Events Calendar

PhD Defense - Abdulmajeed Alameer

PhD Candidate:
Abdulmajeed Alameer

Committee:
William G.J. Halfond (Chair)
Nenad Medvidovic
Sandeep Gupta
Chao Wang
Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Dissertation Title:
Detection, Localization, and Repair of Internationalization Presentation Failures in Web Applications

Time and Location:
3/19 from 11am to 1:30pm - Room PHE 223.

Abstract:
Web applications can be easily made available to an international audience by leveraging frameworks
and tools for automatic translation and localization. However, these automated changes
can introduce Internationalization Presentation Failures (IPFs) - an undesired distortion of the
web page's intended appearance that occurs as HTML elements expand, contract, or move in
order to handle the translated text. It is challenging for developers to design websites that can
inherently adapt to the expansion and contraction of text after it is translated to different languages.
Existing web testing techniques do not support developers in debugging these types of
problems and manually testing every page in every language can be a labor intensive and error
prone task.

In my dissertation work, I designed and evaluated two techniques to help developers in debugging
web pages that have been distorted due to internationalization efforts. In the first part of
my dissertation, I designed an automated approach for detecting IPFs and identifying the HTML
elements responsible for the observed problem. In evaluation, my approach was able to detect
IPFs in a set of 70 web applications with high precision and recall and was able to accurately
identify the underlying elements in the web pages that led to the observed IPFs. In the second
part of my dissertation, I designed an approach that can automatically repair web pages that
have been distorted due to internationalization efforts. My approach models the correct layout
of a web page as a system of constraints. The solution to the system represents the new and
correct layout of the web page that resolves its IPFs. The evaluation of this approach showed
that it could more quickly produce repaired web pages that were rated as more attractive and
more readable than those produced by a prior state-of-the-art technique. Overall, these results
are positive and indicate that both my detection and repair techniques can assist developers in
debugging IPFs in web applications with high effectiveness and efficiency.

Time and Location:
3/19 from 11am to 1:30pm - Room PHE 223.

Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 223

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Lizsl De Leon