Ex-nurse, ex-taxi-driver,
ex-rocket scientist, ex-journalist
(it all made sense at the time)
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 ?
Want to find+fix bugs in real AI/ML? are you in industry or at NC State? Email me and/or take my SE and AI subject (Fall'26) and/or join my reading group (runs every semester).
News
Apr 2026: Talk at ICSE'26 on HPO and SE. Blog: Promoted, Not Replaced. Talk at ICSE'26 on shaky causal structures. Paper in JSS on explaining optimization. Paper in TOSEM on LLMs warming-up active learning.
Mar 2026: Paper at FSE'26: How low can you go? Paper in EMSE: Improving LLM Annotations.
Feb 2026: Paper at VERIFAI'26: Exploiting Sparsity.
Jan 2026: Paper at ICSE'26 FOSE: SE Journals in 2036. Paper at MSR: Multi-Objective Optimization Repo. Keynote at VerifAI, France. Keynote at SSBSE'26.
older news
Sep 2025: Talk, Valencia SE Group.
Aug 2025: Letter in CACM: The Case for Compact AI. Keynote at Airbnb Dev Conference, San Francisco.
Jul 2025: Keynote at Future Advanced Testing Workshop, Paris.
Jun 2025: Keynote at ESEM'25, Hawaii.
Apr 2025: Andre Motta completes his Ph.D.
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