Spring/Summer 2018

It my pleasure to welcome two new faculty members to the Institute for Software Research: Dr. Joshua Garcia and Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed. They both join the School of ICS as Assistant Professors in the general area of Software Engineering. Dr. Joshua Garcia has been a post-doctoral researcher working with Prof. Sam Malek. His research is in security and quality of software, especially in the mobile domain. Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed comes to us from Oregon State University, where he received his Ph.D. His research interests combine software testing, analysis, and machine learning. We are very excited to have them both join ISR, and wish them great success here at UCI!

On June 8, we hosted the 14th Annual ISR Research Forum. It is always a pleasure to organize this event, as it attracts many of our alumni. We had 135 participants, with a mix of past and current students, local industry professionals, and academics. This year, I had the pleasure hosting my former student Dr. Sara Javanmardi as one of the keynote speakers. Dr. Javanmardi is a Staff Software Engineer at Google, where she works on, among other projects, Google’s Autocomplete – all those suggestions when you type a query?, that’s partly her work. The other keynote speaker was Dr. Satish Chandra, from Facebook. He talked about the use of Machine Learning for optimizing certain processing-intensive software development activities, a fascinating topic.

One year ago, I took over as Interim Director of ISR. A lot has happened since then, including the approval of a new Professional Master degree in Software Engineering, MSE, within the School of ICS (see this article). I have shepherded the MSE effort through its development and approval process, and now have agreed to serve as the Director of this new MSE program. So I am stepping down as Director of ISR and am pleased to announce that, as of July 1st, 2018, ISR has a new permanent Director: Prof. Sam Malek. I am honored to have served as Interim Director of ISR, and I’m happy to transition the leadership to such capable hands. Fun fact: Sam is an academic grandchild of Prof. Richard Taylor, ISR’s Founding Director. It comes full circle!