Dave Towey

University of Nottingham Ningbo China | Ningbo · School of Computer Science

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has put additional demands on Higher Education institutions around the globe. In January 2020, universities in China were forced to plan for Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). Many Sino-foreign institutions responded in a proactive way seeing this difficult situation as an opportunity to transform their teaching and learn...

Context Simulation-based testing is essential when developing Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADASs) and autonomous driving (AD) systems, producing fast, high-quality test results, at relatively low cost. However, simulation testing relies on the quality of the ADAS simulation platform: If the simulation platform is faulty, then the simulation...

It is critical that the management of tertiary level educators is not compromised by the use of uncalibrated practices. Continuing professional development (CPD) requires staff motivation to be effective. This study investigates the influence of two professional development programmes; one operates at a Sino-foreign university in mainland China and...

Purpose-Drawing on the traditions of autoethnography and reflective practice, this paper explores the experiences and reflections of one of the longest serving foreign academics in China's Sino-foreign Higher Education (SfHE) system. He started out at UIC (United International College, a collaboration between Beijing Normal University and Hong Kong...

Purpose-Undergraduate Computer Science (CS) students participate in multiple project-based classes throughout their studies. In our context, the two most significant of these are the optional final year project dissertation, and the compulsory penultimate-year team-based software engineering project. These projects can require levels of independent...

Purpose-University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) was the first Sino-foreign higher education institution established in China. As a pioneering institution for innovation, UNNC aims to develop engaging pedagogy to stimulate and motivate students. One of these innovations is the virtual reality (VR) Design Movements (DM) experience developed by V...

Delivering high-quality, timely and formative feedback for students’ code-based coursework submissions is a problem faced by Computer Science (CS) educators. Automated Feedback Systems (AFSs) can provide immediate feedback on students’ work, without requiring students to be physically present in the classroom—an increasingly important consideration...

Test case prioritization (TCP) aims at scheduling test case execution so that more important test cases are executed as early as possible. Many TCP techniques have been proposed, according to different concepts and principles, with dissimilarity-based TCP (DTCP) prioritizing tests based on the concept of test case dissimilarity: DTCP chooses the ne...

For universities, COVID-19 made traditional means of providing quality teaching and learning impossible. Nevertheless, students required delivery and assessment to progress or graduate on time. Subjects in Science and Engineering with practical components presented a particular challenge, and this paper assesses institutional means and the perspect...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Adaptive random testing (ART) is an enhancement of random testing (RT), and aims to improve the RT failure-detection effectiveness by distributing test cases more evenly in the input domain. Many ART algorithms have been proposed, with fixed-size-ca...

Interdisciplinarity is widely regarded as the future ofIndustry 4.0. It is at the core of the knowledge economy and is key to solving complex real-world problems. Contemporary education therefore must provide students with the skills and understanding to engage in interdisciplinary studies. This paper explores the experiences, attitudes and motivat...

Adaptive Random Testing (ART) is a family of testing techniques that were proposed as an enhancement of random testing (RT). ART achieves better failure-detection capability than RT by more evenly distributing test cases throughout the input domain. However, this process of selecting more diverse test cases incurs a heavy computational cost. In thi...

This paper presents an automated, domain-independent, metamorphic testing platform called MTKeras. In this paper, we report on an investigation demonstrating the effectiveness and usability of MTKeras through five case studies in the four domains of image classification, sentiment analysis, search engines and database management systems. We also re...

Software testing is often hindered where it is impossible or impractical to determine the correctness of the behaviour or output of the software under test (SUT), a situation known as the oracle problem. An example of an area facing the oracle problem is automatic image classification, using machine learning to classify an input image as one of a s...

Software testing is often hindered where it is impossible or impractical to determine the correctness of the behaviour or output of the software under test (SUT), a situation known as the oracle problem. An example of an area facing the oracle problem is automatic image classification, using machine learning to classify an input image as one of a s...

Information is indispensable in modern society. People's daily communication and work depend on information transmission. Unsafe storage or transmission of data may result in privacy and security problems. One way to attempt to prevent such issues is to use encryption algorithms to transform information into encrypted forms. Because the encryption...

Awareness of web accessibility issues is necessary for, amongst other things, good website design. Good website design can mean the difference between disabled users being able to access the website content, or not. This paper describes the impact of a student-led project to develop a VR application, as an Open Education Resource (OER), to increase...

