Romain Rouvoy

Université de Lille · Département d'Informatique

In the early days of the web, giving the same web page to different browsers could provide very different results. As the rendering engine behind each browser would differ, some elements of a page could break or be positioned in the wrong location. At that time, the User Agent (UA) string was introduced for content negotiation. By knowing the brows...

While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to systematically block scripts reported by crowdsourced trackers lists. However, this solution heavily depends on the...

While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to systematically block scripts reported by crowdsourced trackers lists. However, this solution heavily depends on the...

Tree matching techniques have been investigated in many fields, including web data mining and extraction, as a key component to analyze the content of web pages. However, when applied to existing web pages, traditional tree matching approaches, covered by algorithms like Tree-Edit Distance (TED) or XyDiff, either fail to scale beyond a few hundred...

Exploratory testing (ET) is a software testing approach that complements automated testing by leveraging business expertise. It has gained momentum over the last decades as it appeals testers to exploit their business knowledge to stress the system under test (SUT). Exploratory tests, unlike automated tests, are defined and executed on-the-fly by t...

Leveraging JavaScript (JS) for User Interface (UI) interactivity has been the norm on the web for many years. Yet, using JS increases bandwidth and battery consumption as scripts need to be downloaded and processed by the browser. Plus, client-side JS may expose visitors to security vulnerabilities such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).This paper intr...

Browser fingerprinting aims to identify users or their devices, through scripts that execute in the users' browser and collect information on software or hardware characteristics. It is used to track users or as an additional means of identification to improve security. In this paper, we report on a new technique that can significantly extend the t...

Energy consumption has been a prominent question in the last decade that concerns both hardware and software dimensions. Source code refactoring is a widespread activity among developers that includes a set of well-known changes to improve the code quality without impacting the functional aspects. Hence, the concern of the impact that may those cha...

Web applications are constantly evolving to integrate new features and fix reported bugs. Even an imperceptible change can sometimes entail significant modifications of the Document Object Model (DOM), which is the underlying model used by browsers to render all the elements included in a web application. Scripts that interact with web applications...

Software Energy Consumption(SEC) is gaining more and more attention. In this paper, we tackle the problem of hinting developers about the SEC of their programs in the context of software developments based on Continuous Integration(CI). In this study, we investigate if the CI can leverage developers' tests to perform a new class of tests: the energ...

Browser fingerprinting has established itself as a stateless technique to identify users on the Web. In particular, it is a highly criticized technique to track users. However, we believe that this identification technique can serve more virtuous purposes, such as bot detection or multi-factor authentication. In this paper, we explore the adoption...

Web applications are constantly evolving to integrate new features and fix reported bugs. Even an imperceptible change can sometimes entail significant modifications of the Document Object Model (DOM), which is the underlying model used by browsers to render all the elements included in a web application. Scripts that interact with web applications...

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been identified by the research community as mobile-specific code smells. These code smells are presented as symptoms...

Many browser cache attacks have been proposed in the literature to sniff the user’s browsing history. All of them rely on specific time measurements to infer if a resource is in the cache or not. Unlike the state-of-the-art, this paper reports on a novel cache-based attack that is not a timing attack but that abuses the HTTP cache-control and expir...

Browser fingerprinting is a stateless identification technique based on browser properties. Together, they form an identifier that can be collected without users' notice and has been studied to be unique and stable. As this technique relies on browser properties that serve legitimate purposes, the detection of this technique is challenging. While s...

Background. As software took control over hardware in many domains, the question of the energy footprint induced by the software is becoming critical for our society, as the resources powering the underlying infrastructure are finite. Yet, beyond this growing interest, energy consumption remains a difficult concept to master for a developer. Aims....

Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been identified by the research community as mobile-specific code smells. These code smells are presented as symptoms...

Mobile crowdsourcing is being increasingly used by industrial and research communities to build realistic datasets. By leveraging the capabilities of mobile devices, mobile crowdsourcing apps can be used to track participants’ activity and to collect insightful reports from the environment (e.g., air quality, network quality). However, most of exis...

IoT devices are ubiquitous and widely adopted by end-users to gather personal and environmental data that often need to be put into context in order to gain insights. In particular, location is often a critical context information that is required by third parties in order to analyse such data at scale. However, sharing this information is i) sensi...

Tree matching techniques have been investigated in many fields, including web data mining and extraction, as a key component to analyze the content of web documents, existing tree matching approaches, like Tree-Edit Distance (TED) or Flexible Tree Matching (FTM), fail to scale beyond a few hundreds of nodes, which is far below the average complexit...

Fine-grained power monitoring of software activities becomes unavoidable to maximize the power usage efficiency of data centers. In particular, achieving an optimal scheduling of containers requires the deployment of software-defined power~meters to go beyond the granularity of hardware power monitoring sensors, such as Power Distribution Units (PD...

The long-term study of air quality inside buildings in the presence of occupants requires the deployment of low-cost instruments capable of measuring the most concerning pollutants, without nuisance to the occupants. Several laboratories within the University of Lille, France, have united their expertises within the APOLLINE project (Air Pollution...

Cloud providers usually offer diverse types of hardware for their users. Customers exploit this option to deploy cloud instances featuring GPUs, FPGAs, architectures other than x86 (e.g., ARM, IBM Power8), or featuring certain specific extensions (e.g, Intel SGX). We consider in this work the instances used by customers to deploy containers, nowada...

Mobile crowdsourcing is being increasingly used by industrial and research communities to build realistic datasets. By leveraging the capabilities of mobile devices, mobile crowdsourcing apps can be used to track participants’ activity and to collect insightful reports from the environment (e.g., air quality, network quality). However, most of exis...

