Deep Learning (DL) frameworks play a critical role in advancing artificial intelligence, and their rapid growth underscores the need for a comprehensive understanding of software quality and maintainability. DL frameworks, like other systems, are prone to code clones. Code clones refer to identical or highly similar source code fragments within the same project or even across different projects. Code cloning can have positive and negative implications for software development, influencing maintenance, readability, and bug propagation. While the existing studies focus on studying clones in DL-based applications, to our knowledge, no work has been done investigating clones, their evolution and their impact on the maintenance of DL frameworks. In this paper, we aim to address the knowledge gap concerning the evolutionary dimension of code clones in DL frameworks and the extent of code reuse across these frameworks. We empirically analyze code clones in nine popular DL frameworks, i.e., TensorFlow, Paddle, PyTorch, Aesara, Ray, MXNet, Keras, Jax and BentoML, to investigate (1) the characteristics of the long-term code cloning evolution over releases in each framework, (2) the short-term, i.e., within-release, code cloning patterns and their influence on the long-term trends, and (3) the file-level code clones within the DL frameworks. Our findings reveal that DL frameworks adopt four distinct cloning trends: “Serpentine”, “Rise and Fall”, “Decreasing”, and “Stable” and that these trends present some common and distinct characteristics. For instance, bug-fixing activities persistently happen in clones irrespective of the clone evolutionary trend but occur more in the “Serpentine” trend. Moreover, the within-release level investigation demonstrates that short-term code cloning practices impact long-term cloning trends. The cross-framework code clone investigation reveals the presence of functional and architectural adaptation file-level cross-framework code clones across the nine studied frameworks. We provide insights that foster robust clone practices and collaborative maintenance in the development of DL frameworks.

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It was a pleasure participating in the Tollab event, organized by Tollab: la fédération des étudiants libanais à Montréal. This incredible initiative unites the Lebanese student associations of McGill, Concordia, Université de Montréal, and Polytechnique Montréal, fostering a strong sense of community and support among students from all academic backgrounds. The event provided a valuable platform for students to engage with professionals from various fields, gain insights into life after university, and be inspired to reach their full potential. As someone with expertise in computer science, I was delighted to share my experiences and connect with students eager to explore career opportunities in tech and beyond. A big thank you to the organizers and participants for making this event such a success! Looking forward to more opportunities to support and uplift the next generation of students. To learn more about Tollab and their initiatives, feel free to check out their website: www.tollab.info

I'm thrilled to announce that I have joined the SE in MTL community under the SEMTL group! This vibrant network is all about fostering connections and collaboration among professionals in the software engineering space here in Montreal. I had the fantastic opportunity to participate in the November session of the SEMTL Meeting at UQÀM, where I connected with like-minded researchers, shared insights, and research ideas. Stay tuned for more updates on my journey with SEMTL upcoming events!

Upon receiving a new issue report, practitioners start by investigating the defect type, the potential ixing efort needed to resolve the defect and the change impact. Moreover, issue reports contain valuable information, such as, the title, description and severity, and researchers leverage the topics of issue reports as a collective metric portraying similar characteristics of a defect. Nonetheless, none of the existing studies leverage the defect topic, i.e., a semantic cluster of defects of the same nature, such as Performance, GUI and Database, to estimate the change impact that represents the amount of change needed in terms of code churn and the number of iles changed. To this end, in this paper, we conduct an empirical study on 298,548 issue reports belonging to three large-scale open-source systems, i.e., Mozilla, Apache and Eclipse, to estimate the change impact in terms of code churn or the number of iles changed while leveraging the topics of issue reports. First, we adopt the Embedded Topic Model (ETM), a state-of-the-art topic modelling algorithm, to identify the topics. Second, we investigate the feasibility of predicting the change impact using the identiied topics and other information extracted from the issue reports by building eight prediction models that classify issue reports requiring small or large change impact along two dimensions, i.e., the code churn size and the number of iles changed. Our results suggest that XGBoost is the best-performing algorithm for predicting the change impact, with an AUC of 0.84, 0.76, and 0.73 for the code churn and 0.82, 0.71 and 0.73 for the number of iles changed metric for Mozilla, Apache, and Eclipse, respectively. Our results also demonstrate that the topics of issue reports improve the recall of the prediction model by up to 45%.

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3MT, what an incredible platform to showcase my research and engage with a diverse audience! I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of conveying the complex concepts of my research in a concise manner to a non-expert audience while maintaining the essence of my work. This experience was unique! It pushed me to refine my communication skills and find creative ways to make my research accessible to a wider audience.

Watch my presentation in the final competition here.

About Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition: The Three Minute Thesis competition challenges researchers to present their research in a clear, concise, and engaging manner, encapsulating years of work in just three minutes to a non expert audience. It serves as a platform to showcase the importance and impact of academic research while honing participants' communication skills.

CAN-CWiC is the premiere Canadian computing conference for Women in Technology. This year, 650 attendees, i.e., faculty members, Ph.D., MSc and undergraduate students from all across Canada, gathered in Toronto to network, learn, share and mentor women in computing.

Being surrounded by hundreds of young and professional achieved women in the tech field felt so empowering. Once on stage, I embraced the "butterflies" in my stomach and opened my talk by raising the voice advocating for women's rights around the world. I ended my speech with a piece of advice to the students: "Be comfortable with imperfections". Why imperfection? Read more about my journey of breaking free from the voice of perfection here.

I appreciate so much the teams I am fortunate to work with and the amazing leadership we have at the School of Computing! A couple of shoutouts I'd like to give to:
Prof. Hossam Hassanein, for the exemplary leadership
Prof. Mohammad Zulkernine, for the great mentorship
Debby Robertson (the Queens of the school), for the genuine and compassionate dedication to our department

About Ian A. Macleod Award

Established by friends, colleagues and students in memory of Professor Ian A. Macleod, who was a member of the Department of Computing and Information Science (currently School of Computing), from its inception in 1969 until 1995.
To commemorate his belief in the importance of a strong departmental spirit, the award is granted in the fall to the graduate student who made the greatest contribution to the intellectual and social spirit of the School of Computing during the preceding academic year.

I am excited to be selected among 50 other international researchers to serve on the MSR program committee to get first-hand experience and be trained by the leaders in the Software Engineering field. To know more about the MSR PC Shadow program, check the MSR webpage

To know more about this award, please refer to the SGPS award web page.

To know more about this award check this article published in Queen's University newsletter

To know more about CAN CWIC conference, check this website

Click here to read the full paper

I am extremely appreciative of the recognition I have received for my work from the Government of Canada. I am grateful to Queen's School of Computing (SoC) for the support. Read SoC article to know more about my research.

To know more about the Prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship check the official webpage.