Current Ph.D. Students (3)
| Year | Name | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 2028 | Srinath Srinivasan | NC State |
| 2027 | Kishan Ganguly | NC State |
| Amirali Rayegan | NC State |
Want to find+fix bugs in real AI/ML? Are you NC State or industry? Why not join my reading group (every semester)?
email me →I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UNSW (1995) and am now a Full Professor at NC State University, where I direct the Irrational Research Lab (mad scientists 'r us)▌.
My work focuses on software engineering for AI, specifically building data-driven, explainable, and intelligent software systems. I am an ACM, IEEE, and ASE Fellow, and co-creator of the PROMISE repository, showing that small, interpretable AI models can often outperform larger, more complex ones.
I have published over 300 papers with 24,000+ citations (h-index=74) and advised 24 Ph.D. students. I serve as Editor-in-Chief of the Automated Software Engineering journal and, from 2010 to 2026, as an Associate Editor for IEEE TSE.
My research is supported by $19M in competitive grants from government (NASA, NSF, NSA) and industry (LexisNexis, Microsoft, Meta). Recent: $2.5M from NSF + $1M from NSA for trustworthy compact AI.
Simpler, optimized models yield exceptional results while remaining transparent and trustworthy. Reproducibility and simplicity over "black box" deep learning.
Where LLMs and deep learning help — and where they hurt. How to prompt, warm-start, and robustify LLM-based SE pipelines.
Practical vulnerability detection and cyberthreat intelligence via active learning and adversarial ML.
Better predictors for software quality, project health, and technical debt via smarter sampling, transfer learning, and hyperparameter optimization.
Methods to verify, audit, and correct AI outputs — ensuring decisions can be inspected, reproduced, and challenged.
| Year | Name | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 2028 | Srinath Srinivasan | NC State |
| 2027 | Kishan Ganguly | NC State |
| Amirali Rayegan | NC State |
| Year | Name | Where Now |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Andre Lutosa | Red Hat |
| Kewen Peng | Meta | |
| Rahul Yedida | Lexis Nexis | |
| 2023 | Sherry (Xueqi) Yang | Oracle |
| Xiao Ling | Meta | |
| Suvodeep Majumder | AWS | |
| 2021 | Rui Shu | Hong Kong |
| Shrikanth Chandrasekaran | Oracle | |
| Tianpei (Patrick) Xia | NewsBreak | |
| Huy Tu | ||
| 2020 | Joymallya Chakraborty | Amazon |
| 2019 | Zhe Yu | RIT |
| Rahul Krishna | IBM Research | |
| Jianfeng Chen | Meta | |
| Amritanshu Agrawal | TikTok | |
| Vivek Nair | Meta | |
| 2018 | Wei Fu | Meta |
| 2014 | Abdel Salam Sayyad | Birzeit U. |
| Fayola Peters | J&J | |
| Joe Krall | Cloudvirga | |
| 2012 | Ekrem Kocaguneli | |
| 2011 | Ashutosh Nandeshwar | CCS Fundraising |
| 2007 | David Owen | Messiah College |
| 2004 | Scott Chen | Masimo.com |