Since the popularization of social media, news has entered our lives digitally. While news is spreading broader and faster, fake news is becoming an increasingly popular topic. Fake news detection is therefore important in both social media and research areas. With artificial intelligence technology, software engineers have developed a lot of fake...

In today's digital era, the number of digital artefacts produced by students in universities around the world continues to rise. This paper describes a project that developed a digital artefacts platform to showcase students' projects at an international level, aiming to increase the visibility of students' work to global audiences. Due to the COVI...

Purpose – This paper reports on experiences at the start of a Software Engineering (SE) PhD, where the candidate encountered and overcame multiple challenges setting up his research environment, which included online learning (and supervision) elements. When preparing a replication study, the candidate faced both hardware and software problems as h...

Purpose-Computer Science (CS) has been rapidly growing in popularity, partly due to the great growth of big data (BD) and other new technologies, and the services that support them. BD involves data sets that are too large to be captured, curated, analyzed, or processed (for an acceptable time and cost) using traditional CS techniques. Although BD...

Purpose-The Sino-foreign Higher Education Institutions (SfHEIs) in the People's Republic of China (PRC) grew as an innovative response to a (then) pressing PRC education problem-providing sufficiently high quality and quantity higher education (HE) opportunities. These SFHEIs have also been centres of innovation, with many exciting initiatives bein...

Purpose-Delivering high-quality, timely and formative feedback for students' code-based coursework submissions is a problem faced by Computer Science (CS) educators. Automated Feedback Systems (AFSs) can provide immediate feedback on students' work, without requiring students to be physically present in the classroom-an increasingly important consi...

Purpose-The COVID-19 pandemic has caused enormous pain and suffering, with the impact on health and daily life having been catastrophic. Industry and professions have been severely impacted, with many seeing widespread redundancy and closures. Although there have been silver linings-in the shape of resilience and adaptations, for example-the disrup...

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has presented challenges to post-secondary education, including that campuses have been closed, removing face-to-face instruction options. Meanwhile, this crisis has also presented unique opportunities to create a “tipping point” or conditions that foster innovative teaching practices. In light of such a “danger-opportu...

COVID-19 has caused heart-break and disruption. The People's Republic of China (PRC) was one of the first severely-impacted countries, but also one of the first to attempt to return to normalcy. Education, including Higher Education-the context of this paper-was disrupted, and the impact of these disruptions continues to be felt. A small consolatio...

Adaptive random testing (ART) improves the failure-detection effectiveness of random testing by leveraging properties of the clustering of failure-causing inputs of most faulty programs: ART uses a sampling mechanism that evenly spreads test cases within a software’s input domain. The widely-used Fixed-Sized-Candidate-Set ART (FSCS-ART) sampling st...

Cloud services have become a popular and flexible solution for providing components to build service-based systems. A component’s trustworthiness is a key measure that can guide service requesters when making a service selection decision. Prediction of this trustworthiness, based on the component’s multi-faceted quality of service (QoS) attributes,...

The advances of 5G, sensors, and information technologies enabled proliferation of smart pervasive sensor networks. 5G mobile networks provide low-power, high-availability, high density, and high-throughput data capturing by sensor networks and continuous streaming of multiple measured variables. Rapid progress in sensors that can measure vital sig...

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has placed a huge strain on higher education institutions and educators around the world, which has included the closure of campuses, removal of face-to-face instruction and a shift to remote teaching and learning. However, this situation has also created unique opportunities and conditions that can foster innovation in...

The advances of 5G, sensors, and information technologies enabled proliferation of smart pervasive sensor networks. 5G mobile networks provide low-power, high-availability, high density, and high-throughput data capturing by sensor networks and continuous streaming of multiple measured variables. Rapid progress in sensors that can measure vital sig...

This paper describes an ongoing project to develop a Virtual Reality platform to deliver phobia-inspired experiences. These experiences could induce a reaction in the user that may help the user overcome, or alleviate, the phobia. The platform includes monitoring sensors that could be used to measure how much impact the experience is having. The pr...

2020 IEEE 44th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference COMPSAC 2020 pp. 507-12

2020 IEEE 44th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference COMPSAC 2020 pp. 513-18

Random testing (RT) is a well-studied testing method that has been widely applied to the testing of many applications, including embedded software systems, SQL database systems, and Android applications. Adaptive random testing (ART) aims to enhance RT's failure-detection ability by more evenly spreading the test cases over the input domain. Since...

