Ph.D. Student Opportunities (2026–2027 Admissions Cycle) I am seeking highly motivated and hard-working Ph.D. students to join my research group, which I call the Software Aurora lab or SORA lab for short, in the Department… Recruiting PhD Students for 2026-2027 Admissions Cycle
Yuqi Huai has successfully defended his dissertation, entitled Toward Effective Autonomous Driving System Testing: Revealing, Reproducing, and Diversifying Bug-Finding Capabilities, and completed his Ph.D. in Software Engineering at UC Irvine. His dissertation introduces doppelganger testing,… Congratulations to Dr. Yuqi Huai!
Our paper entitled Netsiege: A Long-Form, Club-Led King-of-the-Hill Competition for Accessible Cybersecurity Training has been accepted to the 58th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS 2027). Congratulations to Steven and Akshay!
Our paper entitled Between Risk, Recognition, and Necessity: How Open-Source Project Maintainers Perceive and Navigate CVEs Through Reporting and Resolving Vulnerabilities has been accepted to the 33rd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security… Paper accepted to ACM CCS 2026
Our paper entitled DeFT: Maintaining Determinism and Extracting Unit Tests for Autonomous Driving Planning has been accepted to the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026). Congratulations to Yuqi, Yuntianyi, and Ziwen!
Ph.D. Student Opportunities (2025–2026 Admissions Cycle) I am seeking highly motivated and hard-working Ph.D. students to join my research group, which I call the Software Aurora lab or SORA lab for short, in the Department… Recruiting PhD Students for 2025-2026 Admissions Cycle
Rather than just assisting professors, I have confirmed that I am now associated with them. In other words, I’m very fortunate and appreciative to have been approved as an Associate Professor at UC Irvine! Yup,… Promoted to Associate Professor With Tenure
Our paper entitled Breaking Strong Encapsulation: A Comprehensive Study of Java Module Abuse has been accepted to the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026). Congratulations to Yirui, Yongbo, Jessy, Yecheng, and Qiran!
Hercules Droidot and the murder on the JNI Express has been accepted to the 34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Sec 2025). Congratulations to the two lead authors Luca and Philipp, the rest of the HexHive… A second paper accepted to USENIX Security 2025
Our paper entitled A Mixed-Methods Study of Open-Source Software Maintainers On Vulnerability Management and Platform Security Features has been accepted to the 34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Sec 2025). Congratulations to Jessy and Yu-Jye!
Our paper entitled A Comprehensive Study of Bug-Fix Patterns in Autonomous Driving Systems has been accepted to the 33rd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2025). Congratulations to Yuntianyi, Yuqi, Yirui,… Paper Accepted to FSE 2025
My NSF CAREER proposal entitled Enhancing Software Testing and Debugging for Autonomous Driving has been awarded. Thank you very much to the many people who have supported me in winning the award!
Our paper entitled A Deep Dive Into How Open-Source Project MaintainersReview and Resolve Bug Bounty Reports has been accepted to the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2025). Congratulations to Jessy and Steven!
Congratulations to Steven Ngo and Jessy Ayala! We are fortunate and grateful to be among the 6 selected teams out of more than 230 submissions (~2.61% success rate). Please learn more about our proposed computer… Our team is a winner in DARPA’s Building an Adaptive and Competitive Workforce Track.
Our paper entitled Darcy: Automatic Architectural Inconsistency Resolution in Java has been accepted to TSE. Congrats, Negar and Taran!
Our paper entitled Misconfiguration Software Testing for Failure Emergence in Autonomous Driving Systems has been accepted to FSE 2024. Congrats, Yuntianyi, Yuqi, Shilong, and Changnam!
Our paper entitled Do You Want Me to Participate or Not?: Investigating the Accessibility of Software Development Meetings for Blind and Low Vision Professionals has been accepted to CHI 2024. Congrats, Yoonha, Isabela, Jessy, and… Paper accepted to CHI 2024
Our paper entitled scenoRITA: Generating Diverse, Fully Mutable, Test Scenarios for Autonomous Vehicle Planning has been accepted to TSE. Congrats, Yuqi, Sumaya, Yuntianyi, and Xiafa!
Our paper entitled FarSlayer: Turnkey Acceleration of Legacy Software on Commodity FPGA Cards has been accepted to the IEEE 34th International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP 2023). Congrats Esmerald!
Our paper entitled Doppelgänger Test Generation for Revealing Bugs in Autonomous Driving Software has been accepted to the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023). Congratulations to Yuqi, Yuntianyi, Sumaya, Tuan, Xiang, and Ziwen!
Our paper entitled DeltaDroid: Dynamic Delivery Testing in Android. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology has been accepted to TOSEM. Congratulations to Negar, Reyhan, and Navid!
Our paper entitled Too Afraid to Drive: Systematic Discovery of Semantic DoS Vulnerability in Autonomous Driving Planning under Physical-World Attacks has been accepted to NDSS 2022.
Our paper entitled Forecasting Architectural Decay from Evolutionary History has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE).
Our paper entitled Constructing a Shared Infrastructure for Software Architecture Analysis and Maintenance has been accepted to 18th IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2021).
Our paper entitled Too Quiet in the Library: An Empirical Study of Security Updates in Android Apps’ Native Code has been accepted to the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2021). Congrats to Sumaya,… Paper Accepted to ICSE 2021
Our paper entitled A Comprehensive Study of Autonomous Vehicle Bugs has been accepted to the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering. Congrats to Yang, Junjie, Sumaya, Yuan, and Alfred!
Our paper entitled Detection and Repair of Architectural Inconsistencies in Java has been accepted to ICSE 2019. Congratulations to Negar Ghorbani for leading this work!
Awarded an NSF CRI grant for Constructing a Community-Wide Software Architecture Infrastructure
Various updates to the CV, Projects, Publications, and Service pages of this website
Our paper on SALMA: Self-Protection of Android Systems from Inter-Component Communication Attacks has been accepted to ASE 2018. Congratulations to Mahmoud for his hard work paying off! Learn more about SALMA here.
I am now an Assistant Professor at UCI’s Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences.
Our paper entitled A Large-Scale Empirical Study on the Effects of Code Obfuscations on Android Apps and Anti-Malware Products has been accepted to the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018). The Publications page… Two papers accepted to ICSE 2018
Our paper entitled Lightweight, Obfuscation-Resilient Detection and Family Identification of Android Malware has been accepted to ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM). The Publications page has been updated.
I presented our paper entitled Automatic Generation of Inter-Component Communication Exploits for Android Applications at the 11th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of… Paper presented at ESEC/FSE 2017