To support users with disabilities, Android provides the accessibility services , which implement means of navigating through an app. According to the Android developer’s guide: “Accessibility services should only be used to assist users with disabilities in using Android devices and apps” . However, developers are free to use this service without...

With millions of applications (apps) distributed through mobile markets, engaging and retaining end-users challenge Android developers to deliver a nearly perfect user experience. As mobile apps run in resource-limited devices, performance is a critical criterion for the quality of experience. Therefore, developers are expected to pay much attentio...

Software power estimation of CPUs is a central concern for energy efficiency and resource management in data centers. Over the last few years, a dozen of ad hoc power models have been proposed to cope with the wide diversity and the growing complexity of modern CPU architectures. However, most of these CPU power models rely on a thorough expertise...

Over the last few years, data analytics shifted from a descriptive era, confined to the explanation of past events, to the emergence of predictive techniques. Nonetheless, existing predictive techniques still fail to effectively explore alternative futures, which continuously diverge from current situations when exploring the effects of what-if dec...

Modern analytics solutions succeed to under- stand and predict phenomenons in a large diversity of software systems, from social networks to Internet-of-Things platforms. This success challenges analytics algorithms to deal with more and more complex data, which can be structured as graphs and evolve over time. However, the underlying data storage...

The growing adoption of distributed data processing frameworks in a wide diversity of application domains challenges end-to-end integration of properties like security, in particular when considering deployments in the context of large-scale clusters or multi-tenant Cloud infrastructures. This paper therefore introduces SecureStreams, a reactive mi...

Given the increasing competition in mobile-app ecosystems, improving the user experience has become a major goal for app vendors. App Store 2.0 will exploit crowdsourced information about apps, devices, and users to increase the overall quality of the delivered mobile apps. App Store 2.0 generates different kinds of actionable feedback from the cro...

Self-adaptive software (SAS) systems monitor their own behavior and autonomously make dynamic adjustments to maintain desired properties in response to changes in the systems’ operational contexts. Control theory provides verifiable feedback models to realize this kind of autonomous control for a broad class of systems for which precise quantitativ...

L’Internet des Objets (IoT pour Internet of Things en anglais) étend internet aux choses et aux lieux réels : les objets connectés peuvent alors communiquer entre eux mais aussi avec leurs utilisateurs. Un intérêt de l’IoT est de permettre (i) la production d’une grande quantité d’information (Big Data) par un réseau distribué d’objets connectés et...

In Hadoop cluster, the performance and the resource consumption of MapReduce jobs do not only depend on the characteristics of these applications and workloads, but also on the appropriate setting of Hadoop configuration parameters. However, when the job workloads are not known a priori or they evolve over time, a static configuration may quickly l...

In Hadoop cluster, the performance and the resource consumption of MapReduce jobs do not only depend on the characteristics of these applications and workloads, but also on the appropriate setting of Hadoop configuration parameters. However, when the job workloads are not known a priori or they evolve over time, a static configuration may quickly l...

The reputation of a mobile app vendor is crucial to survive amongst the ever increasing competition. However this reputation largely depends on the quality of the apps, both functional and non-functional. One major non-functional requirement of mobile apps is to guarantee smooth UI interactions, since choppy scrolling or navigation caused by perfor...

While the number of mobile apps published by app stores keeps on increasing, the quality of these apps varies widely. Unfortunately, for many apps, end-users continue experiencing bugs and crashes once installed on their mobile device. Crashes are annoying for end-users, but they definitely are for app developers who need to reproduce the crashes a...

Android code smells are bad implementation practices within Android applications (or apps) that may lead to poor software quality, in particular in terms of performance. Yet, performance is a main software quality concern in the development of mobile apps. Correcting Android code smells is thus an important activity to increase the performance of m...

Among the different techniques that are used to design self-adaptive software systems, control theory allows one to design an adaptation policy whose properties, such as stability and accuracy, can be formally guaranteed under certain assumptions. However, in the case of software systems, the integration of these controllers to build complete feedb...

Green IT has emerged as a discipline concerned with the optimization of software solutions with regards to their energy consumption. In this domain, most of the state-of-the-art solutions concentrate on coarse-grained approaches to monitor the energy consumption of a device or a process. In this paper, we report on a fine-grained runtime energy mon...

There is a trade-off between the number of concurrently running MapReduce jobs and their corresponding map an reduce tasks within a node in a Hadoop cluster. Leaving this trade-off statically configured to a single value can significantly reduce job response times leaving only suboptimal resource usage. To overcome this problem, we propose a feedba...

Les TIC représentent une part importante dans les émissions mondiales de CO2. En effet, les dernières études montrent qu’elles y contribuent à hauteur de 2%. Leur efficience énergétique est donc un enjeu majeur pour notre société. Dans cet article, nous décrivons une solution capable d’estimer précisément la consommation énergétique des application...

In the vast galaxy of crowdsourcing activities, crowd-sensing consists in using users’ cellphones for collecting large sets of data. In this chapter, we present the APISENSE distributed crowd-sensing platform. In particular, APISENSE provides a participative environment to easily deploy sensing experiments in the wild. Beyond the scientific contrib...

While the number of mobile apps published by app stores keeps increasing, the quality of these apps greatly varies. Unfortunately, end-users continue experiencing bugs and crashes for some of the apps installed on their mobile devices. Although developers heavily test their apps before release, context-sensitive crashes might still emerge after dep...

App stores are digital distribution platforms that put available apps that run on mobile devices. Current stores are software repositories that deliver apps upon user requests. However, when an app has a bug, the store continues delivering defective apps until the developer uploads a fixed version, thus impacting on the reputation of both store and...