Sourcerer and Code Genie: Searching, slicing, and dicing Open Source code

Abstract:

The large availability of source code on the Internet is changing the way we develop software systems. These days, not only do we not need to develop everything from scratch, but we can speed up our own learning process by looking at other people's solutions to the problems we have at hand. This richness of information is enabling the emergence of specialized search engines that retrieve source code in response to a query. But searching code is only the first step of a lengthier process. Once suitable pieces of code are found, one needs to integrate them in our own application, test them, and possibly discard them. In this talk I will describe Sourcerer, a search engine for open source code that we have developed, and a set of associated tools that facilitate external source code integration.

Bio:

Cristina Videira Lopes is an Associate Professor of Information and Computer Science (ICS) at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining the Faculty in ICS, she was member of the Research Staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). She was a founder of the group that developed Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) and AspectJ, and, for that reason, she is known as "the mother" of AOP. Her Ph.D. thesis, focusing in programming language support for distributed systems, was the first AOP-related thesis, and she co-wrote the seminal AOP paper published at ECOOP '97. For a number of years, she acted as one of the main evangelists for AOP technology, giving invited talks and organizing workshops in academic and industry conferences. More recently, she has also been working in Ubiquitous Computing with a focus in communication mechanisms that are pervasive, secure and intuitive for humans to perceive and interact with. Though with diverse interests, her research is always related to languages and communication systems. Lopes holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico, in Lisbon, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northeastern University, in Boston. She is a member of ACM and IEEE.