Deep convolutional neural networks have performed remarkably well on many Computer Vision tasks. However, these networks are heavily reliant on big data to avoid overfitting. Overfitting refers to the phenomenon when a network learns a function with very high variance such as to perfectly model the training data. Unfortunately, many application domains do not have access to big data, such as medical image analysis. This survey focuses on Data Augmentation, a data-space solution to the problem of limited data. Data Augmentation encompasses a suite of techniques that enhance the size and quality of training datasets such that better Deep Learning models can be built using them. The image augmentation algorithms discussed in this survey include geometric transformations, color space augmentations, kernel filters, mixing images, random erasing, feature space augmentation, adversarial training, generative adversarial networks, neural style transfer, and meta-learning. The application of augmentation methods based on GANs are heavily covered in this survey. In addition to augmentation techniques, this paper will briefly discuss other characteristics of Data Augmentation such as test-time augmentation, resolution impact, final dataset size, and curriculum learning. This survey will present existing methods for Data Augmentation, promising developments, and meta-level decisions for implementing Data Augmentation. Readers will understand how Data Augmentation can improve the performance of their models and expand limited datasets to take advantage of the capabilities of big data.

/pdf/a-survey-on-image-data-augmentation-for-deep-learning-4ru1bj2hbb.pdf

A survey on Image Data Augmentation for Deep Learning

Statistical Analysis with Missing Data

Matrix Factorization Techniques for Recommender Systems

In this paper, we define and explore proofs of retrievability (PORs). A POR scheme enables an archive or back-up service (prover) to produce a concise proof that a user (verifier) can retrieve a target file F, that is, that the archive retains and reliably transmits file data sufficient for the user to recover F in its entirety.A POR may be viewed as a kind of cryptographic proof of knowledge (POK), but one specially designed to handle a large file (or bitstring) F. We explore POR protocols here in which the communication costs, number of memory accesses for the prover, and storage requirements of the user (verifier) are small parameters essentially independent of the length of F. In addition to proposing new, practical POR constructions, we explore implementation considerations and optimizations that bear on previously explored, related schemes.In a POR, unlike a POK, neither the prover nor the verifier need actually have knowledge of F. PORs give rise to a new and unusual security definition whose formulation is another contribution of our work.We view PORs as an important tool for semi-trusted online archives. Existing cryptographic techniques help users ensure the privacy and integrity of files they retrieve. It is also natural, however, for users to want to verify that archives do not delete or modify files prior to retrieval. The goal of a POR is to accomplish these checks without users having to download the files themselves. A POR can also provide quality-of-service guarantees, i.e., show that a file is retrievable within a certain time bound.

PORs: Proofs of Retrievability for Large Files

Technical foundations introduction software reliability and system reliability the operational profile software reliability modelling survey model evaluation and recalibration techniques practices and experiences best current practice of SRE software reliability measurement experience measurement-based analysis of software reliability software fault and failure classification techniques trend analysis in validation and maintenance software reliability and field data analysis software reliability process assessment emerging techniques software reliability prediction metrics software reliability and testing fault-tolerant SRE software reliability using fault trees software reliability process simulation neural networks and software reliability. Appendices: software reliability tools software failure data set repository.

/pdf/handbook-of-software-reliability-engineering-32dwvaljmm.pdf

Handbook of software reliability engineering

Software processes comprise many steps; coding is followed by building, integration testing, system testing, deployment, operations, among others. Software process integration and automation have been areas of key concern in software engineering, ever since the pioneering work of Osterweil; market pressures for Agility, and open, decentralized, software development have provided additional pressures for progress in this area. But do these innovations actually help projects? Given the numerous confounding factors that can influence project performance, it can be a challenge to discern the effects of process integration and automation. Software project ecosystems such as GitHub provide a new opportunity in this regard: one can readily find large numbers of projects in various stages of process integration and automation, and gather data on various influencing factors as well as productivity and quality outcomes. In this paper we use large, historical data on process metrics and outcomes in GitHub projects to discern the effects of one specific innovation in process automation: continuous integration. Our main finding is that continuous integration improves the productivity of project teams, who can integrate more outside contributions, without an observable diminishment in code quality.

