Laszlo Vidacs

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at University of Szeged

Background Advances in high-throughput technologies have originated an ever-increasing availability of omics datasets. The integration of multiple heterogeneous data sources is currently an issue for biology and bioinformatics. Multiple kernel learning (MKL) has shown to be a flexible and valid approach to consider the diverse nature of multi-omics...

Introduction Patients (2.7M in EU) with positive cancer prognosis frequently develop metastases (≈1M) in their remaining lifetime. In 30-70% cases, metastases affect the spine, reducing the strength of the affected vertebrae. Fractures occur in ≈30% patients. Clinicians must choose between leaving the patient exposed to a high fracture risk (with d...

Radiologic reports often contain misspellings that compromise report quality and pose challenges for machine understanding methods, which require syntactical correctness. General automatic misspell correction solutions are less effective in specialized documents, such as spinal radiologic reports, particularly in morphologically rich languages like...

Tool support for automated fault localization in program debugging is limited because state-of-the-art algorithms often fail to provide efficient help to the user. They usually offer a ranked list of suspicious code elements, but the fault is not guaranteed to be found among the highest ranks. In Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL) – which use...

The increasingly anonymous methods people use to communicate in the modern world allow for more freedom of speech. The safety of anonymity, however, can enable criminals to cause harm to others through various means, such as blackmail, verbal abuse, threat letters and numerous other ways. These culprits, often hiding behind computer screens, can be...

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Software Engineering (SE) field is always a bit delayed compared to state-of-the-art research results. While the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-2) model was published in 2018, only a few recent works used it for SE tasks. One of such tasks is Automated Program Repair (APR), where the a...

Communication among people is often a challenging task due to the different interpretations of the terms they use. The way people interpret the terms highly depends on the semantic context, where the notions were acquired. The different contexts provide somewhat distinct meanings to the terms used. In software development and integration, requireme...

Traceability information can be crucial for software maintenance, testing, automatic program repair, and various other software engineering tasks. Customarily, a vast amount of test code is created for systems to maintain and improve software quality. Today’s test systems may contain tens of thousands of tests. Finding the parts of code tested by e...

Despite the immense popularity of the Automated Program Repair (APR) field, the question of patch validation is still open. Most of the present-day approaches follow the so-called Generate-and-Validate approach, where first a candidate solution is being generated and after validated against an oracle. The latter, however, might not give a reliable...

Összefoglalás. A mély mesterséges neuronhálók elterjedése az ipari alkalmazásokban évekkel azok megbízhatóságával, értelmezhetőségével, és biztonságával kapcsolatos szakterületek fejlődését megelőzően történt. Az egyik, gyakorlatban is jelentős területen, a képfelismerésben például a megvalósult megoldások szinte már emberi teljesítményre képesek,...

The analysis of social discourses from the perspective of historical changes deserves special attention. Such a study could play a key role in revealing social changes and latent narrative of those in power; and understanding the underlying social dynamic in a given period. Until the recent years, such issues were analyzed mainly in a qualitative a...

Communication between a software development team and business partners is often a challenging task due to the different context of terms used in the information exchange. The various contexts in which the concepts are defined or used create slightly different semantic fields that can evolve into information and communication silos. Due to the silo...

Closing a question on a community question answering forum such as Stack Overflow is a highly divisive event. On one hand, moderation is of crucial importance in maintaining the content quality indispensable for the future sustainability of the site. On the other hand, details about the closing reason might frequently appear blurred to the user, wh...

The analysis of social discourses from the perspective of historical changes deserves special attention. Such a study could play a key role in revealing social changes and understanding the underlying social dynamic in a given period. Mostly qualitative approaches were used previously to perform such an analysis. In our paper we present a new way o...

Online question answering (Q&A) forums like Stack Overflow have been playing an increasingly important role in supporting the daily tasks of developers. Stack Overflow can be considered as a meeting point of experienced developers and those who are looking for a solution for a specific problem. Since anyone with any background and experience level...

Automatic recovery of test-to-code traceability links is an important task in many areas of software engineering, like quality assurance and code maintenance. The research community has shown great interest in such a topic and has developed several techniques that already made significant advances in the field. These techniques include text-based l...

In industrial practice the clone-and-own strategy is often applied when in the pressure of high demand of customized features. The adoption of software product line (SPL) architecture is a large one time investment that affects both technical and organizational issues. The analysis of the feature structure is a crucial point in the SPL adoption pro...

Identification of non-functional requirements in an early phase of software development process is crucial for creating a proper software design. These requirements are often neglected or given in too general forms. However, interviews and other sources of requirements often include important references also to non-functional requirements which are...

Identification of non-functional requirements in an early phase of software development process is crucial for creating a proper software design. These requirements are often neglected or given in too general forms. However, interviews and other sources of requirements often include important references also to non-functional requirements which are...

Product metrics are widely used in the maintenance and evolution phase of software development to advise the development team about software quality. Although most of these metrics are defined for mainstream languages, several of them were adapted to fourth generation languages (4GL) as well. Usual concepts like size, complexity and coupling need t...

