Biography

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I obtained my PhD from University of California at Irvine, under supervision of Dr. Sam Malek. I have been awarded the Google PhD Fellowship in Programing Technology and Software Engineering for my work on advancing energy testing of Android and have been recognized as a Rising Star in EECS. I am recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and my research has been supported by generous grants from NSF, IBM, Amazon, Capital One, and C3.ai.

I am always looking for highly motivated and self-driven PhD students, who are interested in applying AI and mathematical optimization techniques to solve real-world software engineering problems. Please read my papers before reaching out to ensure your background and interests match my research.

Research

My research interests lie in the field of programming languages and software engineering, with a focus on improving software quality, reliability, and maintenance through neuro-symbolic approaches. I am the director of Intelligent CAT Lab, working with a team of awesome PhD, Master's, undergrad, and high school students.

Please refer to my Google Scholar and Intelligent CAT Lab Google Scholar page for the most recent list of publicly available publications and pre-prints. We are proud to open-source all our research artifacts on the lab's GitHub repo.

Recent Invited Talks

  • [2026] IFIP Working Group 2.4, University of California Irvine, University of California Los Angeles, Purdue University, IEEE WIE Chicago Event (Opening Remarks)
  • [2025] Algorithm Seminar at DeepMind, AICE Fall Symposium (Keynote), Columbia Software Engineering Seminar, Cornell Software Engineering Seminar, New Faculty Symposium (FSE)
  • [2024] ML4Code Seminar at JetBrains, IBM Research, IFIP Working Group 2.4, Winter Seminar Series at Sharif University of Technology, York University AI+SE Seminar Series
  • [2023] Global PhD Fellowship Summit, IFIP Working Group 2.4, Dagstuhl Seminar 23062, Winter Seminar Series at Sharif University of Technology, IBM Research, Microsoft Azure Research Group

Current Students

I also had a blast working with 50+ amazing undergraduate and high school students who contributed to the lab's research through the UIUC++ summer research program in software engineering (now at Berkeley, CMU, Cornell, Georgia Tech, Stanford, UIUC, UMass Amherst, UT Austin, and many other amazing places). Please refer to the UIUC++ official website for the most recent updates and calls.

Graduated Students

  • Ali Reza Ibrahimzada (PhD) [Fall'22-Summer'26]: Third place at ACM SRW (ICSE'24) — First Job: Applied Scientist at Amazon

Service

For the most recent list of external service, please visit my conf.researchr profile.