Talk Abstracts

Title: Software Research, Practice and Innovation

Speaker: Crista Lopes

Abstract: During my career, I have been involved in a number of different kinds of software-related projects, from Aspect-Oriented Programming to OpenSimulator to an urban planning startup to collaborative projects with colleagues in other fields to occasional consulting contracts. I have also been supervising academic research in software for the past 10 years. All this variety has taught me a lot about software. Specifically, I've learned what the role of software research is and... isn't. In this talk I will go through some of these experiences and describe the lessons learned.

Bio: Crista Lopes is a Professor in the Department of Informatics, Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to being in Academia, she worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (1995-2001), where she helped shape the concept of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and the community around it. Her software engineering research work is driven by the development of large-scale systems. Recently, she has been working on MMO virtual worlds and their applications beyond gaming. She is a core contributor to the OpenSimulator project, a virtual world platform. She is the recipient of several NSF grants, including a CAREER Award. She is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, a Senior Member of IEEE, and Ohloh Kudos Rank 9. Dr. Lopes has a PhD from Northeastern University, and MS and BS degrees from Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal.

Title: Challenges in Adapting and Deploying ResearchTechniques into Industrial Teams

Speaker: Brian Robinson

Abstract: The research community has created a large number of techniques that aim to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of software engineering activities. Unfortunately, very few of these techniques have large scale adoption, even though developers and testers really want solutions to their problems. At ABB, we have worked with many teams over the last 8 years to adopt and deploy a number of these techniques. In this talk, I will discuss challenges we have faced in adapting and deploying research solutions, and how we have worked with researchers to improve their tools and techniques and ultimately get them adopted by developers and testers.

Bio: Brian currently leads ABB's global software improvement activities, and is ABB's designated technical expert in Software Engineering. He received his PhD in computer science from Case Western Reserve University. In his current role, Brian is responsible for both short term improvements and ABB’s research in software engineering. His current research involves improving testing and maintenance in large, long lived industrial systems. He particularly enjoys bridging academic work into industrial practice and is actively collaborating with many Universities around the world.

Title: Doing Research in Software Analysis: Lessons and Tips [Slides]

Speaker: Zhendong Su

Abstract: In this talk, I will share my experience in developing and conducting research in software testing and analysis. To illustrate and strengthen my view points, I will discuss a few of my own projects on software analysis, highlighting the relevant lessons and tips.

Bio: Zhendong Su is a Professor and Chancellor's Fellow at UC Davis. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. His research focuses on developing methodologies, techniques, and tools for improving software quality and programming productivity. He serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (ACM TOSEM), and (co-)chaired the 2009 Static Analysis Symposium (SAS) and the 2012 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA). He is the recipient of a Best Paper Award from the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems, two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards, an NSF CAREER Award, a College of Engineering Outstanding Junior Faculty Award at UC Davis, an IBM Software Quality Innovation Award, and a Microsoft Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) Award.

Title: On Finding Fixes

Speaker: Andreas Zeller

Abstract: You may know me from my work on fixing programs, and indeed, that's what I started my career with. In the past decade, though, I have been working much more on fixing other's work---or, more precisely, other's research. Here’s the process: I encounter some technology that I am excited about because it bears great promise. I try to put it to use on real programs. Then I'm invariably disappointed by the many things that don't work as advertised. And then I try fix the problems I encounter, typically by designing some missing link that enables this great technology to automate and to scale. This process is fueled by (a) the will to get things done, (b) the ability to embrace new fields, and (c) sharing across the scientific community; and I illustrate these principles through research examples from empirics, testing, parallelization, and verification.

Bio: Andreas Zeller is a full professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, since 2001. His research concerns the analysis of large software systems and their development process. In 2010, Zeller was inducted as Fellow of the ACM for his contributions to automated debugging and mining software archives. In 2011, he received an ERC Advanced Grant, Europe's highest and most prestigious individual research grant, for work on specification mining and test case generation.

Title: Software Analytics in Practice – Approaches and Experiences

Speaker: Dongmei Zhang

Abstract: A huge wealth of various data exists in the software development process, and hidden in the data is information about the quality of software and services as well as the dynamics of software development. With various analytic and computing technologies, software analytics is to enable software practitioners to performance data exploration and analysis in order to obtain insightful and actionable information for data-driven tasks around software and services.

Software analytics is naturally tied with the software development practice mainly because (1) the data under study comes from real practice; (2) there are real problems to be answered using the data; (3) one of the success metrics of software analytics research is its influence and impact on the development practice. The process of transferring software analytics research results into practical use, a.k.a. technology transfer, is full of challenges, such as dealing with the scale and complexity of the real data, walking the last mile to build tools working well in practice instead of only being a demo or prototype, and effectively engaging the software practitioners to adopt the tools and provide feedback.

At the Software Analytics group in Microsoft Research Asia, we are conducting research in software analytics; and we also collaborate extensively with product teams across Microsoft. In this talk, I will discuss some of the research projects in our group; and I will also use some case studies to share our approaches and experiences in technology transfer.

Bio: Dongmei Zhang is a Principal Researcher and research manager at the Software Analytics group of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). Her research interests include data-driven software analysis, machine learning, information visualization and large-scale computing platform. She founded the Software Analytics group at MSRA in 2009. Since then she has been leading the group to research software analytics technologies. Her group collaborates closely with multiple product teams in Microsoft, and has developed and deployed software analytics tools that have created high business impact.