Jim received the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Award. He was presented with the award at the ESEC/FSE conference in Bergamo, Italy. The Impact Award recognizes research that has had extraordinary impact and is granted to only one research paper per year that was published at least ten years prior. The awarded paper is titled “Visualization of Test Information to Assist Fault Localization” from ICSE 2002. ACM SIGSOFT Impact Award

Jim has been granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.

Jim has been appointed as Vice Chair for Undergraduate Affairs for the Department of Informatics.

Jim’s Ph.D. student, Francisco Servant successfully defended his Doctoral Dissertation, on the work that he and Jim had been working on, for the Multi-revision, Fine-grained Analysis of Code History as a Means to Support Software Development. His presentation, dissertation, and defense were stellar. He will be joining Virginia Tech as an Assistant Professor later this year, in the Fall of 2015. Congratulations to Francisco!

Jim received the “2015 UCI Excellence in Undergraduate Education Dean’s Award”. UCI Teaching Awards

Jim’s Ph.D. student, Nicholas DiGiuseppe, successfully defended his Doctoral Dissertation, on the work that he and Jim had been working on for the Automatic Natural-Language Fault Diagnoses. He will be joining Yahoo! early next month. Congratulations to Nicholas!

Vijay attended the International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2014) at Vasteras, Sweden in September 2014. Vijay and Jim published their new idea research paper “Discriminating Influences among Instructions in a Dynamic Slice” at ASE 2014. Vijay presented the new idea of discriminating dynamic influences with an interesting talk, which was well received.

Jim will be speaking at the Institute for Software Research (ISR) Research Forum 2014 on May 16. The ISR Research Forum brings together researchers, leaders in industry, and technical practitioners in a multi-disciplinary environment to: discuss current research areas and technical trends in the fields of software development and interactive and collaborative technologies; showcase current ISR research; formulate visions on strategic future research and technological directions; and encourage interaction among academia and industry through exchange of ideas and sharing of experiences. Jim’s talk will be titled Diagnosing the Root of Software Problems through Automated Cause-and-Effect Sequence Analysis. You can read more about the Forum at: ISR. Update: Jim’s entire talk, “Diagnosing the Root of Software Problems through Automated Cause-and-Effect Sequence Analysis,” at the ISR Forum is now available at YouTube

Jim, Vijay, and Francisco will be attending ASE this year in Palo Alto, California in November. Vijay is presenting our work on Dynamic Dependence Summaries. Francisco is presenting our work on software history analysis and his plan for his dissertation at the Doctoral Symposium.

Jim will be attending the first version of IEEE VISSOFT Working Conference that is the new union of the SOFTVIS symposium and the VISSOFT workshop. In addition to co-organizing the NIER and Tool Demo tracks with Stephan Diehl, Jim will be presenting his and Vijay’s paper on Visualizing Constituent Behaviors within Executions. Additionally, Paco will be presenting his and Jim’s Tool Demo paper on Chronos.

Jim will be speaking at the Institute for Software Research (ISR) Research Forum 2013 on May 31. The ISR Research Forum brings together researchers, leaders in industry, and technical practitioners in a multi-disciplinary environment to: discuss current research areas and technical trends in the fields of software development and interactive and collaborative technologies; showcase current ISR research; formulate visions on strategic future research and technological directions; and encourage interaction among academia and industry through exchange of ideas and sharing of experiences. Jim’s talk will be titled What is Your Code’s Behavior Telling You? Using Evidence to Automate Software Maintenance. You can read more about the Forum at: http://www.isr.uci.edu/events/Research-Forum-2013/

Jim is speaking at the New Faculty and Researchers Symposium, which is associated with ICSE 2013 in San Francisco. Jim will be sharing his experience as a tenure-track professor in order to help, encourage, and support members of the community who have just started or are about to start their professional research careers.

Now, with the deadline for the main track passed, we want to remind and encourage everyone to submit your new and innovative work to the NIER track of VISSOFT 2013. Also, we are accepting tool demonstrations to the TD track. The deadline for submitting your papers is June 28, 2013. The call for papers is at: http://icsm2013.tue.nl/VISSOFT/cfp/

Jim and Ph.D.-students Nicholas and Vijay will be attending the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in San Francisco, California for the week of May 20 to May 24.

Jim was elected as the Faculty Senate Assembly Representative for the UC Irvine Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. His term of service will extend from September 2013 to September 2015.

Jim is serving on the program committee of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-2014), which will be held in Hong Kong, China in November 2014.