Purpose-On December 31, 2019, the Chinese office of the World Health Organization (WHO) received the first reports of a previously unknown virus allegedly behind a number of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, in the People's Republic of China. The University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) is a Sino-British campus situated in Ningbo, about 700km from Wuha...

Purpose – Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is expected to play a crucial role in the sustainable development of tomorrow’s knowledge economy, as it empowers individuals with skill-development, and promotes employment through offering an alternative educational pathway. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has presented challenges to H...

Regression test case prioritization (RTCP) aims to improve the rate of fault detection by executing more important test cases as early as possible. Various RTCP techniques have been proposed based on different coverage criteria. Among them, a majority of techniques leverage code coverage information to guide the prioritization process, with code un...

Regression test case prioritization (RTCP) aims to improve the rate of fault detection by executing more important test cases as early as possible. Various RTCP techniques have been proposed based on different coverage criteria. Among them, a majority of techniques leverage code coverage information to guide the prioritization process, with code un...

Web vulnerability scanners (WVSs) are tools that can detect security vulnerabilities in web services. Although both commercial and open‐source WVSs exist, their vulnerability detection capability and performance vary. In this article, we report on a comparative study to determine the vulnerability detection capabilities of eight WVSs (both open and...

In its simplest form, software testing consists of creating test cases from a defined input space, running them in the system-under-test (SUT), and evaluating the outputs with a mechanism for determining success or failure (i.e. an oracle). Metamorphic testing (MT) provides powerful concepts for alleviating the problem of a lack of oracles. To incr...

This study describes a practical approach to implement improvements in the teaching of bilingual learners by reflecting on some of the challenges encountered whilst using technology to enhance student engagement and receive real-time feedback in the Sino-Foreign Higher Education (HE) environment of the University of Nottingham, Ningbo (UNNC).

Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) aims at constructing a covering array (CA) of all value combinations at a specific interaction strength, to detect faults that are caused by the interaction of parameters. CIT has been widely used in different applications, with many algorithms and tools having been proposed to support CA construction. To dat...

Purpose It is possible for civil engineering (CE) students to graduate from a degree programme without gaining experience on a construction site. The implementation of virtual field trips using virtual reality (VR) in CE education is a development that can address this phenomenon and help facilitate the consolidation of abstract theories into tangi...

In recent years, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been increasingly adopted to develop distributed applications in the context of the Internet. To develop reliable SOA-based applications, an important issue is how to ensure the quality of web services. In this paper, we propose a dynamic random testing (DRT) technique for web services, which...

While many computer science (CS) curricula are increasingly addressing a demand for more communicative and ethical graduates, reports of CS student difficulties with nontechnical subjects, such as Professional Ethics, persist. These seem compounded for students learning through a second or foreign language. This paper explores the impact that multi...

Random testing (RT) is a well-studied testing method that has been widely applied to the testing of many applications, including embedded software systems, SQL database systems, and Android applications. Adaptive random testing (ART) aims to enhance RT's failure-detection ability by more evenly spreading the test cases over the input domain. Since...

Test-case prioritisation (TCP) attempts to schedule the order of test-case execution such that faults can be detected as quickly as possible. TCP has been widely applied in many testing scenarios such as regression testing and fault localisation. Abstract test cases (ATCs) are derived from models of the system under test and have been applied to ma...

Test‐case prioritisation (TCP) attempts to schedule the order of test‐case execution such that faults can be detected as quickly as possible. TCP has been widely applied in many testing scenarios such as regression testing and fault localisation. Abstract test cases (ATCs) are derived from models of the system under test and have been applied to ma...

Purpose-High stress levels have become increasingly prevalent amongst students and staff, both academic and administrative, in higher education (HE). Much of this stress has been linked to the mass, "one-size-fits-all" approach characteristic of traditional assessment methods, formative and (especially) summative. Motivated by a desire to better un...

Purpose-The discipline of computer science (CS) has seen a surge in popularity in education, with student demand the highest it has been for many years. A reason for this enthusiasm may be linked to the recent growth of the industry, boosted by the increasingly ubiquitous ABC of artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing. However, in ad...