Kostadin Damevski

Kostadin Damevski is an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Computer Science, part of the College of Engineering. He leads the Software Improvement (SWIM) Lab, focusing on leveraging machine learning and NLP to enhance software engineering practices. His research spans developer productivity tools, cybersecurity, and open source sustainability, with notable projects in emotion analysis in developer communication and conversational interfaces for software tasks.

Research Highlights:

• Emotions in Software Engineering: Analyzing toxic communication in open source projects to improve collaboration quality.
• Conversational Interfaces: Designing chat-based tools for bug reporting, documentation search, and end-user programming of cyber-physical systems.
• Vulnerability Data Quality: Enhancing accuracy of software vulnerability databases through empirical studies.

Key Contributions:

• Created annotated datasets for GitHub issue threads and Gitter chat studies.
• Developed StackInTheFlow recommendation system for Stack Overflow navigation.
• Recipient of the 2005 Best Paper Award at IPDPS.

Advisement & Collaboration: Actively mentoring PhD and undergraduate researchers, including Mia Mohammad Imran and Viral Sheth. Seeks industry partnerships to advance applied research in secure coding and developer tooling.

Labs/Teams: SWIM Lab (Software Improvement Lab) focuses on practical solutions for software engineering challenges through empirical research and tool development.