Jim is serving on the program committee of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-2014), which will be held in Hyderabad, India.

As Co-Chair with Stephan Diehl, Jim is organizing the New Ideas and Emerging Research (NIER) track and the Tool Demonstration (TD) track of the first annual VISSOFT working conference. Please consider submitting your interactive demos and latest innovative visualization work to these tracks of VISSOFT. We plan to organize a highly engaging and inviting event to inspire each other, communicate our accomplishments, and connect researchers for future possible collaborations. See the call for papers at: http://icsm2013.tue.nl/VISSOFT/cfp/

Jim is serving on the program committee for the first annual Working Conference on Software Visualization. The Steering Committees of SoftVis and VisSoft decided to merge and have a single annual event starting in 2013. The new conference is the IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization and will carry the acronym of VISSOFT. The first joint conference will be collocated with ICSM in Eindhoven, Netherlands, during September 27-28, 2013. Alex Telea is the general chair of the first joint conference, while Andreas Kerren and Andi Marcus will serve as the Program Co-chairs. See more details at: http://icsm2013.tue.nl/VISSOFT/

Fang successfully defended her Masters Thesis, on the work that she and Jim had been working on for the Weighted System Dependence Graph and the Constellation Visualization. Her presentation, thesis, and defense were stellar.

Nicholas and Jim’s poster for the “Semantic Fault Diagnosis: Automatic Natural-Language Fault Descriptions,” paper, along with Nicholas’ enthusiastic presentation of it were awarded the Best Poster Award at FSE 2012 for the New and Emerging Ideas Track.

Jim, Francisco, and Nicholas attended the International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2012) where Francisco and Jim had their full, main-track paper “History Slicing: Assisting Code-Evolution Tasks,” and Nicholas and Jim had two short, New and Emerging Ideas papers: “Semantic Fault Diagnosis: Automatic Natural-Language Fault Descriptions” and “Concept-Based Failure Clustering.”

Francisco presented our work on “History Slicing: Assisting Code-Evolution Tasks” with an excellent talk, which was well received and garnered attention and questions.

Nicholas presented two lightening talks and presented our posters on each of the short papers.

Paco, Nicholas, and Jim will be traveling to Cary, North Carolina, USA this month to attend the 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT 2012 / FSE-20). Paco will be presenting our paper on History Slicing, and Nicholas will be giving two short presentations on our New Ideas short papers on Fault Diagnosis and Failure Clustering. Join us in North Carolina this November!

Jim participated in a presentation and panel session to help share experiences with submitting and reviewing for National Science Foundation grant proposals and fellowships. The seminar was aimed at researchers, campus-wide, who were interested in learning more about the process to increase their odds at obtaining funding for their research.

Nicholas was a “scientist” for Irvine School District’s “Ask a Scientist” night, in which middle and high school students could interact with professionals in the sciences.

Update: The Orange County Register just posted a story about the event. http://www.ocregister.com/news/school-375073-science-ball.html

Nicholas and Jim had two short papers accepted for publication in the New Ideas and Emerging Research track at the International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-NIER). The first paper, “Semantic Fault Diagnosis: Automatic Natural-Language Fault Descriptions,” describes a technique to automatically extract natural-language summaries of bugs from a program’s source code. The second paper, “Concept-Based Failure Clustering,” describes a technique for performing clustering of failing test cases based on the natural-language concepts that describe their failures.

Nicholas presented at a NSF GRFP panel aimed to help UC Irvine students across the whole campus write effective fellowship applications.

Francisco passed his advancement defense, which now qualifies him as a Ph.D. candidate. Congratulations, Paco!

Paco and Jim’s paper on History Slicing was accepted at the 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT 2012 / FSE-20). The paper, titled “History Slicing: Assisting Code-Evolution Tasks,” describes (1) a fine-grained program-history model that represents source-code evolution; (2) an analysis technique that tracks history of any set of lines among any set of files and versions across any epoch of the recorded history; (3) a novel visualization that allows developers to query and explore the code history; and (4) an evaluation that includes both an automated quantitative experiment and a qualitative user study experiment.

UC Irvine undergrad, Ethan Wessel, joins the Spider Lab. He will be in charge of developing a software-maintenance and debugging “dashboard.” We’re excited to have him join us in helping to develop techniques and tools to empower software developers.

Fang was hired again for her second summer internship at Google. This time around, she’ll be stationed in the main Google campus in Mountain View. She’ll be working on the Google Chrome project. Best wishes to Fang, and we’ll look forward to her return to Irvine.

