Related papers: Detecting and Characterizing Bots that Commit Code
Code-recommendation systems, such as Copilot and CodeWhisperer, have the potential to improve programmer productivity by suggesting and auto-completing code. However, to fully realize their potential, we must understand how programmers…
Traditional reactive approach of blacklisting botnets fails to adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape of cyberattacks. An automated and proactive approach to detect and block botnet hosts will immensely benefit the industry. Behavioral…
As a maintainer of an open source software project, you are usually happy about contributions in the form of pull requests that bring the project a step forward. Past studies have shown that when reviewing a pull request, not only its…
Malicious users try to compromise systems using new techniques. One of the recent techniques used by the attacker is to perform complex distributed attacks such as denial of service and to obtain sensitive data such as password information.…
Developers authoring HTML documents define elements following patterns which establish and reflect the visual structure of a document, such as making all images in a footer the same height by applying a class to each. To surface these…
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology to develop software bots that automate repetitive sequences of interactions between users and software applications (a.k.a. routines). To take full advantage of this technology, organizations…
In a software project, esp. in open-source, a contribution is a valuable piece of work made to the project: writing code, reporting bugs, translating, improving documentation, creating graphics, etc. We are now at the beginning of an…
One single code change can significantly influence a wide range of software systems and their users. For example, 1) adding a new feature can spread defects in several modules, while 2) changing an API method can improve the performance of…
As browser fingerprinting is increasingly being used for bot detection, bots have started altering their fingerprints for evasion. We conduct the first large-scale evaluation of evasive bots to investigate whether and how altering…
Coding agents represent a new paradigm in automated software engineering, combining the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with tool-augmented interaction loops. However, coding agents still have severe limitations.…
Software bots fulfill an important role in collective software development, and their adoption by developers promises increased productivity. Past research has identified that bots that communicate too often can irritate developers, which…
Understanding how developers interact with AI coding assistants requires more than chat logs or git histories in isolation; it requires reconstructing the full context: which prompt led to which edit, what the developer tried and discarded,…
This paper replicates, extends, and refutes conclusions made in a study published in PLoS ONE ("Even Good Bots Fight"), which claimed to identify substantial levels of conflict between automated software agents (or bots) in Wikipedia using…
Bots are becoming a popular method for automating basic everyday tasks in many software projects. This is true in particular because of the availability of many off-the-shelf task-specific bots that teams can quickly adopt (which are…
Botnets, which consist of thousands of compromised machines, can cause significant threats to other systems by launching Distributed Denial of Service (SSoS) attacks, keylogging, and backdoors. In response to these threats, new effective…
With the increasing use of social media data for health-related research, the credibility of the information from this source has been questioned as the posts may originate from automated accounts or "bots". While automatic bot detection…
GitHub is one of the most widely used public code development platform. However, the code hosted publicly on the platform is vulnerable to commit spoofing that allows an adversary to introduce malicious code or commits into the repository…
In collaborative open-source development, the rationale for code changes is often captured in commit messages, making them a rich source of valuable information. However, research on rationale in commit messages remains limited. In this…
We introduce a novel multimodal mobile database called HuMIdb (Human Mobile Interaction database) that comprises 14 mobile sensors acquired from 600 users. The heterogeneous flow of data generated during the interaction with the smartphones…
Data from software repositories have become an important foundation for the empirical study of software engineering processes. A recurring theme in the repository mining literature is the inference of developer networks capturing e.g.…