June 25, 2026

Congratulations to Ruchira Manke, whose paper “AgentInspect: Diagnosing Behavioral Failures in Artificial Intelligence Agents” has been accepted at the 35th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on...

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...

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,...

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...

April 15, 2026

Software engineering learned long ago that large systems are easier to build, understand, and maintain when they are made of modules: parts with clear roles...

February 11, 2026

As machine learning moves into decisions about loans, hiring, and more, whether a model treats people fairly has become a software-engineering problem and not only...

December 10, 2025

Open-source repositories hold a record of how software is really written, by millions of developers over many years. Reading that record at scale can answer...

October 15, 2025

Deep learning now sits inside many software systems, from the apps on a phone to systems that drive cars and read medical scans. These systems...

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...

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...

April 29, 2025

In ordinary software, components can be tested in isolation, often by mocking the parts they depend on. Deep learning resists this, because the data and...

April 28, 2025

As a codebase grows, design problems such as poor modularity and creeping complexity tend to accumulate, and they are harder to spot than ordinary bugs...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

July 01, 2024

After 19 amazing years at Iowa State University Dept. of Computer Science,I will be moving to Tulane University as the next Dean of the School...

June 03, 2024

Hridesh Rajan, Kingland professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University, has been named the new dean of Tulane University’s...

April 18, 2024

Code-intelligence tools like GitHub Copilot turn natural-language hints into code, which raises a practical question about the notes developers already leave in their source. Comments...

April 17, 2024

A deep learning model is trained under certain assumptions about its data and then deployed on inputs it has never seen. When an input drifts...

April 16, 2024

Programming languages evolve, and one common way they grow is through syntactic sugar, the convenient shorthands that make code easier to read and write. Deciding...

April 02, 2024

The Department of Computer Science in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University seeks outstanding applicants for a postdoctoral position in...

December 06, 2023

Deep learning libraries are powerful but easy to misuse, and a call that violates an unstated assumption can produce a model that is silently wrong....

December 05, 2023

A familiar objection to fixing bias in machine learning is that it costs accuracy. Many bias-mitigation methods work only in particular situations, and they often...

September 01, 2023

Dr. Ali Ghanbari and I have received the Distinguished Paper Award at the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2023) for our...

May 31, 2023

In the realm of academia, the most profound indicator of our success lies in the caliber of students we mentor and prepare for the future....

May 17, 2023

Recurrent neural networks power tasks like translating between languages, and changing what such a model does usually means retraining it from scratch. Our earlier work...

May 16, 2023

Most methods for measuring and reducing bias in machine learning assume a single classifier. Real systems are often more involved: they combine several learners into...

May 14, 2023

Testing a model for fairness can reveal problems, but it cannot promise their absence. For high-stakes uses, developers want a guarantee that a model treats...

November 16, 2022

Technical debt is the term for the short-term shortcuts that make software easier to ship now and harder to maintain later. Developers often admit these...

October 01, 2022

The National Science Foundation is supporting the lab’s project on more modular deep learning. The work builds on our finding that a trained neural network...

August 25, 2022

SIGPLAN perspectives has published our essay that provides a perspective on Hybrid SPLASH 2021 conference. SPLASH 2021 was the first hybrid conference at this scale,...

June 15, 2022

I am celebrating the graduation of Sumon Biswas, Rangeet Pan and Iris Ma. Sumon and Rangeet were PhD students in my lab, and Iris was...

May 26, 2022

Choosing a good neural network for a task is hard, and AutoML tools that search for an architecture can take a long time because they...

May 25, 2022

Knowing that a deep neural network is faulty is only half the problem. A developer still has to work out what went wrong and what...

May 24, 2022

Building a convolutional neural network almost always starts from scratch, with training that costs time and energy. Yet much of what one network learns, such...

May 23, 2022

A data-science system is more than its model. Data is acquired, cleaned, transformed, modeled, and served, and this sequence of stages, the data-science pipeline, is...

May 15, 2022

An Experiential Introduction to Principles of Programming Languages Hridesh Rajan’s textbook, An Experiential Introduction to Principles of Programming Languages, is out from MIT Press. It...

