During the last decade, Yves Le Traon essentially focused on the development of the SnT Interdisciplinary Research Center, and more specifically of his research group SerVal (Security Reasoning and Validation). He joined the SnT six months after its creation, and since then he investigated the scientific challenges that arise when confronted to the typical subject of study in software engineering: real-world software development. Though most of his initial background is and continues to be software testing, software security and model-driven engineering, confronted to the industrial reality he diversified his research experience to areas that are also highly relevant to this proposal: real-world empirical studies, search-based software engineering, code static analysis, machine learning applied to industry and robustness of machine learning systems. The SAFE proposal is inspired from the accumulated experience with various industry sectors, noting the timely and critical need for well-founded approaches to automate software development so as to safely switch to the SFS paradigm.
His achievements and visibility have been acknowledged by the international journal of Systems and Sofware (JSS), ranking him in 2018 among the top-15 most impactful experienced SE researchers in the past decade, worldwide. He is one of the recipients of the Facebook Testing and Verification 2019 - Research Award.
Among all published papers, many have appeared in the best general and specialised venues of the field: IEEE Trans. Software Eng. (6), ICSE (10), ICST (15), ISSTA (6), ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE (3), STVR (3), ISSRE (12), MoDELS (10), ASE (8), ICSME (5), IST (7), Emp. Software Engineering (6), JSS (3), ICSME (5), IEEE TIFS (2). His h-index is 59, with an aggregated citation count of over 13 200 (Google Scholar, July 2020).
SERVICE/ORGANISATION OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES/INVITED PRESENTATIONS
He has been General Chair of major conferences in the domain, such as IEEE ICST 2013, IEEE ISSRE 2004, and Program Chair of IEEE QRS 2016. He will be General Chair of the International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2021). He has been a founding member and a steering committee member of ICST, the IEEE flagship conference in software testing from 2008-2011 and 2011-2016. He serves at the editorial boards of international journals in his domains of expertise (STVR, SoSym, IEEE Transactions on Reliability) and is author of more than 200 publications in international peer-reviewed conferences and journals such as ISSTA, ICSE, TIFF, TIFS, TSE, PLDI and Usenix Security. Since 2010, excluding workshops, he has served in the program committees of 55 conferences, including the flagship ones in software engineering and software testing (ICSE, FSE, ICST, ISSTA).
LEADERSHIP/MENTORING/INDUSTRY/INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION
He has (co-)founded three and led two research groups at IRISA (Triskell – co-founder - Rennes, France) Telecom Bretagne (SerVal v1, Rennes) and University of Luxembourg (SerVal v2), mentored 21 post-docs and 30 PhD candidates to completed degrees, most of which are in industry and 7 university (ass-)professors, e.g., Benoit Baudry: h-index 45, Franck Fleurey: h-index 41, Li Li: h-index 23, Alexandre Bartel: h-index 17, Clémentine Nebut: h-index 18, Jabier Martinez: h-index 11, Kui Liu: h-index 9.
As an indicator of success and healthy growth, a spin-off group of SerVal, called TruX was created in 2020 that is led by a former member of SerVal, Prof. Klein. TruX already embeds 20 researchers.
He has maintained a close relationship with industry in the majority of the research projects he led in the past or is currently leading. His experience with industry has been consolidated by two years spent in France Telecom company, where as an expert in the field he applied model-driven engineering to automating the process of cleaning and migrating obsolete databases. During his scientific leave at University of California Berkeley (2017-2018), hosted by Prof. Koushik Sen with who he collaborated on semantic fuzz testing and mutation testing, he spent in average one day a week in PayPal and another one in Google. He also visited Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and VMWare, and met the main software architects and test engineers in charge of the devops processes in these companies. He has developed an in-depth expertise in the development practices and the level of automation that is nowadays reached by software intensive companies. Since the beginning of his career, where he initially worked on embedded systems from Aerospatiale, Thales, Airbus, Alcatel Lucent, many of his papers have industrial case studies, a large subset with co-authors from industry. He got funding and collaborated with more than 12 small to large scale companies and public-service partners over the years, on real-world, complex software engineering problems. He is currently running projects with four industry partners that are all about automation in the development and testing process (PayPal: Fintech) when ML is used (BGL BNP Paribas: Fintech, Cebi: Indutry4.0), and in the capacity to self-diagnose and reconfigure (CREOS: smartgrid).
He is co-founder of Datathings (January 2017), a spin-off company of University of Luxembourg providing advanced AI software to perform scalable decision-making at runtime, based on a novel temporal graph technology. In 2019, he is co-founder of Right-on-Skill, and educational start-up company that devises graph-based digital tools that are efficient, flexible and adapted to knowledge acquisition needs in companies.
