Rocco Oliveto

University of Molise | Università del Molise · Department of Biosciences and Territory

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly becoming fundamental in supporting software developers in coding tasks. The massive datasets used for training LLMs are often collected automatically, leading to the introduction of data smells. Previous work addressed this issue by using quality filters to handle some specific smells. Still, the litera...

Modern video games are extremely complex software systems and, as such, they might suffer from several types of post-release issues. A particularly insidious issue is constituted by drops in the frame rate ( i.e. , stuttering events), which might have a negative impact on the user experience. Stuttering events are frequently documented in the milli...

Docker is the de facto standard for software containerization. A Dockerfile contains the requirements to build a Docker image containing a target application. There are several best practice rules for writing Dockerfiles, but the developers do not always follow them. Violations of such practices, known as Dockerfile smells, can negatively impact th...

Smart Contracts are programs running logic in the Blockchain network by executing operations through immutable transactions. The Blockchain network validates such transactions, storing them into sequential blocks of which integrity is ensured. Smart Contracts deal with value stakes, if a damaging transaction is validated, it may never be reverted,...

Voice-based virtual assistants are becoming increasingly popular. Such systems provide frameworks to developers for building custom apps. End-users can interact with such apps through a Voice User Interface (VUI), which allows the user to use natural language commands to perform actions. Testing such apps is not trivial: The same command can be exp...

Context The game industry is increasingly growing in recent years. Every day, millions of people play video games, not only as a hobby, but also for professional competitions ( e.g., e-sports or speed-running) or for making business by entertaining others ( e.g., streamers). The latter daily produce a large amount of gameplay videos in which they a...

The increasing diffusion of mobile devices and their integration with sophisticated hardware and software components has promoted the development of numerous applications in which developers find new ingenious ways to exploit the possibilities offered by the access to resources such as cameras, biometric sensors, and GPS receivers. As a result, we...

Context. The game industry is increasingly growing in recent years. Every day, millions of people play video games, not only as a hobby, but also for professional competitions (e.g., e-sports or speed-running) or for making business by entertaining others (e.g., streamers). The latter daily produce a large amount of gameplay videos in which they al...

Telemedicine allows to constantly monitor patients without the need of hospitalization. Such a practice is enabled by IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) devices, which acquire signals, and by AI (Artificial Intelligence)-based algorithms, able to automatize the analysis carried out on many patients. The large quantity of data produced every minute b...

Docker is a containerization technology that allows developers to ship software applications along with their dependencies in Docker images. Developers can extend existing images using them as base images when writing Dockerfiles. However, a lot of alternative functionally-equivalent base images are available. While many studies define and evaluate...

Containerization allows developers to define the execution environment in which their software needs to be installed. Docker is the leading platform in this field, and developers that use it are required to write a Dockerfile for their software. Writing Dockerfiles is far from trivial, especially when the system has unusual requirements for its exe...

The automatic generation of source code is one of the long-lasting dreams in software engineering research. Several techniques have been proposed to speed up the writing of new code. For example, code completion techniques can recommend to developers the next few tokens they are likely to type, while retrieval-based approaches can suggest code snip...

Software engineering research has always being concerned with the improvement of code completion approaches, which suggest the next tokens a developer will likely type while coding. The release of GitHub Copilot constitutes a big step forward, also because of its unprecedented ability to automatically generate even entire functions from their natur...

Medical technologies in the form of wearable devices are an integral part of our daily lives. These devices are devoted to acquire physiological data to provide personal analytics and to assess the physical status of assisted individuals. Nowadays, thanks to the research effort and to the continuously evolving technologies, telemedecine plays a cru...

Blockchain is a platform of distributed elaboration, which allows users to provide software for a huge range of next‐generation decentralized applications without involving reliable third parties. Smart contracts (SCs) are an important component in blockchain applications: they are programmatic agreements among two or more parties that cannot be re...

Background. Containerization technologies are widely adopted in the DevOps workflow. The most commonly used one is Docker, which requires developers to define a specification file (Dockerfile) to build the image used for creating containers. There are several best practice rules for writing Dockerfiles, but the developers do not always follow them....

