Tulane University · School of Science & Engineering

Toward more dependable software and AI

The Laboratory for Software Design works on programming languages and software engineering. Much of our current work studies how to make AI-enabled systems more reliable, using ideas from modular reasoning.

What we work on

Most of our work comes back to modular reasoning, which lets people and tools work on one part of a system at a time.

Modular reasoning

Modularity and Modular Reasoning

Languages and interfaces that let developers reason about one part of a program at a time.

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Software at scale

Analyzing Software at Scale, with Boa

Boa lets a software analysis be written once and run across very large collections of open-source code.

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Dependable AI

Modular and Dependable AI

Decomposing trained models into modules, and using software engineering to make AI-enabled systems more reliable.

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Explore our research in depth →

Selected Papers

Boa: A Language and Infrastructure for Analyzing Ultra-Large-Scale Software Repositories

ICSE '13

A Comprehensive Study on Deep Learning Bug Characteristics

ESEC-FSE '19

Ptolemy: A Language with Quantified Typed, Events

ECOOP '08

DeepLocalize: Fault Localization for Deep Neural Networks

ICSE '21

On Decomposing a Deep Neural Network into Modules

ESEC-FSE '20

RefineAct: Automatic Runtime Verification of LLM Agent Actions

ASE '26

IRepair: An Intent-Aware Approach to Repair Data-Driven Errors in Large Language Models

FSE '25

µPRL: A Mutation Testing Pipeline for Deep Reinforcement Learning based on Real Faults

ICSE '25

An LLM-Based Agent-Oriented Approach for Automated Code Design Issue Localization

ICSE '25

Mock Deep Testing: Toward Separate Development of Data and Models for Deep Learning

ICSE '25

Inferring Data Preconditions from Deep Learning Models for Trustworthy Prediction in Deployment

ICSE '24

Are Prompt Engineering and TODO Comments Friends or Foes? An Evaluation on GitHub Copilot

ICSE '24

Data-Driven Evidence-Based Syntactic Sugar Design

ICSE '24

Design by Contract for Deep Learning APIs

ESEC-FSE '23

Fix Fairness, Don’t Ruin Accuracy: Performance Aware Fairness Repair using AutoML

ESEC-FSE '23

Fairify: Fairness Verification of Neural Networks

ICSE '23

Decomposing a Recurrent Neural Network into Modules for Enabling Reusability and Replacement

ICSE '23

Towards Understanding Fairness and its Composition in Ensemble Machine Learning

ICSE '23

News

RefineAct Accepted at ASE 2026

June 19, 2026

Keeping AI Agents Within the User’s Intent Our paper “RefineAct: Automatic Runtime Verification of LLM Agent Actions” has been accepted at the 41st IEEE/ACM International...

Links: Read the paper
We Are Hiring a Postdoctoral Fellow

June 16, 2026

Postdoctoral Fellow Position Open The Laboratory for Software Design is hiring one or more postdoctoral fellows in the Department of Computer Science at Tulane University,...

Links: Apply on Tulane's career site
NSF Funds Our Work on Fault Localization for Deep Learning

June 02, 2026

I am delighted to share that the National Science Foundation has funded a new collaborative project that Mohammad Wardat and I will pursue together. Mohammad...

Dr. Sayma Sultana has joined the Laboratory of Software Design at Tulane University as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

September 12, 2025

Dr. Sayma Sultana She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wayne State University under the supervision of Dr. Amiangshu Bosu. Her research focuses on...

Can you fix a large language model without breaking everything else it does?

June 23, 2025

Large language models absorb the biases in their training data, which surfaces as toxic or inaccurate output. The usual remedy, further training, adjusts the whole...

Would your tests catch a real bug in a reinforcement-learning agent?

April 27, 2025

Reinforcement learning trains agents for tasks such as driving a vehicle or controlling a robot, and before such an agent reaches production its tests need...

Three Lab Members Presented at ICSE 2025

April 27, 2025

Three members of our lab presented their work at ICSE’25 in Ottawa, Canada: Deepak-George Thomas presented his paper titled “µPRL: A Mutation Testing Pipeline for...

Sayem Imtiaz defends Ph.D. thesis

October 11, 2024

Sayem Imtiaz has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Modularity-inspired Techniques for Patching the Weak Components in Deep Learning”. His research focused on addressing data-driven...

Links: Event Link
Congratulations to Dr. Shibbir Ahmed, Now Faculty at Texas State!

August 22, 2024

It is a privilege to celebrate another former student stepping into a faculty role. Shibbir Ahmed, who completed his PhD with our group at Iowa...

Congratulations to Dr. Sumon Biswas, Now Faculty at Case Western Reserve!

August 15, 2024

One of the deepest joys of academic life is watching the people you mentor grow into colleagues and leaders in their own right. This season...