The forthcoming 6G networks will embrace a new realm of AI-driven services that requires innovative network slicing strategies, namely slicing for AI, which involves the creation of customized network slices to meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of diverse AI services. This poses challenges due to time-varying dynamics of users’ behavior and mobile networks. Thus, this paper proposes an online learning framework to determine the allocation of computational and communication resources to AI services, to optimize their accuracy as one of their unique key performance indicators (KPIs), while abiding by resources, learning latency, and cost constraints. We define a problem of optimizing the total accuracy while balancing conflicting KPIs, prove its NP-hardness, and propose an online learning framework for solving it in dynamic environments. We present a basic online solution and two variations employing a pre-learning elimination method for reducing the decision space to expedite the learning. Furthermore, we propose a biased decision space subset selection by incorporating prior knowledge to enhance the learning speed without compromising performance and present two alternatives of handling the selected subset. Our results depict the efficiency of the proposed solutions in converging to the optimal decisions, while reducing decision space and improving time complexity. Additionally, our solution outperforms State-of-the-Art techniques in adapting to diverse environmental dynamics and excels under varying levels of resource availability. ... Read more

Bots have become popular in software projects as they play critical roles, from running tests to fixing bugs/vulnerabilities. However, the large number of software bots adds extra effort to practitioners and researchers to distinguish human accounts from bot accounts to avoid bias in data-driven studies. Researchers developed several approaches to identify bots at specific activity levels (issue/pull request or commit), considering a single repository and disregarding features that showed to be effective in other domains. To address this gap, we propose using a machine learning-based approach to identify the bot accounts regardless of their activity level. We selected and extracted 19 features related to the account's profile information, activities, and comment similarity. Then, we evaluated the performance of five machine learning classifiers using a dataset that has more than 5,000 GitHub accounts. Our results show that the Random Forest classifier performs the best, with an F1-score of 92.4% and AUC of 98.7%. Furthermore, the account profile information (e.g., account login) contains the most relevant features to identify the account type. Finally, we compare the performance of our Random Forest classifier to the state-of-the-art approaches, and our results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in identifying the account type regardless of their activity level. ... Read more

Software bots automate tasks within Open Source Software (OSS) projects’ pull requests and save reviewing time and effort (“the good”). However, their interactions can be disruptive and noisy and lead to information overload (“the bad”). To identify strategies to overcome such problems, we applied Design Fiction as a participatory method with 32 practitioners. We elicited 22 design strategies for a bot mediator or the pull request user interface (“the promising”). Participants envisioned a separate place in the pull request interface for bot interactions and a bot mediator that can summarize and customize other bots’ actions to mitigate noise. We also collected participants’ perceptions about a prototype implementing the envisioned strategies. Our design strategies can guide the development of future bots and social coding platforms. ... Read more