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!

Congratulations to Zexuan and Zhengkai for Achievements in ICPC 2019 World Finals!

The 2019 ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) World Finals was held from March 31 to April 5, 2019 in Porto, Portugal.

Zexuan Zhong, an ASE MS student, attended the event as the team member of University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Zhengkai Wu, an ASE PhD student, is a co-coach of the team.

In Pre-competition Challenge on Neural Networks, the team ranked second among all teams! Zhengkai won the Coaches' Challenge!

In the main competition, the team solved 4 problems out of 11.

Congratulations to Zexuan, Zhengkai, and University of Illinois team!

Illinois ASE Group Hosted Industrial Visitor from Facebook

On September 7, Alex Gyori from Facebook arrived at Champaign and visited the Illinois ASE group. Alex and the ASE students had fruitful discussion.

Alex Gyori is a research scientist on the Core Systems team at Facebook in Seattle. His research interests are in improving the reliability of distributed systems. Prior to joining Facebook, Alex received his PhD from Illinois CS in 2017, advised by Prof. Darko Marinov.

First row: Xueqing, Alex, Wing, Siwakorn (Ping); second row: Zelin, Owolabi, Ziang, Zexuan, Linyi, Liia, Yue (From left to right)

Illinois ASE student participated in CRA Graduate Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD Grad Cohort)

CRA Graduate Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD Grad Cohort) was held on March 16-17 in San Diego, CA. One Illinois ASE Ph.D. student, Wing Lam, attended in this iteration of the Grad Cohort Workshop, which was the first gathering of its kind hosted by CRA. Wing also presented a poster titled "A characteristic study of bug reports" during the workshop (see https://cra.org/events/urmgradcohort/#agenda_PDF for more details). The workshop aimed to increase representation of minorities in computing research by building and mentoring nationwide communities through their graduate studies and is modeled on the highly successful CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop for Women.

CRA Graduate Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD Grad Cohort)

(Credit: https://cra.org/crn/2018/04/expanding-the-pipeline-cra-urmd-grad-cohort-fosters-a-diverse-and-inclusive-generation-of-computing-researchers/)

Congratulations to Siwakorn (Ping) and Zexuan for securing the 1st place in UIUC ICPC Spring Coding Contest!

Team ASEVeterans, formed by two current ASE members, Siwakorn (Ping) Srisakaokul and Zexuan Zhong, won the first place in the UIUC ICPC Spring Coding Contest held on April 7 by being the only team who solved all 13 ACM ICPC-level coding challenges. They were also the first to come up with correct solutions for 8 of the problems.

Siwakorn (Ping) is currently a third-year PhD student. He competed in ACM-ICPC World Finals 2016 by being in the first place at Chicago regional contest as part of the UIUC team. Zexuan is currently a first-year MS student. He also competed in ACM-ICPC and won Gold Medals at Changchun and Chicago regional contests.

Scoreboard at the end of the contest

Ping and Zexuan working together

Well done,  Siwakorn (Ping) and Zexuan!

Congratulations to Zexuan for his accepted papers at AAAI 2018 and NL4SE 2018

Zexuan Zhong, a first-year graduate student and Illinois ASEer, authored two accepted papers:

CoLink: An Unsupervised Framework for User Identity Linkage
Zexuan Zhong, Yong Cao, Zaiqing Nie, and Mu Guo.
Accepted at The Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2018)

Generating Regular Expressions from Natural Language Specifications: Are We There Yet?
Zexuan Zhong, Jiaqi Guo, Wei Yang, Tao Xie, Jian-Guang Lou, Ting Liu, and Dongmei Zhang.
Accepted at Workshop on NLP for Software Engineering (NL4SE 2018) co-located with AAAI 2018
(Co-authored with Wei Yang, another ASEer)

Zexuan interned at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) when he was an undergraduate student at Peking University. He worked with Dr. Yong Cao and Dr. Zaiqing Nie during his internship.

(Zexuan @ MSRA)

Congratulations to Zexuan!

Illinois ASE Undergraduate Researchers Analyzed Contestant Performance of a Code Hunt Contest

Over the 2017 summer, a group of Illinois ASE undergraduate students, Adrian Clark, Jonathan Wells, and Jalen Coleman-Lands advised by Professor Tao Xie, in collaboration with PhD student Angello Astorga and high school student Andrew Xie, analyzed the Code Hunt data set (released by Microsoft Research) from a coding contest. Their undergraduate research was supported by the National Science Foundations.

Code Hunt from Microsoft Research is a web-based serious gaming platform being popularly used for various programming contests. Over the summer, the preceding students conducted analysis of the Code Hunt data set (players’ playing history) to focus on contestant performance released by Microsoft Research. This data set contains the programs written by students (only) worldwide during a contest over 48 hours. There are approximately 250 users, 24 puzzles and about 13,000 programs.

The initial results of the data analysis will be presented in the 2017 Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2017), Vancouver, Canada, October 2017

Adrian Clark, Jonathan Wells, Angello Astorga, Andrew Xie, Jalen Coleman-Lands, and Tao Xie. Preliminary Analysis of Contestant Performance for a Code Hunt Contest. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2017), Vancouver, Canada, October 2017. [PDF]

Great job, Adrian, Jonathan, Angello, Andrew, and Jalen!! 

