Xujie Si is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute and an affiliate member at Mila - Quebec AI Institute, holding a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Previously, he served as an Assistant Professor at McGill University's School of Computer Science. Education: Ph.D., Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania (advised by Mayur Naik) M.S., Computer Science, Vanderbilt University B.E. (with Honors), Nankai University Research Focus: His work bridges AI and program reasoning, emphasizing the integration of statistical and logical methods. Key areas include: Static analysis and verification using deep learning/reinforcement learning Neuro-symbolic systems for urban simulation (e.g., LogiCity) Automated theorem proving via LLMs and symbolic reasoning Program repair and compiler fuzzing Recent Article Trends: Recent work focuses on synergizing LLMs with symbolic reasoning (e.g., Olympiad inequality proving), advancing SAT solving with graph neural networks, and applying neuro-symbolic methods to Euclidean geometry formalization. Awards: Canada CIFAR AI Chair (2023) Lab/Teams: Leads research teams exploring program analysis, neuro-symbolic AI, and formal verification at the University of Toronto and Vector Institute.
Baishakhi Ray is an Associate Professor at Columbia University, specializing in improving software reliability and developers' productivity for both traditional and AI-driven systems. She leads the ARiSE Lab, focusing on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of software engineering and artificial intelligence. Her research interests include software testing for AI systems, adversarial robustness, automated testing of autonomous systems, and leveraging AI techniques such as neural networks for dynamic analysis and fuzzing. Notable projects include DeepTest for autonomous car testing and NEUZZ for efficient fuzzing. Awards: VMware Early Career Faculty Award (2020), IBM Faculty Award (2019), NSF CAREER Award (2019), and multiple best paper awards including EAPLS FASE (2020) and ACM Distinguished Papers (FSE 2017, MSR 2017). Grants: NSF CAREER grant (2019-2024) for deep learning testing, NSF grants for workshops and security bug detection, and collaborative grants on persistent memory and SSL/TLS implementations. Her recent work emphasizes advancing code generation with large language models (LLMs), evaluating model robustness under data contamination, and developing tools like CodeSense and CrashFixer for code semantics and kernel debugging. The ARiSE Lab also explores causal performance debugging and transfer learning for configurable systems.
Xin Peng is a Professor and Deputy Dean at the School of Computer Science, Fudan University, China. He leads the CodeWisdom research team focusing on intelligent software engineering techniques for development, maintenance, and operation of software systems. His educational background includes a PhD in Computer Science (2001-2006) and Bachelor's degree in Computer Science (1997-2001), both from Fudan University. He progressed through the academic ranks from Assistant Professor (2006-2010) to Associate Professor (2010-2015) and finally to Professor (2015-present). Professor Peng's research interests span Software Analytics, Intelligent Software Development, Microservice systems, and AIOps. His work leverages AI technologies including deep learning and knowledge graphs to develop intelligent software engineering techniques. A significant portion of his recent work focuses on applying Large Language Models to various software engineering tasks, including vulnerability detection, API usage analysis, and test automation. His publication record shows a clear trend toward increasingly sophisticated applications of AI in software engineering, with recent work heavily featuring LLMs for tasks ranging from vulnerability patch porting to resource leak detection. The research spans multiple domains including microservice systems, automotive software, and Web of Things security. Best Paper Award of ICSM 2011 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award of ASE 2018 and 2021 IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award of ICSME 2018, 2019, and 2020 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Best Paper award for 2018 Professor Peng serves in numerous leadership roles including Deputy Director of CCF Technical Committee on Software Engineering, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, and Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. He has been actively involved in program committees for major software engineering conferences including ICSE, ASE, ESEC/FSE, and ICSME. He leads the CodeWisdom research team at Fudan University, which has developed several benchmark systems including TrainTicket for microservice research. The team's work bridges academic research with industrial applications, particularly in microservice systems analysis and intelligent software development tools.
Andrea Arcuri is a Professor at the School of Economics, Innovation and Technology within Kristiania University of Applied Sciences . His research focuses on Software Testing , Software Engineering , and Cloud Computing , with a particular emphasis on automated testing techniques for web APIs. Specialized in RESTful, GraphQL, and RPC API fuzzing Developer of the open-source EvoMaster testing tool Pioneer in integrating evolutionary algorithms and symbolic execution for test generation Active in bridging academic research with industrial software testing practices His recent publications show a strong focus on Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) , Automated Test Generation , and Industrial Adoption of Testing Technologies . He has contributed extensively to improving testability through mock generation and database handling in API testing. While no formal scientific awards are listed in the public records analyzed, his work has been consistently published in top-tier software engineering venues since 2013. The articles demonstrate increasing sophistication in fuzzing techniques, with recent extensions to handle complex dependencies like MongoDB and SQL databases.