Jim was awarded the “Best Presentation Award” at the International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation for his presentation of the work described in the “Weighted System Dependence Graph” paper, which was published in the proceedings of the conference.

Nicholas was awarded the very selective honor as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Congratulations, Nicholas!

Jim has been invited to give a keynote talk at Regression 2012 in Montreal about the past, present, and future of the Tarantula work. Regression 2012 is co-located with the International Conference on Software Testing, where Nicholas and Jim have a paper “Software Behavior and Failure Clustering” and Fang and Jim have a paper “Weighted System Dependence Graph.”

The abstract of Jim’s keynote is:

“In this keynote, Dr. Jones will review the story of the Tarantula fault-localization technique and its many incarnations in the decade since its inception. He will also describe some of the unexpected ways in which the original Tarantula concept is adapting to and influencing new families of approaches that use regression tests for progressive software-maintenance tasks.”

In this keynote, Dr. Jones will review the story of the Tarantula fault-localization technique and its many incarnations in the decade since its inception. He will also describe some of the unexpected ways in which the original Tarantula concept is adapting to and influencing new families of approaches that use regression tests for progressive software-maintenance tasks.

Join us in Montreal for the International Conference on Software Testing (ICST) from April 18–20. We have two research paper talks: (1) Nicholas will be presenting his and Jim’s paper, titled “Software Behavior and Failure Clustering: An Empirical Study of Fault Causality”; and (2) Jim will be presenting his and Fang’s paper, titled “Weighted Software Dependence Graph.”

Vijay, who had already been conducting research with the Spider Lab as a Masters student, applied and was accepted into the Ph.D. program. We’re excited to get to continue working with Vijay for the coming years and seeing where he helps take our research.

Francisco and Jim’s paper, “WhoseFault: Automatic Developer-to-Fault Assignment Through Fault-Localization” was accepted for publication at ICSE 2012. The paper describes a new technique (and family of techniques) for automatically recommending developers to be assigned for fixing execution failures.

Fang’s and Jim’s paper “Weighted System Dependence Graph” was accepted for publication at ICST 2012. This paper provides a new program-analysis model of software code for a program. The model augments static (i.e., compile-time) whole-program dependencies among instructions with dynamic (i.e., run-time) information describing how the instructions were executed. Existing static models provide information about which instructions may affect others, and existing dynamic models provide information about which instructions did affect others. In contrast, our new hybrid model allows for the assessment of the degree to which instructions affect each other. We envision applications of the model for supporting numerous software-maintenance tasks.

Nicholas’s and Jim’s paper “Software Behavior and Failure Clustering: An Empirical Study of Fault Causality” was accepted for publication at ICST 2012. This paper presents a novel empirical study to demonstrate how independent, individual faults in software can interact to either act independently or work in concert to create entirely new and different failure behaviors. The experimental setup has implications for failure-clustering research and recommendations for future scientific evaluations of such clustering techniques.

Ted successfully completed the Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. Ted worked with the Spider Lab to develop new visualizations and implementations to assist developers to find, understand, and fix bugs in software. We thank Ted for his invaluable contribution to the research and wish him all the best with everything in the future. We look forward to watching his bright future unfold.

Nicholas and Jim led an outreach event at University High School in Irvine, California. Jim presented advice on how to choose among universities and navigate among the options for computer-science majors. And, Nicholas led a demonstration and presentation of our research. The students found bugs in a Tetris program and learned about dynamic analysis and automated debugging assistance. Fang and Vijay also joined in the event to speak one-on-one with students after the presentation.

Nicholas DiGiuseppe led a group of students from the Brea Olinda High School. Nicholas presented some of our research and led interactive activities that allowed the students to experience the benefits enabled by our research. The session was fun for all and was very well received. Thank you to Nicholas and to the Brea Olinda students for a fun and informative experience!

The National Science Foundation awarded Jim a grant to study the nature of faults and their behavior. The proposed work creates techniques to visualize faulty program behavior and produce conceptual diagnoses to assist developer debugging efforts. The grant is titled “Promoting Efficient Debugging and High-Quality Software through Contextual Understanding of Faults.”

Fang was hired as an intern this summer at Google to assist in their software-testing efforts. Congratulations, Fang!

Paco (i.e., “Francisco”) was granted an internship this summer at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington to research software-history mining. Congratulations, Paco!

Nicholas was selected for an Honorable Mention for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship program. Congratulations, Nicholas!

Google Inc. awarded James Jones a Faculty Research Award. The award comes with funding for the work in fault comprehension and visualization.