Thank Microsoft Research for releasing the Code Hunt data set to engage the academic community to study such valuable educational data! 

Jalen Coleman-Lands, Jonathan Wells, Adrian Clark, Tao Xie,  Angello Astorga (from lef to right)

Jonathan Wells co-presented the workshop paper at the the 8th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2017), Vancouver, Canada.

Group BBQ Party for Greeting New Students and Farewell to Prof. Wo

Illinois ASEers had a fantastic BBQ party at Hessel Park on Saturday evening to welcome new graduate students, Joey, Liia, Wenyu, Yue and Zexuan, and say farewell to Prof. Wo, our visiting professor from Beihang University.

Preparing lots of foods for the party...

Special thanks to Mingming and Liia for their awesome cooking!

We had many attendees: Chiao, David (Wei), Joey (Jiayi), Jonathan, Liia, Mingming, Ping, Wenyu, Wing, Prof. Wo, Prof. Xie, Xueqing, Yue, Zexuan, Zhengkai, etc. Everybody enjoyed the food and the games!

Illinois ASE Group Farewell Party for the Group End-of-Year Celebration and Dengfeng Li's Graduation

Illinois ASE Group Farewell Party 2017 on April 28, 2017 for celebrating the group's achievements and Dengfeng Li's Graduation, with BBQ party at Prof. Tao's house!

Congratulations to Dengfeng Li (Davis) on the right of the picture below:

Illinois ASE Group Lunar New Year 2017 Gathering

Illinois ASE Group Lunar New Year 2017 Gathering on January 27, 2017 for celebrating Lunar New Year, with Chinese food, drink at Prof. Tao's house! (One ASEer, David, is absent due to other things.)

Congratulations to Wing for being named a State Farm Companies Foundation Doctoral Scholar

Wing Lam, a PhD student in our ASE Illinois group, has been named a State Farm Companies Foundation Doctoral Scholar. Scholars receive a $6,000 fellowship for use during academic year 2016-2017.  

Congratulations to Davis for being named a Siebel Scholar

Dengfeng "Davis" Li, an MS student in our ASE Illinois group, has been named a Siebel Scholar for the Class of 2017. He is one of five students in CS @ Illinois who received this award for 2017. In recognition of their outstanding academic record and leadership, the Siebel Scholars will receive $35,000 during their final year of study.

The student in the second to the right is Davis.

Read more here.

Illinois ASE Group Going away party for Pinjia and Tao / Welcome back party

The Illinois ASE Group gathered on Sept. 9th, 2016 for celebrating the departure of Pinjia, our group's visiting student this summer, and Tao, who is going to China for teaching CS101 in ZJU-UIUC institute. We also celebrated MingMing, our new visiting student for joining our group!

Group members had dinner at Destihl and then headed out for laser tag. Two intense games between group members made us all sweaty as much as the heavy rain outside that night did too. Davis and Ping acheived remarkably high scores in shooting everyone. :)

After the games, all of our group members grabbed some drinks, fruits and ice creams at Schnucks and went to Tao's house to play the board game "The Resistance" supplied by Wing. The game was contested with Zhengkai's and Tao's talkative strategies and Pinjia acting like a real "silent spy".

Attendees:
Chiao, Davis, Mingming, Ping, Pinjia, Tao (Only join the board game), Wing, Zhengkai

Below are our pictures taken at Destihl:

Illinois Undergraduate Researchers Analyzing Code Hunt Data Set Released by Microsoft Research

Over the 2016 summer, a group of Illinois ASE undergraduate students, Pierre McCauley, Brandon Nsiah-Ababio, Joshua Reed, and Faramola Isiaka, advised by Professor Tao Xie, have been analyzing the Code Hunt data set (released by Microsoft Research) from a coding contest. Their undergraduate research has been supported by the National Science Foundations.

Code Hunt from Microsoft Research is a web-based serious gaming platform being popularly used for various programming contests. Over the summer, the Illinois ASE undergraduate students conducted preliminary analysis of the Code Hunt data set (players’ playing history) released by Microsoft Research. This data set contains the programs written by students (only) worldwide during a contest over 48 hours. There are approximately 250 users, 24 puzzles and about 13,000 programs.

The initial results of the data analysis will be presented in the 2016 International Code Hunt Workshop on Educational Software Engineering (CHESE 2016), co-located with FSE 2016 in Seattle, Washington in November 2016:

Pierre McCauley, Brandon Nsiah-Ababio, Joshua Reed, Faramola Isiaka, and Tao Xie. Preliminary Analysis of Code Hunt Data Set from a Contest. In Proceedings of the 2016 International Code Hunt Workshop on Educational Software Engineering (CHESE 2016), Seattle, WA, November 2016. [PDF]

Great job, Pierre, Brandon, Joshua, and Faramola!! Look forward your further comprehensive study of the Code Hunt data set (with additional efforts from Jeremy Green) in the upcoming 2016 Fall semester!

Thank Microsoft Research for releasing the Code Hunt data set to engage the academic community to study such valuable educational data!