Lingming Zhang is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, affiliated with the Grainger College of Engineering. His research focuses on the intersection of Software Engineering, Programming Languages, and Machine Learning, with a particular emphasis on automated program repair, compiler testing, and large language model (LLM) applications in software engineering. He has published over 100 papers, achieving an h-index of 50+, and holds an ACM Distinguished Member status. Research Interests: LLM-based software testing, repair, and synthesis Fuzzing of deep-learning libraries and compilers Open-source code LLMs (e.g., StarCoder2, Magicoder) with over 1M downloads Automated program repair systems (e.g., AlphaRepair, ChatRepair, Agentless) Recent Contributions: Developed TitanFuzz for coverage-guided compiler fuzzing Released Agentless , an LLM-based coding tool adopted by OpenAI and DeepSeek Proposed SWE-RL to enhance LLM reasoning via reinforcement learning Service Roles: Program Co-Chair for ASE 2025 and LLM4Code 2025 Associate Chair for OOPSLA 2024 and Area Chair for ICSE 2025/2026 Recipient of NSF CAREER Award and ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Award Lab/Teams: Develops open-source tools like UniAPR for efficient patch validation Active in releasing industry-adopted LLM-based software engineering tools
Aravind Machiry is an Assistant Professor at Purdue University's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a founding member of the Purdue Systems and Software Security (PurS3) Lab . His research focuses on system security, particularly vulnerability detection, prevention, and secure system development using static/dynamic program analysis, fuzzing, type systems, and machine learning. Designing practical solutions for software and embedded system security Recipient of NSF CAREER and Amazon Research awards Active participant in SPLASH 2025 as OOPSLA Review Committee member His recent work includes automated vulnerability detection in embedded software, spatial memory safety enhancements, and security analysis of GitHub workflows. He has received recognition for his research through multiple distinguished paper awards and industry funding. Selected scientific awards include NSF CAREER Award (2024) Amazon Research Award (2022) Test of Time Award at FSE 2023 for DynoDroid Distinguished Paper Award at OOPSLA 2022 for 3c Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2025) His research team has developed frameworks like ARGUS for taint analysis of CI/CD workflows and FuzzUEr for UEFI interface fuzzing, discovering hundreds of critical vulnerabilities in open-source projects and thousands of command injection flaws in GitHub repositories.
Darko Marinov is a Professor at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and a member of the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on software testing methodologies, particularly regression testing, flaky tests, and software reliability engineering. He has contributed to frameworks like Ekstazi for regression test selection and DeFlaker for identifying flaky tests. Marinov holds an NSF CAREER Award (2008) for his work in this domain. His research interests span testing techniques for modern software systems, including configuration testing, test prioritization, and fault localization. He has pioneered studies on the characteristics of flaky tests in large-scale projects and developed tools to improve software quality assurance processes. Marinov collaborates across academic and industrial settings, addressing challenges in continuous integration, reproducibility of computational experiments, and hardware-software co-design for resilience. His work bridges theory and practice, with applications in cloud computing, AI workloads, and cybersecurity. Awards: NSF CAREER Award (2008) Key Contributions: Ekstazi, DeFlaker, FastFlip, and Ctest4J frameworks Labs/Teams: Active member of the Information Trust Institute and leads software testing research groups at UIUC
Abhik Roychoudhury is a Provost's Chair Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS), leading the Trustworthy and Secure Software (TSS) research group since 2001. His work focuses on automated program repair, software testing, security, and agentic AI. He is a Senior Advisor at SonarSource following the acquisition of his startup AutoCodeRover. He holds an ACM Fellowship and has received the ICSE Most Influential Paper Award for program repair research. Education: M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from State University of New York at Stony Brook (1997-2000). Research interests include program analysis, software security, and AI-driven software engineering. His team has pioneered techniques like SemFix and Angelix for program repair, and AFLNet for protocol fuzzing. He has served as editor-in-chief of ACM TOSEM and conference chair for ICSE and FSE. Awards include the NUS Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award (inaugural recipient) and IEEE New Directions Award. His work bridges academia and industry, with contributions to projects like the DesCartes initiative for critical urban systems. Key collaborations include Microsoft on API repair and IBM on AI research centers. His recent focus includes agentic AI for software engineering, reflected in AutoCodeRover's acquisition by SonarSource.
Stefan Nagy is an Assistant Professor at the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah . He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech (2022) and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2016). His primary research focuses on Software Engineering , Software Quality Assurance , and Computer Systems , with specific interests in program analysis, automated bug discovery, and efficient quality assurance for opaque systems. He teaches courses such as CS 4440: Introduction to Computer Security and CS 5963/6963: Applied Software Security Testing . His recent publications (2025) include work on fuzzing frameworks for binary-to-C decompilers, automated API harness generation, and kernel fuzzing configuration optimization. He advises students in these areas and collaborates with groups like the Utah Software Security Group. He is affiliated with the FuTURES 3 Lab and maintains a research website with full publication details. His work addresses challenges in closed-source software analysis, security ethics, and digital forensics.