He has participated in several European projects in H2020 (bIoTope), NoE (Sparta, NESSoS) and acquired research funding from industry 3.3 M€ since 2010) for bi-lateral research projects in addition to competitive EU and FNR (Luxemburgish funding agency) projects (10.6 M€ since 2010).
He has an extensive international network and collaboration with a large number of scientists worldwide, this includes contractual projects, joint publications, student and researcher exchange, sabbatical visits etc.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS (10+1): (not always most cited but relevant to the project)
Since I am team leader, I am last author of every paper. Usually the ordering of authors is: PhD students, Postdocs, faculty members. In case of collaborative work with other universities, the rule still holds for the researchers affiliated to University of Luxembourg.
Papers 1and 5 are about software testing in practice, papers 2 and 3 are seminal papers on code static analysis that can be used for SAFE to narrow defect location between code and ML models, paper 4 is an example of efficient test-oriented fault localization technique, paper 7 is about MDE and machine learning, a technology used by Datathings start-up to deploy machine learning systems, paper 9 and 10 are about program repair, finally papers 6, 8 and 11 (available as technical report) are ongoing contributions on machine learning testing.
1. Christopher Henard, Mike Papadakis, Gilles Perrouin, Jacques Klein, Patrick Heymans, Yves Le Traon. Bypassing the combinatorial explosion: Using similarity to generate and prioritize t-wise test configurations for software product lines. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2014. Citations 166 GS.
2. Steven Arzt, Siegfried Rasthofer, Christian Fritz, Eric Bodden, Alexandre Bartel, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon, Damien Octeau, Patrick D. McDaniel: FlowDroid: precise context, flow, field, object-sensitive and lifecycle-aware taint analysis for Android apps. PLDI 2014: 259-269. Citations 1550 GS.
3. Li Li, Alexandre Bartel, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon, Steven Arzt, Siegfried Rasthofer, Eric Bodden, Damien Octeau, Patrick D. McDaniel: IccTA: Detecting Inter-Component Privacy Leaks in Android Apps. IEEE/ACM 37th Int. Conf. on Software Engineering ICSE 2015. Citations 470 GS.
4. Mike Papadakis, Yves Le Traon: Metallaxis-FL: mutation-based fault localization. Softw. Test. Verification Reliab. 25(5-7): 605-628 (2015). Citations 128 GS.
5. Christopher Henard, Mike Papadakis, Mark Harman, Yue Jia, Yves Le Traon: Comparing white-box and black-box test prioritization. ICSE 2016: 523-534. Citations 118 GS.
6. Maxime Cordy, Steve Muller, Mike Papadakis, Yves Le Traon: Search-based test and improvement of machine-learning-based anomaly detection systems. ISSTA 2019: 158-168
7. Thomas Hartmann, Assaad Moawad, François Fouquet, Yves Le Traon: The next evolution of MDE: a seamless integration of machine learning into domain modeling. Software and Systems Modeling 18(2): 1285-1304 (2019) Best Journal paper award
8. Matthieu Jimenez, Renaud Rwemalika, Mike Papadakis, Federica Sarro, Yves Le Traon, Mark Harman: The importance of accounting for real-world labelling when predicting software vulnerabilities. ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE 2019: 695-705. Citations 5 GS. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
9. Anil Koyuncu, Kui Liu, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, Dongsun Kim, Martin Monperrus, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon: iFixR: bug report driven program repair. ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE 2019: 314-325
10. Anil Koyuncu, Kui Liu, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé, Dongsun Kim, Jacques Klein, Martin Monperrus, Yves Le Traon: FixMiner: Mining relevant fix patterns for automated program repair. Empirical Software Engineering 25(3): 1980-2024 (2020)
11. Wei Ma, Mike Papadakis, Anestis Tsakmalis, Maxime Cordy, Yves Le Traon: Test Selection for Deep Learning Systems, minor revision at ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM).
PLENARY AND KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Over the last ten years, I have been an invited speaker at the 2012 and 2013 editions of TAROT Summer School on Software Testing, Verification & Validation, I have further been a keynote speaker in six venues (AFRICOMM 2018, Android Malware Analysis and Detection Workshop 2017, MOPComp 2015, Mutation 2014, SECTEST 2013, AST 2012), I opened ICST 2013 and QRS 2016 conferences and gave an inaugural talk for the Francqui chair award in 2018. I have been invited for punctual seminar presentations in different universities (Saarbrücken, Stuttgart, KIT, IRISA, Simula, KTH..) but most notably at UC Berkeley (2017-2018), Google (2017-2018), PayPal (2017-2020), Facebook (2017), Alcatel Lucent (2010). I am episodically invited as expert by companies or institution, e.g. by the European Bank Authority on the use of Big Data and Data Analytics (including Machine Learning) in banking – EBA’s FinTech Roadmap (London. February 2019).