Gushu Li from UCSB Gave Talk on Testing and Debugging Quantum Programs in Group Meeting

 On Dec 17, 2020, Gushu Li gave an invited talk in our ASE group meeting on his paper "Projection-based Runtime Assertions for Testing and Debugging Quantum Programs". The paper was accepted by OOPSLA 2020 and won the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award. Our group members had a fruitful discussion and brainstormed several future directions.

The paper presents Proq, a runtime assertion scheme for testing and debugging quantum programs on a quantum computer. At a high level, Proq represents the assertion predicate by projections (or equivalently, closed subspaces of the state space), following Birkhoff-von Neumann quantum logic. Theoretically, the assertion can be directly checked upon a small number of projective measurements rather than a large number of repeated executions. Practically, Proq considers hardware constraints and introduces several techniques to transform the assertions, making them directly executable on the measurement-restricted quantum computers.

Gushu Li is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at ECE Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, advised by Prof. Yuan Xie and Prof. Yufei Ding. His research interests include but are not limited to Computer Architecture, Compiler, Programming Language for Quantum Computing.

Wing Lam Passed Preliminary Exam and on Job Market

Our ASEer, Wing Lam, passed his Preliminary Exam on Nov 24, 2020, and is expected to graduate in July 2021.

Wing works with Professor Darko Marinov and Professor Tao Xie. His research interests are in Software Engineering, with a focus on flaky tests, test-input generation, code-clone detection, automatic program repair, record and replay, and parameterized unit tests. He has published over 10 papers in Software Engineering and Programming Languages conferences including ICSE, ESEC/FSE, ISSTA, and OOPSLA.

Wing is on the job market now and is interested in research positions in both academia and industry. Good luck, Wing!

Congratulations to Tao for winning Xplorer Prize

 Prof. Tao Xie is recently awarded with Xplorer Prize. Tao is among the 6 winners in the "Information and Electronics" categories along with the other 49 winners from top academics in China.

As a winner of the Xplorer Prize, Tao would be awarded near 500,000 US$ within five years. The prize is recognized as one of the highest academia achievements of people under 45 years, so it is highly competitive as the ratio between applicants and final winners is 25:1. 

Congratulations to Tao for winning Xplorer Prize!

Tao in the awarding ceremony.

Prof. Wei invited as special speaker in group meeting

In this Thursday's ASE group meeting, we have the honor to invite Prof. Wei Yang as a special speaker. He talks about his ongoing research and his recent born twin babies. Congratulations to Wei for being a father!

Prof. Wei Yang is currently a assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. He teaches and does research on software engineering and security. Wei has a strong bond with the ASE group as a former PhD student in the group and graduated from UIUC in 2018 before being a professor in UT Dallas.

Prof. Wei Yang

Congratulations to Angello for his accepted paper at PLDI 2019!

The paper "Learning Stateful Preconditions Modulo a Test Generator" was accepted by PLDI 2019. The conference is to be held from June 22-June 26, 2019 in Phoenix, AZ.

Angello Astorga, a PhD candidate of our ASE group, is the first author of the paper.

Congratulations to Angello and the co-authors Madhu, Shambwaditya, Shiyu, and Tao!

Congratulations to Graduating Students Liia, Shirdon, Xueqing, Zexuan!

Four ASEers, Liia Butler, Shirdon Gorse, Xueqing (Susan) Liu, and Zexuan Zhong, are going to graduate the end of this Fall 2019 or this Summer 2019, congratulations!

Liia will continue her PhD career in the Illinois ASE group. Shirdon will join Uber. Xueqing will make a career choice soon. Zexuan will become a PhD student at Princeton starting this fall.

The Illinois ASE group held a farewell meeting for them. They shared invaluable moments and advice to other ASEers.

From left to right, first row: Liia, Zexuan, Tao, and Xueqing(Susan); second row: Neil (Zirui), Zhilei, Linyi, Wenyu, Shirdon, Jonathan, and Zhengkai.

Wish them all the best in their future career!

ASE Group Celebration for End of Academic Year

Illinois ASEers had a wonderful celebration for End of 2018-19 Academic Year!

We (almost) cracked this escape room.

Had an awesome potluck party, table tennis & board games!