Deep learning (DL) techniques have been used to support several code-related tasks such as code summarization and bug-fixing. In particular, pre-trained transformer models are on the rise, also thanks to the excellent results they achieved in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The basic idea behind these models is to first pre-train them on a...

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a chronic heart disease that causes debilitating symptoms and leads to higher mortality and morbidity. In this paper, we present HARPER, a novel automatic detector of CHF episodes able to distinguish between Normal Sinus Rhythm (NSR), CHF, and no-CHF. The main advantages of HARPER are its reliability and its capabi...

Refactoring aims at improving the maintainability of source code without modifying its external behavior. Previous works proposed approaches to recommend refactoring solutions to software developers. The generation of the recommended solutions is guided by metrics acting as proxy for maintainability (e.g., number of code smells removed by the recom...

Context. The game industry is increasingly growing in recent years. Every day, millions of people play video games, not only as a hobby, but also for professional competitions (e.g., e-sports or speed-running) or for making business by entertaining others (e.g., streamers). The latter daily produce a large amount of gameplay videos in which they al...

Different from what happens for most types of software systems, testing video games has largely remained a manual activity performed by human testers. This is mostly due to the continuous and intelligent user interaction video games require. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been exploited to partially automate functional testing. RL enable...

Active rehabilitation is an exercise-based program designed to improve the level of function of people with motor disabilities. The effectiveness of such programs is strongly influenced by the correctness of the exercise execution. An exercise done incorrectly could even lead to a worsening of the health status. For this reason, specialists are req...

Background and Objective. Equipments generally used for entertainment, such as Microsoft Kinect, have been widely used for postural control as well. Such systems—compared to professional motion tracking systems—allow to obtain non-invasive and low-cost tracking. This makes them particularly suitable for the implementation of home rehabilitation sys...

Search-based techniques have been successfully used to automate test case generation. Such approaches allocate a fixed search budget to generate test cases aiming at maximizing code coverage. The search budget plays a crucial role; due to the hugeness of the search space, the higher the assigned budget, the higher the expected coverage. Code compon...

Wearable devices as medical technologies are becoming an integral part of our lives. Many research studies are dedicated to these devices and are mainly focused on providing personal analytics, measuring physical status, and acquiring physiological signals and parameters. These continuously evolving technologies play an important role in telemedici...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common type of heart arrhythmia. AF is highly associated with other cardiovascular diseases, such as heart failure, coronary artery disease and can lead to stroke. Unfortunately, in some cases people with atrial fibrillation have no explicit symptoms and are unaware of their condition until it is discovered duri...

The number of connected medical devices that are able to acquire, analyze, or transmit health data is continuously increasing. This has allowed the rise of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). IoMT-systems often need to process a massive amount of data. On the one hand, the colossal amount of data available allows the adoption of machine learning tec...

The SZZ algorithm for identifying bug-inducing changes has been widely used to evaluate defect prediction techniques and to empirically investigate when, how, and by whom bugs are introduced. Over the years, researchers have proposed several heuristics to improve the SZZ accuracy, providing various implementations of SZZ. However, fairly evaluating...

Deep learning (DL) techniques are gaining more and more attention in the software engineering community. They have been used to support several code-related tasks, such as automatic bug fixing and code comments generation. Recent studies in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field have shown that the Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) archit...

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing their findings, we present a large-scale study quantitatively and qualitatively investigating why developers pe...

Android fragmentation is a well-known issue referring to the adoption of different versions in the multitude of devices supporting such an operating system. Each Android version features a set of APIs provided to developers. These APIs are subject to changes and may cause compatibility issues. To support app developers, approaches have been propose...

Code reading is one of the most frequent activities in software maintenance. Such an activity aims at acquiring information from the code and, thus, it is a prerequisite for program comprehension: developers need to read the source code they are going to modify before implementing changes. As the code changes, so does its readability; however, it i...

