About
The Laboratory for Software Design at Tulane University conducts research in programming languages, compilers, and software engineering. We are part of the Department of Computer Science in the School of Science and Engineering, and led by Dr. Hridesh Rajan, Dean of the School and Professor of Computer Science.
Our aim is to make software, including AI-enabled systems, easier to build and more reliable. Much of the work comes back to modular reasoning: being able to understand and change one part of a system without having to understand all of it.
What we work on
- Modularity and Modular Reasoning: languages and interfaces that let developers reason about one part of a program at a time.
- Analyzing Software at Scale, with Boa: writing a software analysis once and running it across very large collections of open-source code.
- Modular and Dependable AI: decomposing trained models into modules, and using software engineering to make AI-enabled systems more reliable.
See our research for the thrusts in depth and our papers for the full record.
View our work on Google Scholar →
Recognition
Honors and fellowships
- AAAS Fellow (2021)
- Facebook Probability and Programming Award (2020)
- US–UK Fulbright Scholar (2018)
- ACM Distinguished Member (2017)
- Kingland Professorship (2016)
- Big-12 Faculty Fellowship (2012)
- Early Achievement in Research Award, Iowa State University (2010)
- NSF Early CAREER Award (2009)
Paper and poster awards
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ASE 2023
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ESEC/FSE 2020
- Distinguished Poster Award, ICSE 2016
- Best Paper of Modularity (2015)
- Best Paper of Modularity (2015)
Students and scholars
The lab has helped train twenty-eight doctoral and postdoctoral scholars and more than forty-five undergraduates. Eight former students and postdocs are now faculty, at institutions including Bowling Green State University and Oakland University, and ten are industrial researchers, including at Google. Our current team is on the people page.
Service and leadership
Founder of the VMIL workshop (2007–2017) and General Chair of SPLASH 2020 and 2021, the first ACM hybrid conference, with more than 800 participants. Principal investigator of the NSF TRIPODS D4 (Dependable Data-Driven Discovery) Institute, and founder of the Midwest Big Data Summer School, which has helped train more than 600 early-career researchers.
Editorial roles
- Advisory Board, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (2023–present)
- Editorial Board, Automated Software Engineering Journal (2024–present)
- Editorial Board, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2017–2022)
Join us
Our research meetings are held in person and virtually on Fridays from 3:00 pm to 5:30 pm. Prospective students who are excited about software, languages, and trustworthy AI are encouraged to reach out.