Sharif Digital Repository

Online question-answering communities, as reliable sources for exchanging experts' opinions, have specific rules to maintain their content quality. Due to their large number of users and posts, manual control and approval by administrators is not plausible, and these systems require solutions that are more scalable. The current dominant solution, i.e., the use of crowdsourcing and relying on user reports, has serious problems, including the slow speed of handling violations, the waste of time of users, and the discouraging feedback from the community towards new users. Although the automation of moderation actions via artificial intelligence methods would solve the existing problems, the... 

The goal of active learning is to choose the training instances intelligently, in order to make the cost of the learning process as low as possible. In proactive learning, which is an extension of active learning, several noisy labelers provide labels for each chosen sample. The proactive problem consists of three different subproblems: estimating true labels and finding their correctness probability (crowdsourcing), learning a model for finding labels of new instances (classification), and selecting samples for empowering the classifier (active learning). Since estimated labels through crowdsourcing are not certain, regular classification and active learning methods should be extended to be... 

During software evolution and maintenance, developers deal with various challenges, such as locating features, fixing bugs, and adding new features. One of the first steps to perform most of the software maintenance activities, such as updating features or fixing bugs, is to have a relatively good understanding of the program’s source code which is often written by other developers. A code summary is a description about a program’s entities (e.g., its methods) which helps developers have a better comprehension of the code in a shorter period of time. However, generating code summaries can be a challenging task. To mitigate this problem, in this thesis, we introduce CrowdSummarizer, a code... 

The goal of crowd labeling is to find labels of given samples using humans’ mind power.Since crowds are not necessarily experts, their provided labels are rather noisy and erroneous.This challenge is usually resolved by collecting multiple labels for each sample and aggregating them to estimate its true label. Although this mechanism leads to high-quality labels, it is not actually cost effective. Adaptive methods consider that only some samples are challenging and require more labels. They spend the budget more wisely, and iteratively collect the required labels. Using adaptive methods approach, we utilize statistical latent models to model and analyze the collected labels and low-rank... 

Nowadays, we observe the growth in the number of mobile smart phones. These smart phones have had an impressive progress in software and hardware. Many studies have focused on utilizing this new platform. One of these areas of research is collecting information from environment.Two major challenges for a successful crowdsourcing system are engaging a sufficient number of workers and validating of their registered data, which make the system more reliable. Collecting data from different points of a territory can be defined as some tasks and should be assigned to users near those tasks properly. Some users want a monetary reward for the cost they incur. On the other hand, information... 

According to expanding penetration of Internet and the increased power of processing devices in the recent years, softwares are incisingly used for daily acitivies. The variety of hardware configuration and operating system of such devices leds the companies to take advantage of cross-platform software development methods. Although the production of cross platform software, resude development costs, it results in an specific type of faults known as platform-specific failures. These faults occur when software is running on specific platforms, and therefore, to identify and resolve them, the software test process should be performed on different platforms. To deal with this problem, we present...