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~filkov/papers/pr_soc_lan.pdf

Quality and productivity outcomes relating to continuous integration in GitHub

In a typical large-scale data center, a set of applications are hosted over virtual machines (VMs) running on a large number of physical machines (PMs). Such a virtualization technique can be used for conserving power consumption by minimizing the number of PMs that should be turned on according to the application requirements to resource. However, the resource demands for VMs is dynamic in nature since the number of user requests the applications should handle is rapidly changing in practice. It is a great challenge to online reconfigure the VMs (i.e., optimize the number and the locations for the VMs) according to the dynamic resource demands. Especially for the emerging applications of large-scale data centers for cloud computing systems, existing approaches either fails to find a best configuration of VMs or cannot produce a result in an acceptable time. In this paper, we propose an online self-reconfiguration approach for reallocating VMs in large-scale data centers. It first accurately predicts the future workloads of the applications with Brown’s quadratic exponential smoothing. Based on such a prediction, it adopts a genetic algorithm to efficiently find the optimal reconfiguration policy. The resource utilization of large-scale cloud computing data centers can thus be improved and their energy consumption can be greatly conserved. We conduct extensive experiments and the results verify that our approach can effectively switch off more unnecessary running PMs comparing with current approaches without a performance degradation of the whole system.

Online Self-Reconfiguration with Performance Guarantee for Energy-Efficient Large-Scale Cloud Computing Data Centers

The pull-based development model, enabled by git and popularised by collaborative coding platforms like Bit Bucket, Gitorius, and GitHub, is widely used in distributed software teams. While this model lowers the barrier to entry for potential contributors (since anyone can submit pull requests to any repository), it also increases the burden on integrators (i.e., Members of a project's core team, responsible for evaluating the proposed changes and integrating them into the main development line), who struggle to keep up with the volume of incoming pull requests. In this paper we report on a quantitative study that tries to resolve which factors affect pull request evaluation latency in GitHub. Using regression modeling on data extracted from a sample of GitHub projects using the Travis-CI continuous integration service, we find that latency is a complex issue, requiring many independent variables to explain adequately.

Wait for it: determinants of pull request evaluation latency on GitHub

Pull-Request (PR) is the primary method for code contributions from thousands of developers in GitHub. To maintain the quality of software projects, PR review is an essential part of distributed software development. Assigning new PRs to appropriate reviewers will make the review process more effective which can reduce the time between the submission of a PR and the actual review of it. However, reviewer assignment is now organized manually in GitHub. To reduce this cost, we propose a reviewer recommender to predict highly relevant reviewers of incoming PRs. Combining information retrieval with social network analyzing, our approach takes full advantage of the textual semantic of PRs and the social relations of developers. We implement an online system to show how the reviewer recommender helps project managers to find potential reviewers from crowds. Our approach can reach a precision of 74% for top-1 recommendation, and a recall of 71% for top-10 recommendation.

Reviewer Recommender of Pull-Requests in GitHub

Performance diagnosis is labor intensive in production cloud computing systems. Such systems typically face many real-world challenges, which the existing diagnosis techniques for such distributed systems cannot effectively solve. An efficient, unsupervised diagnosis tool for locating fine-grained performance anomalies is still lacking in production cloud computing systems. This paper proposes CloudDiag to bridge this gap. Combining a statistical technique and a fast matrix recovery algorithm, CloudDiag can efficiently pinpoint fine-grained causes of the performance problems, which does not require any domain-specific knowledge to the target system. CloudDiag has been applied in a practical production cloud computing systems to diagnose performance problems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CloudDiag in three real-world case studies.

Huaimin Wang

Papers

Quality and productivity outcomes relating to continuous integration in GitHub

Online Self-Reconfiguration with Performance Guarantee for Energy-Efficient Large-Scale Cloud Computing Data Centers

Wait for it: determinants of pull request evaluation latency on GitHub

Reviewer Recommender of Pull-Requests in GitHub

Toward Fine-Grained, Unsupervised, Scalable Performance Diagnosis for Production Cloud Computing Systems