Bernhard Aichernig is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. His work bridges formal methods, model-based testing, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on automata learning, digital twins, and AI-assisted programming. Institution: Institute of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence Key Research Areas: Model-Based Testing, Automata Learning, AI-Driven Verification His research explores the integration of machine learning into formal verification, enabling scalable testing of complex systems like IoT devices and reinforcement learning agents. Recent projects include AI-Augmented DevOps frameworks (AIDOaRT) and digital twin validation (LearnTwins). Notable scientific awards include multiple best paper recognitions at SEFM (2020, 2021) and the TAYSIR Competition first place (2023). His publications emphasize hybrid approaches combining genetic programming, SMT solving, and neural networks for system modeling. 2025 : AI-assisted programming, timed automata via domain knowledge 2024 : Stochastic environment modeling, Git system learning 2023 : Reinforcement learning under partial observability, digital twins for VPN servers He actively contributes to testing frameworks like AALpy and investigates explainable AI for fault diagnosis in cyber-physical systems.
Lionel C. Briand is a Professor of Software Engineering with shared appointments at the University of Luxembourg's SnT Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. He holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance and serves as Director of Lero, Ireland's national software research center. His academic leadership spans over 25 years of collaborative research with industry partners across automotive, aerospace, energy, financial, and legal domains. Professor Briand's research focuses on software verification and validation, trustworthy AI systems, model-driven engineering, and empirical software engineering methodologies. His work bridges theoretical foundations with industrial applications, particularly in cyber-physical systems where machine learning components interact with safety-critical control systems. He has pioneered techniques for testing AI-enabled systems, GDPR compliance automation, and mutation analysis for space systems. His publication portfolio demonstrates consistent innovation in software testing, with recent emphasis on large language models for test generation, automated compliance checking, and safety analysis of deep neural networks. Key trends include black-box testing methodologies, metamorphic testing for security, and search-based approaches for DNN validation. IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills Award (2012) ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2022) IEEE Reliability Society Engineer-of-the-Year Award (2013) ERC Advanced Grant recipient (2016) Fellow of the Academy of Science, Royal Society of Canada (2023) ICSE 2011 Most Influential Paper Award As Director of Lero and holder of a Canada Research Chair, Professor Briand leads major research initiatives including an ERC Advanced Grant on cyber-physical system modeling and testing. His industrial collaborations generate substantial grant funding, particularly in automotive safety validation and regulatory compliance automation. He mentors numerous researchers through his dual appointments and serves on program committees for top software engineering conferences. Professor Briand directs research activities at the SnT Centre's SVV department, focusing on software verification and validation. His team develops practical tools like MASS for space system mutation analysis and COREQQA for compliance requirements understanding, with strong industry adoption in automotive and aerospace sectors.
Bihuan Chen is an Associate Professor at the College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, specializing in software engineering with focus on software supply chain security and trustworthy AI systems. His research spans multiple programming languages including JavaScript, Python, Java, and C/C++ across application and AI domains. Dr. Chen earned his B.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Fudan University in 2009 and 2014 respectively, followed by postdoctoral research at Nanyang Technological University (2014-2017). His research interests include software supply chain risk assessment, trustworthy AI systems, and program analysis. His recent publications demonstrate strong focus on malicious package detection in NPM/PyPI ecosystems, vulnerability patch porting using LLMs, and safety verification for autonomous driving systems. The work shows increasing integration of machine learning techniques with traditional program analysis approaches, particularly evident in the 2024-2025 publications that leverage LLMs for vulnerability detection and code refinement. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award (FSE 2016, ASE 2018, ASE 2022, FSE 2025) IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award (ICSME 2020, SANER 2023) CCF Prototype Competition Awards (2nd and 3rd Prizes) Dr. Chen has advised over 50 students including current PhD candidates and notable alumni now at Huawei, ByteDance, and other leading tech firms. His fuxi platform assesses security, legal, and maintenance risks across the software engineering lifecycle. He serves on program committees for major conferences including ICSE, FSE, ASE, and ISSTA, and as Associate Editor for the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process.
