European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Meta 📑 Instead of changing the data or learners in multiple ways and then see if fairness improves, postulate that the root causes of bias are the prior decisions that generated the training data. These affect (a) what data was selected, and (b) the labels assigned to the examples. They propose the \(\text{Fair-SMOTE}\) (Fair Synthetic Minority Over Sampling Technique) algorithm which (1) removes biased labels (via situation testing: if the model’s prediction for a data point changes once all of the data points' protected attributes are flipped, then that label is biased and the data point is discarded), and (2) rebalances internal distributions such that based on a protected attribute, examples are equal in both positive and negative classes....

Formal Software Design Alloy is an open-source language and analyzer for software modeling. An Alloy model is a collection of constraints that describe a set of structures, e.g. all possible security configurations of a web application. Alloy’s tool, the Alloy Analyzer is a solver that takes the constraints of a model and finds structures that satisfy them. 📑 The Alloy Analyzer leverages a SAT solver, and this precludes Alloy from analyzing optimization problems....

Dependency Management Golang introduced a new library referencing mode to overcome limitations of the old one. While the two library modes are supported by Golang, they are incompatible, e.g. dependency management (DM) issues, reference inconsistencies, build failures, etc. did an empirical study that resulted in HERO, an automated technique to detect DM issues and suggest fixes. Applied to 19k Golang projects, HERO detected 98.5% on a DM issue benchmark, and found 2,422 new DM issues in 2,356 Golang projects....

Debugging 101 Definition? Debugging involves inspecting a program’s internal state. printf Debugging and Logging In printf debugging, one adds print statements and keeps iterating until enough information has been extracted. Using logging has several advantages over printf debugging: varying logging destinations (e.g. standard output, files, sockets, remote servers, etc.); severity levels (e.g. INFO, DEBUG, WARN, ERROR, &c) that support filtering of output; color-coding for readability. Terminals have varying levels of color support: plain color; ANSI escape codes (16 color codes with bold/italic and background); 256 color palette; 24-bit truecolor (“888” colors, aka 16 million, e....