2025
Authors
Cumbane, SP; Gidófalvi, G; Cossa, OF; Madivadua, AM; Sousa, N; Branco, F;
Publication
BIG DATA AND COGNITIVE COMPUTING
Abstract
Understanding people's face-to-face interactions is crucial for effective infectious disease management. Traditional contact tracing, often relying on interviews or smartphone applications, faces limitations such as incomplete recall, low adoption rates, and privacy concerns. This study proposes utilizing anonymized Call Detail Records (CDRs) as a substitute for in-person meetings. We assume that when two individuals engage in a phone call connected to the same cell tower, they are likely to meet shortly thereafter. Testing this assumption, we evaluated two hypotheses. The first hypothesis-that such co-located interactions occur in a workplace setting-achieved 83% agreement, which is considered a strong indication of reliability. The second hypothesis-that calls made during these co-location events are shorter than usual-achieved 86% agreement, suggesting an almost perfect reliability level. These results demonstrate that CDR-based co-location events can serve as a reliable substitute for in-person interactions and thus hold significant potential for enhancing contact tracing and supporting public health efforts.
2025
Authors
Andrade, H; Bispo, J; Correia, FF;
Publication
JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE-EVOLUTION AND PROCESS
Abstract
Code comprehension is often supported by source code analysis tools that provide more abstract views over software systems, such as those detecting design patterns. These tools encompass analysis of source code and ensuing extraction of relevant information. However, the analysis of the source code is often specific to the target programming language. We propose DP-LARA, a multilanguage pattern detection tool that uses the multilanguage capability of the LARA framework to support finding pattern instances in a code base. LARA provides a virtual AST, which is common to multiple OOP programming languages, and DP-LARA then performs code analysis of detecting pattern instances on this abstract representation. We evaluate the detection performance and consistency of DP-LARA with a few software projects. Results show that a multilanguage approach does not compromise detection performance, and DP-LARA is consistent across the languages we tested it for (i.e., Java and C/C++). Moreover, by providing a virtual AST as the abstract representation, we believe to have decreased the effort of extending the tool to new programming languages and maintaining existing ones.
2025
Authors
Salinas, G; Sequeira, G; Rodriguez, A; Bispo, J; Paulino, N;
Publication
2025 IEEE INTERNATIONAL PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING SYMPOSIUM WORKSHOPS, IPDPSW
Abstract
The rapid proliferation of Edge AI applications demands efficient, low-power computing architectures tailored to specific workloads. The RISC-V ecosystem is a promising solution, and has led to a fast growth of implementations based on custom instructions extensions, but with varying degrees of functionality and support which may hinder easy adoption. In this paper, we extensively review existing RISC-V extensions targeting primarily the AI domain and respective compilation flows, highlighting challenges in deployment, usability, and compatibility. We further implement and provide usable containerized environments for two of these works. To address the identified challenges, we then propose an approach for lightweight early validation of custom instructions via source-to-source transformations, without need of compiler modifications. We target our own Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) accelerator, which we integrate into a CORE-V cv32e40px baseline core through custom instructions, and versus which we achieve up to 11.9x speedup for matrix-vector operations.
2025
Authors
Santos, G; Bispo, J; Mendes, A;
Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF SLE 2025 18TH ACM SIGPLAN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE LANGUAGE ENGINEERING, SLE 2025
Abstract
Mobile devices have become integral to our everyday lives, yet their utility hinges on their battery life. In Android apps, resource leaks caused by inefficient resource management are a significant contributor to battery drain and poor user experience. Our work introduces Alpakka, a source-to-source compiler for Android's Smali syntax. To showcase Alpakka's capabilities, we developed an Alpakka library capable of detecting and automatically correcting resource leaks in Android APK files. We demonstrate Alpakka's effectiveness through empirical testing on 124 APK files from 31 real-world Android apps in the DroidLeaks [12] dataset. In our analysis, Alpakka identified 93 unique resource leaks, of which we estimate 15% are false positives. From these, we successfully applied automatic corrections to 45 of the detected resource leaks.
2025
Authors
Ferreira, JP; Bispo, J; Lima, S;
Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF SLE 2025 18TH ACM SIGPLAN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE LANGUAGE ENGINEERING, SLE 2025
Abstract
WebAssembly (Wasm) has emerged as a powerful binary format, enabling the seamless integration of languages like C and Rust into web applications. JavaScript (JS), the dominant language for client-side web development, has its code susceptible to tampering and intellectual property theft due to its transparency in browser environments. We introduce TranspileJS, a novel tool designed to enhance code security by automatically selecting and translating JS snippets into Wasm. TranspileJS leverages a multi-stage architecture that converts JS to TypeScript, which is compiled into Wasm using the AssemblyScript compiler. TranspileJS addresses the challenges posed by the fundamental differences between JS and Wasm, including dynamic typing, runtime behaviour mismatches, and standard library discrepancies, ensuring that the original behaviour of the code is preserved while maximising the amount of code transpiled. Our experiments show that TranspileJS successfully transpiles approximately one-third of the code in our dataset, with a performance impact of up to a 12.3% increase in execution time. The transpilation process inherently obfuscates code, creating effects similar to standard obfuscation techniques, and generates a stealthy and resilient output. Furthermore, combining transpilation with WebAssembly-specific obfuscation techniques opens new possibilities for code protection and resistance against reverse engineering.
2025
Authors
Fernandes T.B.; Sousa B.B.; Garcia J.E.; da Fonseca M.J.S.;
Publication
Evolving Strategies for Organizational Management and Performance Evaluation
Abstract
This chapter aims to understand how Esports organizations can improve digital marketing strategies, considering the unique characteristics of this sector and the importance of maintaining solid relationships with the target audience. The research was carried out using a mixed methodology, which included the application of quantitative research to evaluate the behaviors of Esports fans and a qualitative literature review to explore the trends and challenges of digital marketing in this context. The results show that the esports audience consists predominantly of young males, with a strong interest in video games, technology and pop culture. The personalization of digital strategies, focusing on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch, as well as the use of promotions and sweepstakes, proved essential for audience engagement. Although the use of influencers has a neutral perception, campaigns that offer direct benefits, such as promotions, are more attractive.
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