April 13, 2022

Sumon Biswas has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Understanding and Reasoning Fairness in Machine Learning Pipelines”. His research unravels several software engineering techniques towards...

January 26, 2022

Elected a Fellow of the AAAS Hridesh Rajan has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the...

November 04, 2021

Sumon Biswas has successfully defended his MS thesis entitled “Understanding Unfairness and its Mitigation in Open-Source Machine Learning Models”. The abstract of the thesis is...

October 01, 2021

The National Science Foundation is supporting Boa 2.0, a renewal and expansion of the lab’s infrastructure for studying software and its evolution at a large...

August 23, 2021

A machine-learning system is usually a pipeline: data passes through a sequence of preprocessing steps before a classifier ever sees it. Most fairness research has...

May 25, 2021

A deep neural network that will not train, or that stalls at poor accuracy, is one of the harder things to debug in modern software....

November 11, 2020

Deep learning is now part of many software systems. A model is trained on examples and then used to make predictions, and although its structure...

November 10, 2020

Machine-learning models increasingly make or shape consequential decisions, from approving a loan to screening a job applicant. When they do, it matters whether the model...

November 10, 2020

SPLASH 2020, the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity, starts on November 15, 2020 at 0700 Central Standard Time....

October 07, 2020

This Fall 2020 semester, I am teaching an advanced topics seminar on the idea of Modularity in Software Engineering. The goal of this seminar is...

August 20, 2020

PhD student Rangeet Pan and Hridesh Rajan have received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium...

July 30, 2020

Graduate student Rangeet Pan earned second place at the ACM Student Research Competition at 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2020 for his work...

July 29, 2020

The EAPLS Best Paper Award 2020 is awarded to the paper “An Empirical Study on the Use and Misuse of Java 8 Streams”, by Raffi...

July 15, 2020

Md Johirul Islam has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Towards Understanding the Challenges Faced by Machine Learning Software Developers and Enabling Automated Solutions”. The...

June 27, 2020

When a deep learning model misbehaves, the fix is rarely obvious, and until recently there was little systematic knowledge of how developers repair these models...

June 27, 2020

Many software-engineering tasks, from mining API specifications to discovering programming patterns, rely on analyzing control flow graphs, and doing this across millions of programs can...

June 01, 2020

Facebook Probability and Programming Research Award Hridesh Rajan received a Facebook Probability and Programming Research Award in 2020, supporting work at the intersection of probabilistic...

March 30, 2020

As researchers and public-health experts join forces to battle COVID-19, computer scientists from Iowa State University have developed a data science infrastructure that will drastically...

December 06, 2019

Samantha-Syed Khairunnesa has successfully passed the PhD preliminary exam. The proposal abstract: ``Uncertainty is an integral part of ML programs, and, it is to be...

October 01, 2019

Hridesh Rajan, interim chair of the Department of Computer Science and Kingland Professor of Data Analytics, was recently awarded a $1.5 million grant from the...

September 30, 2019

Md Johirul Islam has successfully defended his Masters of Science thesis. The thesis abstract: ``Big data-driven transportation engineering has the potential to improve the utilization...

September 25, 2019

Hamid Bagheri has successfully passed the PhD preliminary exam. The proposal abstract: ``Every day, many scientists around the world use NCBI’s non-redundant (NR) database to...

September 25, 2019

Hamid Bagheri has successfully defended his Masters of Science degree. The thesis abstract: ``Creating a scalable computational infrastructure to analyze the wealth of information contained...

August 26, 2019

Before you can locate or repair a bug in a deep learning system, it helps to know what kinds of bugs occur, where they come...

May 25, 2019

Sumon Biswas will describe our brand new dataset at the MSR 2019 Conference. This work describes a new dataset that we have created to study...

May 20, 2019

Building on the inaugural 2016, 2017, and 2018 editions, the 2019 edition has started. This edition will be held from May 20-23, 2019 in Ames,...

December 17, 2018

The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board had selected Prof. Rajan for the 2018-19 U.S. Scholar Award. This award led to an international workshop on...

November 06, 2018

Most software is built from parts that do more than compute a value. They read and write files, throw exceptions, acquire locks, and otherwise produce...