Manuel Rigger is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), leading the TEST Lab (Trustworthy Engineering of Software Technologies) within the PL/SE group at the School of Computing. His research focuses on improving the reliability of data-centric systems through automated testing frameworks and formal methods. Education : PhD from Johannes Kepler University Linz (supervised by Hanspeter Mössenböck), postdoctoral work at ETH Zurich (Advanced Software Technologies Lab under Zhendong Su). Research Interests : Automated testing of database systems Programming language design and verification Incremental build systems Formal methods for software reliability Key Contributions : Developed tools like SQLancer (for finding bugs in databases) and CERT (performance issue detection). His work has uncovered over 800 bugs in real-world systems. Awards : Recipient of the ERC Consolidator Grant (2025) for groundbreaking research in software security and testing. Service Roles : Organizer of ICFP/SPLASH 2025 Outdoor Activities, committee member for OOPSLA Review, PLDI Artifact Evaluation, and ICSE Program Committee. Also actively involved in organizing workshops (e.g., Fuzzing & Software Security Summer School 2025).
Timothy Menzies is a full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University's College of Engineering. He serves as the director of the Irrational Research lab (mad scientists r'us) and holds editorial positions as editor-in-chief of the Automated Software Engineering journal and associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. With over 300 publications and more than 24,000 citations, Menzies is a globally recognized leader in software engineering research. Menzies' research focuses on developing computer systems that make optimal decisions with minimal data, specializing in artificial intelligence, intelligent agents, data sciences, analytics, and software engineering. His pioneering work in data-driven, explainable, and minimal AI for software systems has redefined defect prediction, effort estimation, and multi-objective optimization. He is particularly known for his contributions to empirical software engineering, emphasizing transparency and reproducibility. As the co-creator of the PROMISE repository, he helped establish modern empirical software engineering by demonstrating that small, interpretable AI models can outperform larger, more complex ones. Menzies' recent publications reveal several key trends in his research: a growing emphasis on ethical considerations in AI deployment, particularly in sensitive domains like legal systems; continued innovation in software analytics with a focus on hyperparameter optimization tailored specifically for software engineering tasks; exploration of causal relationships in software analytics; and development of techniques that work effectively with limited data, including landscape analysis, surrogate learning, and active learning approaches. Mining Software Repositories Foundational Contribution Award (2017) Carol Miller Graduate Lecturer Award (2016) IBM Faculty Award (2016, 2017) ACM Fellow (2025) ASE Fellow (2024) IEEE Fellow Professor Menzies has advised 24 Ph.D. students throughout his career, with recent completions including Andre Motta (April 2025) and Xueqi Yang (October 2024). His research has secured over $19 million in funding from prestigious agencies including NSF, DARPA, and NASA, as well as industry partners like Meta, Microsoft, and IBM. Current grants focus on improving machine learning model efficiency, adapting empirical software engineering methods to computational science, vulnerability detection, and software analytics at scale using transfer learning across 10,000+ GitHub projects. Menzies has developed innovative approaches to help developers navigate the challenges of AI implementation while maintaining ethical standards and practical effectiveness. As director of the Irrational Research lab, Menzies leads a team focused on creating AI tools that are not only intelligent but also fair, transparent, and trustworthy. The lab's work emphasizes practical applications of AI in software engineering while addressing the human factors involved in developer-AI collaboration. Current projects include developing methods for better fuzzing with L3harris, improving vulnerability detection through smart pruning techniques, and creating AI platforms for workforce empowerment through credential gap diagnostics.
Kihong Heo is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Graduate School of Information Security at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) in South Korea. His academic career includes serving as an Assistant Professor at KAIST from 2017-2019 before being promoted to Associate Professor in 2020, following his postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned both his Ph.D. and B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering from Seoul National University. Dr. Heo's research focuses on developing program reasoning systems for safe and reliable software, with specific interests in AI-based program analysis systems for detecting deep semantic software bugs, general-purpose program simplification systems for secure and efficient software, and scalable program synthesis systems for automatic software generation and repair. His work bridges the gap between programming languages, program analysis, and machine learning techniques to create next-generation programming systems. Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong trend toward integrating machine learning techniques with traditional program analysis methods, with significant contributions in compiler validation, software security, fault localization, and program debloating. His research has practical impact, with some of his work incorporated into Facebook's Infer static analyzer. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, FSE 2025 Amazon Research Award, 2024 The Soo-Young Lee Teaching Innovation Award, KAIST, 2024 Prize for Excellence in Teaching, KAIST, 2024 Best Artifact Award, ICSE 2022 ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award, PLDI 2019 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ICSE 2019 Dr. Heo actively mentors graduate students, currently advising several Ph.D. candidates including Yeonhee Ryou, Taeeun Kim, and Sujin Jang, as well as master's students. He has served on program committees for major software engineering and programming language conferences including PLDI, ICSE, POPL, and SPLASH, demonstrating his active role in the academic community. His laboratory, the Programming Systems Laboratory at KAIST, focuses on creating innovative programming systems that leverage both semantic-based program analysis and AI techniques.
