Social Computing in Open Source Community:A Study of Software Reuse

Software projects are not developed in isolation but often build upon other open source resources. These projects form a kind of reference ecosystem regarded as a software world. Most of social computing works focus on social networks such as Facebook and weibo to mine information. However, few previous works analyze Open Source Community which could help developers conduct collaborative development. In this paper, we model the Java reference ecosystem as a network based on the reuse relationships of GitHub-hosted Java projects and analyze the characteristics and the patterns of this reference ecosystem by using community detection and pattern discovery algorithms. Our study indicates that (1) Developers prefer to reuse software limited in only a small part of projects with cross cutting functionality or advanced applications. (2) Developers usually select software reused with similar function widely depending on different requirements, resulting to different patterns. Based on these collective intelligence, our study opens up several possible future directions of reuse recommendation,which are considered as guidance of collaborative development.

群智范式:软件开发范式的新变革

软件开发作为人类当代独特的智力活动,经历了从作坊式的个体创作到工业化群体大生产,再由工业化群体大生产回归大规模群体创作的历史转变,产生了工程范式与开源范式两次变革.工程范式聚焦线性的确定性问题的软件开发,几乎放弃对不确定性问题的关注.开源范式全面拥抱不确定性,但对结果不做确定性承诺.本文面向软件定义一切的新时代,系统总结两次软件开发范式变革的核心规律,结合我们长期的研究与实践,提出软件开发群智范式,采用“群体智能”为本源的科学观、“宏观演化、微观求精”的核心理念,以及“两个联接、一个转化”的方法论,重新认识软件开发活动,为人机物三元共融的群智软件开发提供指导.

Hierarchical Self-assembly of G-Quadruplexes Based Hydrogel Consisting of Guanine and Peptide Epitope

Guanosine-based hydrogels have attracted considerable attention because of their simplicity and easy preparation.However,the sugar moiety limits its further applications because of the necessity of sugar in the hydrogel formation.This work reports a G-quadruplexes-based hydrogel consisting of guanine and peptide epitope to form a supramolecular hydrogel in the presence of metal cations.Using the metal ion-responsive peptide epitope from the ion channel to replace sugar motif at N9 position of guanosine results in a novel nucleopeptide.The results show that the gelation time,the diameter of nanofibers,the anisotropic property,and the mechanical property of the hydrogel can be simply controlled using metal cations.The magnesium and calcium ions direct the alignment of nanofibers to form anisotropic nano-bundles.The mechanistic studies indicate the formation of G-quadruplexes in the hydrogel.Compared to the storage modulus of nucleopeptide without the metal cation,adding zinc ions results in an over three-order increase in mechanical properties.Cytotoxicity experiment indicates the good biocompatibility of our hydrogel.Moreover,we demonstrate that the guanine-capped peptide could release STING agonist in a controlled manner.This work illustrates a simple way to modulate the property of the nucleopeptide hydrogel to develop soft materials.

Tag recommendation for open source software

Nowadays open source software becomes highly popular and is of great importance for most software engi- neering activities. To facilitate software organization and re- trieval, tagging is extensively used in open source communi- ties. However, finding the desired software through tags in these communities such as Freecode and ohloh is still chal- lenging because of tag insufficiency. In this paper, we propose TRG （tag recommendation based on semantic graph）, a novel approach to discovering and enriching tags of open source software. Firstly, we propose a semantic graph to model the semantic correlations between tags and the words in software descriptions. Then based on the graph, we design an effec- tive algorithm to recommend tags for software. With com- prehensive experiments on large-scale open source software datasets by comparing with several typical related works, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method in recommending proper tags.

An online service-oriented performance profiling tool for cloud computing systems

The growing scale and complexity of component interactions in cloud computing systems post great challenges for operators to understand the characteristics of system performance. Profiling has long been proved to be an effective approach to performance analysis; however, existing approaches confront new challenges that emerge in cloud computing systems. First, the efficiency of the profiling becomes of critical concern; second, service-oriented profiling should be considered to support separation-of-concerns performance analysis. To address the above issues, in this paper, we present P-Tracer, an online performance profiling tool specifically tailored for cloud computing systems. P-Tracer constructs a specific search engine that proactively processes performance logs and generates a particular index for fast queries; second, for each service, P-Tracer retrieves a statistical insight of performance characteristics from multi-dimensions and provides operators with a suite of web-based interfaces to query the critical information. We evaluate P- Tracer in the aspects of tracing overheads, data preprocessing scalability and querying efficiency. Three real-world case studies that happened in Alibaba cloud computing platform demonstrate that P-Tracer can help operators understand soft-ware behaviors and localize the primary causes of performance anomalies effectively and efficiently.

Correlation-based software search by leveraging software term database

Internet-scale open source software （OSS） pro- duction in various communities generates abundant reusable resources for software developers. However, finding the de- sired and mature software with keyword queries from a considerable number of candidates, especially for the fresher, is a significant challenge because current search services often fail to understand the semantics of user queries. In this paper, we construct a software term database （STDB） by analyzing tagging data in Stack Overflow and propose a correlationbased software search （CBSS） approach that performs correlation retrieval based on the term relevance obtained from STDB. In addition, we design a novel ranking method to optimize the initial retrieval result. We explore four research questions in four experiments, respectively, to evaluate the effectiveness of the STDB and investigate the performance of the CBSS. The experiment results show that the proposed CBSS can effectively respond to keyword-based software searches and significantly outperforms other existing search services at finding mature software.

Molecular Hydrogels with Esterase-like Activity

The development of molecular hydrogels that can be applied for mimicking bioactive molecules attracts exten- sive interests of researchers in fields of self-assembly. In this study, we reported on several molecular hydrogels based on naphthylacetic acid-peptides containing L-histidine formed by the heating-cooling process. All hydrogels exhibited higher activity to hydrolyze 4-nitrophenyl acetate （4-NPA） than the free L-histidine probably due the high density of L-histidine residue at the surface of self-assembled nanofibers. To calculate the 4-NPA hydrolysis rates, the Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics model was made. Among these gels, the gel of Nap-GFFYGHY possesses the highest enzyme activity of making the ester bond cleavage, which is approximately 25 times higher than that of the control （free L-histidine and Nap-GFFYGYY）. These results indicate that molecular hydrogels with self-assembled nanofibers have great potential for the generation of self-assembled multivalent materials.

Optimizing guest swapping using elastic and transparent memory provisioning on virtualization platform

On virtualization platforms, peak memory de- mand caused by hotspot applications often triggers page swapping in guest OS, causing performance degradation in- side and outside of this virtual machine （VM）. Even though host holds sufficient memory pages, guest OS is unable to utilize free pages in host directly due to the semantic gap between virtual machine monitor （MM） and guest operat- ing system （OS）. Our work aims at utilizing the free memory scattered in multiple hosts in a virtualization environment to improve the performance of guest swapping in a transparent and implicit way. Based on the insightful analysis of behav- ioral characteristics of guest swapping, we design and im- plement a distributed and scalable framework HybridSwap. It dynamically constructs virtual swap pools using various policies, and builds up a synthetic swapping mechanism in a peer-to-peer way, which can adaptively choose different vir- tual swap pools. We implement the prototype of HybridSwap and evaluate it with some benchmarks in different scenar- ios. The evaluation results demonstrate that our solution has the ability to promote the guest swapping efficiency indeed and shows a double performance promotion in some cases. Even in the worst case, the system overhead brought by Hy- bridSwap is acceptable.