Software systems are to be developed based on expectations of customers. These expectations are expressed using natural languages. To design a software meeting the needs of the customer and the stakeholders, the intentions, feed-backs and reviews are to be understood accurately and without ambiguity. These textual inputs often contain inaccuracies,...

The RPG programming language is a popular language employed widely in IBM i mainframes nowadays. Legacy mainframe systems that evolved and survived the past decades usually data intensive and even business critical applications. Recent, state of the art quality assurance tools are mostly focused on popular languages like Java, C++ or Python. In thi...

Context Program queries play an important role in several software evolution tasks like program comprehension, impact analysis, or the automated identification of anti-patterns for complex refactoring operations. A central artifact of these tasks is the reverse engineered program model built up from the source code (usually an Abstract Semantic Gra...

Software development in C/C++ languages is tightly coupled with preprocessor directives. While the use of preprocessor constructs cannot be avoided, current IDE support for developers can still be improved. Early feedback from IDEs about misused macros or conditional compilation has positive effects on developer productivity and code quality as wel...

The relation of test suites and actual faults in a software is of critical importance for timely product release. There are two particularily critical properties of test suites to this end: fault localization capability, to characterize the effort of finding the actually defective program elements, and fault detection capability which measures how...

Complex Event Processing deals with the detection of complex events based on rules and patterns defined by domain experts. Many complex events require real-time detection in order to have enough time for appropriate reactions. However, there are several events (e.g. credit card fraud) that should be prevented proactively be-fore they occur, not jus...

We present a tool that permits developers to monitor and verify assumptions at an abstract level about an application running on a virtual machine. On the implementation level, a so-called platform aligned model (PAM) described in the UML (Unified Modeling Language) and enriched by OCL (Object Constraint Language) requirements is used to formalize...

In the age of advanced integrated development environments there is a lack of support for understanding preprocessor macros. The preprocessor has proven to be a powerful tool for decades, but the developer is still guided poorly when the debugger stops at a source code line containing macros. The main problem is that the developer sees the original...

Nowadays, the most popular programming languages are so-called third generation languages, such as Java, C# and C++, but higher level languages are also widely used for application development. Our work was motivated by the need for a quality assurance solution for a fourth generation language (4GL) called Magic. We realized that these very high le...

Re-engineering a legacy software system to support new, modern technologies instead of old ones is not an easy task, especially for large systems with a complex architecture. The use of reverse engineering tools is crucial for different subtasks of the full process, such as re-documenting the old code or recovering its design. There are many tools...

Nowadays there are many tools and methods available for source code quality assurance based on static analysis, but most of these tools focus on traditional software development techniques with 3GL languages. Besides procedural languages, 4GL programming languages such as Magic 4GL and Progress are widely used for application development. All these...

For Complex Event Processing (CEP), the synergy with Predictive Analytics (PA) is a promising research direction. In this paper we focus on the inclusion of PA technologies into CEP applications. Involving PA opens a wide range of possibilities in several application fields. However, we have observed that only a few CEP solutions apply PA technique...

Of the very few practical implementations of program slicing algorithms, the majority deal with C/C++ programs. Yet, preprocessor-related issues have been marginally addressed by these slicers, despite the fact that ignoring (or only partially handling) these constructs may lead to serious inaccuracies in the slicing results and hence in the progra...

Preprocessor directives are usually omitted from the analysis of C/C++ software, yet they play an important role especially in program transformations. Here a method is presented for refactoring preprocessor constructs at the model level. Refactorings are carried out on program models derived from a reverse engineering process of real-life software...

Slicing C programs has been one of the most popular ways for the implementation of slicing algorithms; out of the very few practical implementations that exist many deal with this programming language. Yet, preprocessor related issues have been addressed very marginally by these slicers, despite the fact that ignoring (or handling poorly) these con...

The expressiveness of the C/C++ preprocessing facility enables the development of highly configurable source code. However, the usage of language constructs like macros also bears the potential of resulting in highly incomprehensible and unmaintainable code, which is due to the flexibility and th e "cryptic" nature of the pre- processor language. T...

In this paper, we study a metamodel for the C++ programming language. We work out refactorings on the C++ metamodel and present the essentials as graph transformations. The refactorings are demonstrated in terms of the C++ source code and the C++ target code as well. Graph transformations allow to capture refactoring details on a conceptual and eas...

In this paper, we study a metamodel for the C++ programming language. We work out refactorings on the C++ metamodel and present the essentials as graph transformations. The refactorings are demonstrated in terms of the C++ source code and the C++ target code as well. Graph transformations allow to capture refactoring details on a conceptual and eas...

File inclusion, conditional compilation and macro processing has made the C/C++ preprocessor a powerful tool for programmers. However, program code with lots of directives often causes difficulties in program understanding and maintenance. The main source of the problem is the difference between the code that the programmer sees and the preprocesse...