Colloquia, Seminars and Conference News
Title : XSnippet: Mining For Sample Code
Date : April 28, 2006. (2:00 pm) Tea starts half an hour before each seminar
Location: ITEB 336
Speaker : Kajal Claypool
Abstract:
It is common practice for software developers to use examples to
guide development efforts. This largely unwritten, yet standard,
practice of ``develop by example'' is often supported by examples
bundled with library or framework packages, provided in textbooks, and
made available for download on both official and unofficial web sites.
However, the vast number of examples that are embedded in the billions
of lines of already developed library and framework code are largely
untapped. We have developed XSnippet, a context-sensitive code
assistant framework that allows developers to query a sample
repository for code snippets that are relevant to the programming task
at hand. In particular, our work makes three primary contributions.
First, a range of queries is provided to allows developers to switch
between a context-independent retrieval of code snippets to various
degrees of context-sensitive retrieval. Second, a novel graph-based
code mining algorithm is provided to support the range of queries and
enable mining within and across method boundaries. Third, an
innovative context-sensitive ranking heuristic is provided that has
been experimentally proven to provide better ranking for best-fit code
snippets than context-independent heuristics such as shortest path and
frequency. Our experimental evaluation has shown that XSnippet has
significant potential to assist developers, and provides better
coverage of tasks and better rankings for best-fit snippets than other
code assistant systems.
Bio:
Kajal Claypool is currently an Assistant Professor of the Department
of Computer Science at University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and an
Associate Director of the Center of Biomolecular and Medical
Informatics, Lowell. She received her B.Tech. degree in Computer
Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, Karnataka India,
and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic
Institute, Worcester. Dr. Claypool has been active in the database
research community for over 8 years and her current research interests
include information integration and transformation, stream data
management, database evolution and migration, and stream query
evolution and migration. She has numerous publications in these and
other related areas.
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