal database of Sapienza University of Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe. While our results indicate generally good accuracy for all bibliographic data sources considered, we highlight a number of issues that undermine the accuracy for certain classes of author names, including compound names and names with diacritics, which are common features to Italian and other Western languages.
Fuzzing Symbolic Expressions Borzacchiello, Luca; Coppa, Emilio; Demetrescu, Camil
2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
Conference Proceeding
Recent years have witnessed a wide array of results in software testing, exploring different approaches and methodologies ranging from fuzzers to symbolic engines, with a full spectrum of instances ...in between such as concolic execution and hybrid fuzzing. A key ingredient of many of these tools is Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers, which are used to reason over symbolic expressions collected during the analysis. In this paper, we investigate whether techniques borrowed from the fuzzing domain can be applied to check whether symbolic formulas are satisfiable in the context of concolic and hybrid fuzzing engines, providing a viable alternative to classic SMT solving techniques. We devise a new approximate solver, FUZZY-SAT, and show that it is both competitive with and complementary to state-of-the-art solvers such as Z3 with respect to handling queries generated by hybrid fuzzers.
Mining hot calling contexts in small space D'Elia, Daniele Cono; Demetrescu, Camil; Finocchi, Irene
Software, practice & experience,
08/2016, Volume:
46, Issue:
8
Journal Article
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