Refactoring aims at improving code non-functional attributes without modifying its external behavior. Previous studies investigated the motivations behind refactoring by surveying developers. With the aim of generalizing and complementing their findings, we present a large-scale study quantitatively and qualitatively investigating why developers pe...

Heart Rate (HR) is one of the mostly used elec-trocardiogram (ECG) feature in many automatic detectors of anomalies. This paper deals with a preliminary study on a novel approach which, through the combination of Machine Learning (ML) and Compressed Sensing (CS), aims at retrieving vital information from a digital compressed single-lead electrocard...

In the last few years wearable devices are becoming always more important. Their usefulness mainly lies in the continuous monitoring of vital parameters and signals, such as electrocardiogram. However, such a monitoring results in an enormous amount of data which cannot be precisely analyzed manually. This recalls the need of approaches and tools f...

Software vulnerabilities are particularly dangerous bugs that may allow an attacker to violate the confidentiality, integrity or availability constraints of a software system. Fixing vulnerabilities soon is of primary importance; besides, it is crucial to release complete patches that do not leave any corner case not covered. In this paper we study...

This paper deals with a description of an innovative Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) system for implementing personalized health services. The proposed IoMT system has the following advantages respect to the state-of-the-art systems available in literature: (i) it fuses the data provided by several sensors, inertial measurement unit, the bio-impe...

Understanding software is an inherent requirement for many maintenance and evolution tasks. Without a thorough understanding of the code, developers would not be able to fix bugs or add new features timely. Measuring code understandability might be useful to guide developers in writing better code, and could also help in estimating the effort requi...

Online code clones are code fragments that are copied from software projects or online sources to Stack Overflow as examples. Due to an absence of a checking mechanism after the code has been copied to Stack Overflow, they can become toxic code snippets, e.g., they suffer from being outdated or violating the original software license. We present a...

Code smells are poor implementation choices applied by developers during software evolution that often lead to critical flaws or failure. Much in the same way, community smells reflect the presence of organizational and socio-technical issues within a software community that may lead to additional project costs. Recent empirical studies provide evi...

The number of mobile devices sold worldwide has exponentially increased in recent years, surpassing that of personal computers in 2011. Such devices daily download and run millions of apps that take advantage of modern hardware features (e.g., multi-core processors, large Organic Light-Emitting Diode—OLED—screens, etc.) to offer exciting user exper...

The project “Higher Education Innovation in Plant Diversity: flexible learning paths for emerging labour market” HEIPLADI relays on constructive cooperation and integration of expertise between Botanic Gardens, Germplasm Banks, Herbarium and Higher Education Institutes from University of Molise (Italy), University of Cagliari (Italy), University of...

The use of database technologies as a tool for implementing data for quantitative ecological studies and biodiversity conservation planning has recently attracted the attention of the biological community. Despite the fact that the number of biodiversity data sets is quickly rising, online databases of small mammals are still scarce, especially for...

Automatically generating test cases plays an important role to reduce the time spent by developers during the testing phase. In last years, several approaches have been proposed to tackle such a problem: amongst others, search-based techniques have been shown to be particularly promising. In this paper we describe Ocelot, a search-based tool for th...

We performed two online surveys of Stack Overflow answerers and visitors to assess their awareness to outdated code and software licenses in Stack Overflow answerers. The answerer survey targeted 607 highly reputed Stack Overflow users and received a high response rate of 33%. Our findings are as follows. Although most of the code snippets in the a...

Online code clones are code fragments that are copied from software projects or online sources to Stack Overflow as examples. Due to an absence of a checking mechanism after the code has been copied to Stack Overflow, they can become toxic code snippets, i.e., they suffer from being outdated or violating the original software license. We present a...

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices that may hinder code comprehensibility and maintainability. Despite the effort devoted by the research community in studying code smells, the extent to which code smells in software systems affect software maintainability remains still unclear. In this paper we present a large scale...

Unreadable code could compromise program comprehension, and it could cause the introduction of bugs. Code consists of mostly natural language text, both in identifiers and comments, and it is a particular form of text. Nevertheless, the models proposed to estimate code readability take into account only structural aspects and visual nuances of sour...