Research in Computer Science Seminar (RICSS) for Friday, March 5, 2010

[Gregory M. Kapfhammer]

Hello Everyone,

You are cordially invited to attend the upcoming session of the
Research in Computer Science Seminar (RICSS). Please pass this
invitation on to other students, staff, and faculty members who
would be interested in attending the upcoming talk.

Date: Friday, March 5, 2010
Location: Alden Hall Room 101
Time: 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm

Presenter:

James Clause
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Title:

Enabling and Supporting the Debugging of Field Failures

Abstract:

Applications are often released with faults or missing
functionality, and real-world examples of failures experienced
by users are countless. This talk presents a novel approach that
facilitates the debugging of these field-failures by capturing
and replaying program executions. Recording executions is done
by intercepting and logging the interactions between an
application and its environment while the application executes
on a user's machine. If the execution terminates with a
failure, the resulting execution recording is sent to developers
who can use it to investigate the captured failure.

The approach also addresses two of the most important practical
issues when collecting information from the field: collecting
large amounts of data and privacy and security concerns. To
reduce the amount of information that must be sent to
developers, and to help focus developers' debugging efforts, the
approach minimizes failing executions by removing portions of
the recordings that are not necessary for reproducing the
captured failures. To help address privacy and security
concerns, the approach automatically anonymizes execution
recordings by replacing potentially sensitive information with
non-sensitive information that can also be used to reproduce the
captured failure.

Presenter Biography:

James Clause is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Computing at
the Georgia Institute of Technology. He works with Professor
Alessandro Orso in the area of software engineering. His current
areas of interest include techniques for improving the
effectiveness of debugging and dynamic information flow-based
program analysis. Additional information can be found on his
website: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~clause

All are welcome to attend!

More details about RICSS are available at:

http://www.cs.allegheny.edu/~gkapfham/research/RICSS/

Kind Regards,

greg

--
Dr. Gregory M. Kapfhammer, Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
Allegheny College
Meadville, Pennsylvania, USA
Office: +1 814-332-2880
gkapfham(at)allegheny(dot)edu
http://www.cs.allegheny.edu/~gkapfham/