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Python is a particularly appealing language to carry out data analysis, owing in part to its user-friendly character as well as its access to well maintained and powerful libraries like NumPy and SciPy. Still, for the purpose of analyzing…

The recent progress of artificial intelligence(AI) has shown great potentials for alleviating human burden in various complex tasks. From the view of software engineering, AI techniques can be seen in many fundamental aspects of…

On the worldwide web, not only are webpages connected but source code is too. Software development is becoming more accessible to everyone and the licensing for software remains complicated. We need to know if software licenses are being…

Programs are a kind of communication to both computers and people, hence as students are trained to write programs they need to learn to write well-designed, readable code rather than code that simply functions correctly. The difficulty in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in software engineering to generate, complete, translate, and fix code, improving developer productivity. While most research focuses on the energy consumption and carbon emissions of model…

Python applications depend on third-party native libraries that may be vendored within package distributions or installed on the host system. When vulnerabilities are discovered in these native libraries, determining which Python packages…

The adoption of third-party libraries has become integral to modern software development, leading to large ecosystems such as PyPI, NPM, and Maven, where contributors typically share the technical expertise to sustain extensions. In…

The work presented in this thesis seeks to improve programmer productivity in the following ways: - by reducing the amount of code that has to be written to construct an application; - by increasing the reliability of the code written; and…

Code protections aim at blocking (or at least delaying) reverse engineering and tampering attacks to critical assets within programs. Knowing the way hackers understand protected code and perform attacks is important to achieve a stronger…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a popular choice for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks due to their versatility and ability to produce high-quality results. Specifically, they are increasingly used for automatic code…

Generative machine learning models have recently been applied to source code, for use cases including translating code between programming languages, creating documentation from code, and auto-completing methods. Yet, state-of-the-art…

AI-powered code generation models have been developing rapidly, allowing developers to expedite code generation and thus improve their productivity. These models are trained on large corpora of code (primarily sourced from public…

Given programming languages can provide different types and levels of security support, it is critically important to consider security aspects while selecting programming languages for developing software systems. Inadequate consideration…

Large language models (LLMs) are now largely involved in software development workflows, and the code they generate routinely includes third-party library (TPL) imports annotated with specific version identifiers. These version choices can…

Producing code of good quality is an essential skill in software development. Code quality is an aspect of software quality that concerns the directly observable properties of code, such as decomposition, modularization, and code flow. Code…

Proponents of software verification have argued that simpler code is easier to verify: that is, that verification tools issue fewer false positives and require less human intervention when analyzing simpler code. We empirically validate…

Much of the success of modern software development can be attributed to code reuse. The ability to reuse existing functionality via third-party dependencies has enabled massive gains in productivity, but for a long time the dominant…

With the increasing reliance on software and automation nowadays, tight deadlines, limited resources, and prioritization of functionality over security can lead to insecure coding practices. When not handled properly, these constraints…

Reviewing source code from a security perspective has proven to be a difficult task. Indeed, previous research has shown that developers often miss even popular and easy-to-detect vulnerabilities during code review. Initial evidence…

We investigate how code obfuscation influences human understanding of programs through an output-prediction task. To study this effect, we construct multiple levels of obfuscation, ranging from unobfuscated code to transformations involving…