Event-driven programs are prone to concurrency bugs due their inherent nature of handling asynchronous events. Asynchronous events introduce logical concurrency into these programs making them hard to be thoroughly tested and debugged. However, understanding the root causes and characteristics of concurrency bugs can ease the debugging process and help developers to avoid introducing them. Unfo...

We investigate the impact of bugs in a well-known weather simulation system, MM5. The findings help fill a gap in knowledge about the dependability of this widely used system, leading to both new understanding and further questions. In the research reported here, bugs were artificially added to MM5. Their effects were analyzed to statistically understand the effects of bugs on MM5. In one analy...

Ubiquitous computing applications are frequently long-running and highly distributed, leading to bugs that only become apparent far from and long after their original points of origin. Such bugs are difficult to find. This paper describes the Interaction Analyzer, a debugging tool for ubiquitous computing applications that addresses this problem. The Interaction Analyzer uses protocol definitio...

passert is a new debugging tool for parallel programs which allows programmers to express correctness criteria using a simple, expressive assertion language. We demonstrate how these parallel assertions allow the detection and diagnosis of real world concurrency bugs, detecting 14/17 bugs in an independently selected set of bugs from open source software. We describe a runtime checker which all...

Exposure of a pyrethroid-susceptible strain of bed bugs, Cimex lectularius L. (Hemiptera: Cimicidae) to varying concentrations of deltamethrin for 24 h indicated no significant difference in mortality between males, females, and nymphs at 24 nor at 168 h postexposure when bed bugs were removed to untreated surfaces at 24 h. In addition, many bed bugs classified as morbid or moribund at 24 h and...

Bed bugs have reemerged recently as a serious and growing problem not only in North America but in many parts of the world. These insects have become the most challenging pest to control in urban environments. Residual insecticides are the most common methods used for bed bug control; however, insecticide resistance limits the efficacy of treatments. Desiccant dusts have emerged as a good optio...

Recently, integer bugs, including integer overflow, width conversion, and signed/unsigned conversion errors, have risen to become a common root cause for serious security vulnerabilities. We introduce new methods for discovering integer bugs using dynamic test generation on x86 binaries, and we describe key design choices in efficient symbolic execution of such programs. We implemented our meth...

Concurrency bugs threaten the safety of shared-memory multithreaded programs. The automated fixing techniques add new synchronization constructs; existing techniques may add too many synchronization constructs, sacrifice too much concurrency, or introduce deadlocks. The underlying problem is that existing techniques cannot simultaneously fix different bugs, especially different types of bugs, w...

The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thus, they avoid common concurrency bugs such as data races. However, they are not immune to concurrency bugs in general. This paper studies concurrency bugs in actor-based programs reported in l...

PROUST is a system which identifies the non-syntactic bugs in novices’ programs and provides novices with help as to the misconceptions under which they were laboring that caused the bugs. In this paper we will discuss the methods which PROUST uses to identify and diagnose non-syntactic bugs. Key in this enterprise is PROUST's ability to cope with the significant variability exhibited by novice...