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  • PhD Defense - Abdulmajeed Alameer

    Tue, Mar 19, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 01:30 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    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

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