Café SERU No. 8, back on site

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Jens Krinke, Director of CREST at University College London, gave Café SERU No. 8, “Toxic Code on Stack Overflow”, on 16 November 2022 in room A2 of the MU AI Center. It was our first seminar on site since the COVID-19 pandemic. Developers exchange code snippets on Stack Overflow, and researchers harvest those snippets for recommendation systems, but the code can have quality problems such as security or license issues. The talk covered how Stack Overflow users perceive such issues, the problem of outdated code and possible license violations, and code on Stack Overflow that breaks coding style and contains security problems. Such toxic code may affect both the projects that reuse it and the mining or machine learning work that uses Stack Overflow as a code base.