University of Saskatchewan Department of Computer Science

Department Seminar Series

Title: When is a clone not a clone? (and vice-versa)

Speaker: James R. Cordy, School of Computing, Queen's University

Date:

Time: 2:00 p.m.

Place: Thorvaldson 159

Abstract:

Software clones are fragments of code or other artifacts that are copied or repeated in source text.  Clones have a significant effect on software development and maintenance, and as a result clone detection, analysis and management has become a popular research topic in software engineering.  However, there is a class of languages for which clone detectors perform very poorly, and in fact return results that are either incomplete, uninteresting or downright incorrect. In this talk I will introduce one such language, the Web Services Description Language.  I will explain why implicit assumptions made by clone detectors cause them to do very poorly in analysis of similarities in this and other modelling languages, and how we can resolve the problem by taking context into account.  I will demonstrate our results by applying the new method to the problem of web services personalization, and show how it generalizes to semantic methods such as LDA.

Biography:

James Cordy is Professor and past Director of the School of Computing at Queen’s University.  As leader of the TXL source transformation project with hundreds of academic and industrial users worldwide, he is the author of more than 130 refereed contributions in programming languages, software engineering and artificial intelligence.  Dr. Cordy is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, a senior member of the IEEE, and an IBM visiting scientist and faculty fellow.

This is joint work with PhD students Douglas Martin and Scott Grant, funded in part by NSERC, OGS and IBM Canada.