“
Software has too many states.
People have too little time. Both need shortcuts.
”
I am an ACM fellow, IEEE fellow, ASE fellow and the editor-in-chief of the Automated SE journal. For 2010–2026 I was an Associate Editor, IEEE TSE
I earned my phd from UNSW (1995) and am a Full Professor at NC State, where I direct the Irrational Research Lab. My work focuses on software engineering for AI — building data-driven, explainable, and intelligent software systems. I co-created the PROMISE repository, showing that small, interpretable AI models can often outperform larger, more complex ones.
24 Ph.D. students advised + 3 in progress.
$19M in grants from NASA, NSF, NSA, LexisNexis, Microsoft, Meta, National Archives, etc.
300+ papers, 25,000+ citations (h-index=75).
wanna work with me ?
Are you industry? Or enrolled at NC State?
want to find+fix bugs in real ai/ml?
Email me, and/or take my SE+AI subject (Fall'26),
and/or
sign up for my reading group (Fall 2026).
paper · appointed · talk · keynote · blog · panel
| May'26 | SSBSE'26: Zoom, Don't Wander — Regional Search vs. Pareto vs. Global | |
| IST: From Coverage to Causes: Data-Centric Fuzzing for JS Engines | ||
| Apr'26 | JF talk: ICSE'26: HPO and SE | |
| Promoted, Not Replaced | ||
| JF talk: ICSE'26: shaky causal structures | ||
| JSS: explaining optimization | ||
| TOSEM: LLMs warming-up active learning | ||
| ICSE'26: Future of SE | ||
| Mar'26 | Reappointed EIC, ASE journal | |
| PC Member, FSE'27 | ||
| Co-chair, Future of SE track, ICSE 2028 | ||
| PC Member, ICSE'27 NIER | ||
| FSE'26: Data-Light SE Challenge | ||
| EMSE: Improving LLM Annotations | ||
| Feb'26 | IEEE Fellows Review Committee | |
| VERIFAI'26: Exploiting Sparsity | ||
| Jan'26 | ICSE'26 FOSE: SE Journals in 2036 | |
| MSR: Multi-Objective Optimization Repo | ||
| VerifAI, France | ||
| invited keynote, SSBSE'26 |
2025 > older news
| Dec'25 | Area Chair: ASE'26, ICSE'26 | |
| Oct'25 | PC Member: ISSTA'26, FSE'26, ICSE NIER'26, CAIN'26 | |
| Sep'25 | Valencia SE Group | |
| Aug'25 | CACM: The Case for Compact AI | |
| Airbnb Dev Conference, San Francisco | ||
| Jul'25 | PC: AAAI Social Impact'26, CAIN'26 | |
| Future Advanced Testing Workshop, Paris | ||
| Jun'25 | ESEM'25, Hawaii | |
| May'25 | Co-chair, EMSE'25 Doctoral Symposium |
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