Award
2019 NSF CAREER Award Winner
Department
Computer Science
Awarded Project
Data-Driven Debugging of Complex Program Changes
What path did you take to get to this point in your career and research?
When I was a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin, I decided to pursue an academic career. I love learning about cutting-edge research and enjoy discussing research problems and solutions with people. More importantly, I have been excited to learn about challenging technical problems which software developers encounter, and I have great passion to propose various solutions to alleviate or eliminate those problems.
What impact do you hope your research will have?
On average, up to 50 percent of developers' time is spent on finding and solving bugs, and software bugs cost the economy $312 billion per year. I hope my research can solve challenging problems that prevent developers from being productive and producing high-quality software. By teaching my research and software engineering research conducted by other people, I also hope to raise awareness of software quality and security in next-generation software developers.
Additionally, as software has been widely used in different aspects of our daily lives, I want to expand my research scope to also identify and solve problems in the areas where software is intensively used but seldom thoroughly examined. These areas include agriculture and construction. By revealing software problems in particular domains and proposing solutions, I hope to help a lot more people who are not in the software industry.
What do you find most interesting about your field of engineering?
Computer science extensively adopts mathematics. When I was a little girl, I was always excited about math and enjoyed the problem-solving process for tricky problems. Compared with mathematics, computer science does not require a lot of background in mathematics theories, and it is more closely related to everybody's daily life. With knowledge of computer science, math, and software development processes, I can solve concrete problems and easily evaluate the quality of my solutions based on lots of open-source software programs and direct feedback from software developers.
If you had one piece of advice to give students that aspire to pursue research and are just starting their journey, what would you share with them?
Work hard on mathematical problems. The problem-solving skills associated with this can train you to think as a software engineer, and also encourage you to pursue CS-related careers by enabling you to identify problems in the real world and propose solutions in your own way.
What's a common myth or misconception about the subject of your research that you'd like to debunk?
A myth: It is very hard for females to pursue an academic career path in computer science. What I believe: When I was younger, I saw many girls who were pretty good at math but later decided to pursue a career path less challenging than CS research. Based on my personal experience, I feel that many females are qualified to conduct CS research, based on the problem-solving and communications skills I’ve seen among women doing this work, and our sensitivity about technical problems in the real world. If females are more confident and less critical about ourselves, I believe that we can achieve more success than what we have seen so far.