Posted by The JAACS is the Alumni Association of the three Computer Science Institutes INF, IIUN and DIUF of the Universities of Bern, Neuchâtel, and Fribourg. More information about the association and how to register can be found at https://www.jointalumni.ch/admission.
The JAACS annually awards a prize for the best Bachelor, Master, and Doctoral thesis at the INF, IIUN and DIUF that was defended during the academic year. The winners are selected by the respective institutes and are presented the award at the institute’s end-of-year event.
| PhD
Dr. Pooja Rani, “Assessing Comment Quality in Object-Oriented Languages” INF, Bern |
Abstract
High-quality code comments support developers in software maintenance and program comprehension tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, contradictory conventions to write comments, and the lack of quality assessment tools for all aspects of comments make comment evaluation and maintenance a non-trivial problem. To understand the specification of high-quality comments to build effective assessment tools, we develop a multi-perspective view of the comments, which can be approached by analyzing (1) the academic support for comment quality assessment, (2) developer commenting practices across languages, and (3) developer concerns about comments.
Laudatio
Pooja Rani’s dissertation represents an important and in-depth study of commenting practices in current object-oriented languages. She has not only paid great attention to methodological details to ensure the validity of the presented results, but she has also done an excellent job of drawing clear messages from the massive amount of data she has analyzed. The empirical studies conducted to evaluate the two proposed tools are extensive and convincing. Ms Rani has delivered a doctoral thesis of considerable depth on a highly relevant topic in the domain of Software Engineering which has only received moderate levels of attention until now.
Link
https://scg.unibe.ch/archive/phd/rani-phd.pdf
| Master
Timo Bürk “Blockchain consensus protocols based on stake” INF, Bern |
Abstract
The thesis explores so-called “proof-of-stake” consensus protocols. These are algorithms developed for coordination in blockchain networks. Proof-of-stake does not use wasteful “mining” for influencing consensus, but lets the participants vote in proportion to their “stake” in the network. Stake could be the number of coins they hold. Consensus protocols are inherently difficult to understand, due to the decentralization of the network, the presence of faults, and potential attacks by participants.
Laudatio
The thesis of Timo Bürk presents a clear exposition of the eight most relevant proof-of-stake consensus protocols using a rich vocabulary and scientific rigor. He collected, organized, and categorized these important algorithms and unified them through a common language with attention to detail. The final result gives much-needed insight into this important area that was missing so far.
Link
https://crypto.unibe.ch/archive/theses/2021.msc.timo.buerk.pdf
| Bachelor
Joel Hari “Development and evaluation of a low-cost, LoRa-based measurement device for microclimatic assessments in urban environments” INF, Bern |
Abstract
With the ongoing climate change it is crucial to understand the intra-urban temperature and air humidity variations. The urban heat stress and related consequences are becoming increasingly relevant for urban planning. Therefore, a heat monitoring network of up to 85 low-cost temperature sensors was built and evaluated in a previous research project. We have developed a new version of this low-cost temperature sensor providing two major improvements. The first major improvement is wireless communication via LoRaWAN. This decreases the maintenance effort since the previous sensor required to read out the measurement data manually on site. The second major improvement is active ventilation. With the previous sensor only relying on passive ventilation, we achieved to increase the measurement accuracy using active ventilation. We were able to quantify the increased measurement accuracy, as we did numerous experiments including extensive amount of measurements in our lab.
Laudatio
Joel Hari developed and implemented a new sensor prototype in his bachelor thesis in a collaboration between the Institute of Computer Science, the Institute of Geography, and Abilium. The sensors can now be connected to a LoRaWAN network such as TTN or Helium. A special feature is the developed active ventilation system that allows to achieve more accurate temperature measurement results. The thesis selected hardware components for the ventilation and developed the software to control them, also considering energy efficiency issues. Detailed evaluations were performed demonstrating the feasibility of the approach.
Link
https://webarchive.inf.unibe.ch/cds/publications/files/Hari_Joel_bsc_thesis.pdf