Software and Programming Group

The Software and Programming Group (SPG) involves leading software engineering and programming languages researchers with links to a large number of international institutions worldwide. We conduct research on static analysis, modern programming language design, type systems, modelling, formal methods, human aspects, and database. We contribute to the development of both commercial and research programming languages and tools. We always seek new PhD and masters students with a background in software development with experience in compilers, language design, and tools implementation.

Meetings

See the Meetings page for the time and place! Please JoinUs by subscribing to our mailing list to stay up to date: https://ecs.wgtn.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/spg.

News

• Jens Dietrich attended the NZ Testing Confernece, June 2024.
• Philip Oliver submitted his PhD on Investigating Configurations for Automated Crash Reproduction in JavaScript, June 2024.
• Martin Kropp and Craig Anslow were interviewed for the InfoQ Podcast on the The State of Software Engineering from an Academic Perspective, January 2024
• Jens Dietrich, James Noble, Craig Anslow received a Most Influential Paper award at APSEC 2023 for their paper on "Qualitas Corpus: A Curated Collection of Java Code for Empirical Studies" at APSEC 2010, December 2023
• Seminar by Stephen Kell on How debuggable is your (compiler-optimised) program?, November 2023
• We have funding for a Marsden Funded PhD Scholarship on Gradual concurrency: correctness, simplicity, and performance via dynamic ownership. The scholarship will pay $35K NZD per year for three years. See the Marsden Funded PhD Scholarship web page for further details and contact James Noble to apply. August 2023
• Jens Dietrich attended NZ Tech Rally July 2023
• Craig Anslow attended AppSec (OWASP Day) July 2023
• Jens Dietrich 's work on Software Composition Analysis has resulted in the discovery of several new vulnerabilities that have been accepted to be included in the GitHub Security Advisory database, accepted pull requests include changes to CVE-2022-38749 (skakeyaml), CVE-2016-2510 (beanshell), CVE-2015-6420 (commons-collections) and CVE-2022-42889 (commons-text), with more to come. The work was sponsored by Oracle Labs and Sfti Veracity, in collaboration with Shawn Rasheed (UCOL) and Alex Jordan (Oracle Labs Austria). A preprint of the paper reporting the results is available on arxiv. June 23
• Jens Dietrich 's and David Pearce's paper on null pointer analysis will be presented at ECOOP'23. The paper addresses a problem that is often referred to as the "billion dollar mistake". The paper has led to some changes (via issues and pull requests) in some of the most widely used Java libraries, Google Guava and Spring. June 23
• Nkiru Ede is starting a new PhD project investigating "Networks of Knowledge Sharing - Complex Dynamics of Software Components". The project is supervised by Jens Dietrich and Prof Uli Zuehlicke (Physics), and funded by Te Pūnaha Matatini. May 23
• Thomas Kühne is a co-organiser of the 10th anniversary MULTI 2023 - International Workshop on Multi-Level Modeling to take place as a satellite event of the ACM/IEEE-sponsored MODELS 2023 conference.
• Thomas Kühne is the Practice Track PC chair for the ACM/IEEE-sponsored conference MODELS 2023 to take place 1-6 October 2023 in Sweden.
• James Noble and Julian Mackay received an Amazon Research Award (60K USD) for "Programming Made Hard' Made Easier: Improving Dafny’s Human Factors". July 2022
• Jens Dietrich gave a lightning talk (see video), and Michael Homer, Craig Anslow and several students attended the NZ Testing Conference July 2022
• James Noble has been lucky enough to receive a 2021 Marsden Fund grant of NZD 685,000 for work on Gradual Concurrency (3min video). The project comes with a Marsden funded PhD (NZD35,000 tax free for 3 years) --- let James know if you're interested.
• Julian Mackay has received the prestigious MBIE Science Whitinga Fellowship, with a total value of NZD 320,000.
• Alex Potanin and others from SPG are involved in organizing ACM SPLASH 2022 to be held in Auckland in December 2022
• The Science for Technological Innovation National Science Challenge (SfTI) has accepted the proposal for the new spearhead project on Veracity. This project will fund researchers from several NZ universities, coordinated at VUW by Markus Luczak-Roesch. The project will be funded with 2m for two years starting in July 21, with a possible extension after this. From SPG, Jens Dietrich will be funded to work on software provenance, in particular on the use of program analysis techniques to improve the transparency and auditability of software. The project comes with a funded PhD and research assistance positions, please get in touch if you are interested.
• Best Short Paper Award for "The Effects of Social Support and Work Engagement with Scrum Events" at CHASE 2021 by Debora Müller, Kropp Martin, Craig Anslow, Andreas Meier
• Watch Jens Dietrich give his ICSE'20 talk.
• Michael Homer, Craig Anslow and Jens Dietrich have their proposal accepted by the Science for Technological Innovation National Science Challenge (SfTI). The proposal is on Automating Automated Testing -- regression test synthesis from bug reports, the project will be funded with 200k NZD. If you are interested in a PhD project in this area, please contact any of the investigators.
• We organized IEEE VL/HCC 2020 (10-14 August 2020) in Dunedin, NZ virtual!
• We organized IEEE VISSOFT 2020 (28-29 September 2020) in Adelaide, Australia virtual!
• We co-organized APSEC 2016 (6-9 December 2016) in Hamilton, NZ.