May 31, 2018

Programmers routinely learn a new API by copying an example from a question-and-answer site such as Stack Overflow. Those examples are convenient, but they are...

May 30, 2018

Mining large collections of source code has become a standard way to study how software is written, but the deeper the analysis, the harder it...

March 07, 2018

The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board has selected Prof. Rajan for the 2018-19 U.S. Scholar Award. According to the award letter "The Fulbright Program,...

February 19, 2018

Early registration is now open for the 2018 Midwest Big Data Summer School to be held from May 14-17, 2018 in Ames, Iowa on Iowa...

November 17, 2017

Ganesha Upadhyaya, a graduate student in the Dept. of Computer Science and a member of the Laboratory for Software Design successfully defended his PhD thesis...

November 08, 2017

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has recognized Dr. Hridesh Rajan as one of 43 distinguished member for 2017. More details can be found here....

July 10, 2017

The 2017 Midwest Big Data Summer School held from July 10-14, 2017 in Ames, Iowa on Iowa State University campus was another successful edition. Over...

June 29, 2017

Dr. Zhen Yu has joined the Laboratory for Software Design as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Yu who prefers to go by Zhen obtained his Ph.D....

May 24, 2017

Good documentation helps developers use a library correctly, but many libraries document their behavior poorly, especially the exceptions a call can throw. Earlier approaches tried...

May 23, 2017

Mining very large collections of repositories supports many software-engineering tasks, such as inferring specifications or predicting defects, but the sheer volume makes it slow. Adding...

May 23, 2017

Just received words from the Iowa State University Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost that the Data Science Minor and Data Science Certificate...

May 12, 2017

Early registration is now open for the 2017 Midwest Big Data Summer School to be held from July 10-14, 2017 in Ames, Iowa on Iowa...

May 02, 2017

Prof. Hridesh Rajan, professor in the Department of Computer Science, was named Kingland Professor of Data Analytics. Rajan is the director of the Laboratory for...

April 14, 2017

Nitin Tiwari, a graduate student in the computer science and a member of the Laboratory for Software Design successfully defended his Masters thesis today. His...

March 14, 2017

A paper on the Candoia Platform and Ecosystem has been accepted at the 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2017), a conference co-located...

February 10, 2017

The Laboratory for Software Design in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University is seeking a graduate student to work on the Panini...

February 05, 2017

The Laboratory for Software Design in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University is seeking a postdoctoral fellow to work on the Boa...

Jackson Maddox graduates with a Bachelors degree with Honors

December 17, 2016

Dr. Yuheng Long presents First-class Effects at SPLASH/OOPSLA 2016

November 04, 2016

Dr. Hridesh Rajan Elected to Midwest Big Data Hub Steering Committee

September 24, 2016

Dr. Mehdi Bagherzadeh graduates with a Ph.D. degree

September 07, 2016

Dr. Hridesh Rajan to Lead an ISU Presidential Initiative for Interdisciplinary Research (PIIR) in Data Driven Science (DDS) Project

September 07, 2016

August 03, 2016

We just heard that our work on first class effect will appear at the OOPSLA/SPLASH 2016 conference. This is a collaborative effort with my former...

August 02, 2016

For the last several years, my research lab has been developing the Panini programming language whose goals are to make concurrent programming easier and concurrent...

July 25, 2016

I will be teaching a course on object-oriented analysis and design this Fall at Iowa State University after a long hiatus. I last taught that...

July 25, 2016

Good evening! Its Monday, July 25, 2016 and I just got a basic blog up and running. I am using the Jekyll page generator. Thanks...

Iowa State University Hosts Data-Driven Research Summer School

July 20, 2016

July 20, 2016

In June 2016, a team of individuals organized the Inaugural Midwest Big Data Summer School. The team consisted of myself and Pavan Aduri as general...

July 14, 2016

My (now former) PhD Student Mehdi Bagherzadeh just defended his PhD Thesis. Congratulations to Mehdi! Mehdi Bagherzadeh will start his new job as an assistant...

May 15, 2016

Congratulations to Yuheng Long, who has defended their PhD thesis, “Formal Foundations for Hybrid Effect Analysis.” Read it here.

May 15, 2016

Congratulations to Eric Lin, who has defended their MS thesis, “PaniniJ: Adding the capsule programming abstraction to Java to provide linguistic support for modular reasoning...

April 25, 2016

Myself and Pavan Aduri wrote to the Midwest Big Data Hub to seek support for organizing the Inaugural Midwest Big Data Summer School in June...

ISU Researchers Leverage Big Data to Improve Software Quality

January 22, 2016

July 01, 2015

The National Science Foundation is supporting a large collaborative project on inferring software specifications from open-source repositories by leveraging data and the collective expertise of...

June 01, 2015

The National Science Foundation is supporting Boa, the lab’s infrastructure for studying software and how it evolves across very large collections of repositories. Boa lets...

May 15, 2015

Congratulations to Sean Mooney, who has defended their MS thesis, “A Unified Design of Capsules.” Read it here.

August 01, 2014

The National Science Foundation is supporting capsule-oriented programming, the model behind the lab’s Panini language. Capsules let a developer reason about a concurrent program one...

September 01, 2013

An early NSF EAGER award seeded Boa, the lab’s infrastructure for mining software repositories at scale. The grant supported the first version of a platform...

May 20, 2013

Boa presented at ICSE 2013 Our paper introducing Boa, a language and infrastructure for analyzing ultra-large-scale software repositories, was presented at ICSE 2013. Boa lets...

May 15, 2013

Congratulations to Robert Dyer, who has defended their PhD thesis, “Bringing ultra-large-scale software repository mining to the masses with Boa.” Read it here.

August 01, 2011

The National Science Foundation is supporting work on phase-based tuning for better use of performance-asymmetric multicore processors. Modern chips mix fast and slow cores, and...

May 15, 2011

Congratulations to Tyler Sondag, who has defended their PhD thesis, “Phase-based tuning: better utilized performance asymmetric multicores.” Read it here.

August 15, 2010

The National Science Foundation is supporting a collaborative project on balancing expressiveness and modular reasoning in aspect-oriented programming. Aspect-oriented features make some designs far more...

May 15, 2010

Congratulations to Harish Narayanappa, who has defended their MS thesis, “Monitoring software using property-aware program sampling.” Read it here.

July 01, 2009

The National Science Foundation has awarded Hridesh Rajan a CAREER award for work on the mutualism of modularity and concurrency goals. Modular reasoning lets a...

May 15, 2009

Congratulations to Jaikishan Jalan, who has defended their MS thesis, “Feature selection, statistical modeling and its applications to universal JPEG steganalyzer.” Read it here.

July 08, 2008

Ptolemy at ECOOP 2008 Our paper, Ptolemy: A Language with Quantified, Typed Events, was presented at ECOOP 2008. Ptolemy uses quantified, typed events as an...

May 15, 2008

Congratulations to Rakesh Setty, who has defended their MS thesis, “On the test-driven development of emerging modularization mechanisms.” Read it here.

May 15, 2008

Congratulations to Youssef Hanna, who has defended their MS thesis, “Verifying sensor network security protocol implementations.” Read it here.

July 15, 2007

The National Science Foundation is supporting a collaborative effort to revitalize the tools and documentation behind the Java Modeling Language (JML), a notation for writing...

May 15, 2007

Congratulations to Mahantesh Hosamani, who has defended their MS thesis, “Bootstrapping trust in service oriented architecture.” Read it here.

September 01, 2006

The National Science Foundation is supporting work on the specification and verification challenges of security protocols in sensor networks. Sensor networks operate under tight resource...

January 15, 2006

Crosscutting interfaces in IEEE Software (2006) Our article, Modular Software Design with Crosscutting Interfaces, appeared in IEEE Software. It develops crosscutting interfaces so that aspect-oriented...

September 05, 2005

Information-hiding interfaces at ESEC/FSE 2005 Our paper introduced information-hiding interfaces for aspect-oriented design. The interfaces give aspects and the modules they affect a stable contract...

May 16, 2005

Classpects at ICSE 2005 Our paper, Classpects: Unifying Aspect- and Object-Oriented Language Design, was presented at ICSE 2005. It unifies aspects and objects into a...