I am a Professor (Personal Chair of Software Testing and Verification) at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh .

Prior to arriving at Edinburgh, I was a post-doc at Oxford University, Computer Science Department and at Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (LIG) at Grenoble, France. I graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in Aug 2009. My PhD supervisor was Prof. Mats Heimdahl.



 
 

My Research

My research is along two directions:
  • Automated Software Testing Techniques considering test input generation, test oracles, coverage metrics.
  • Biomedical Artificial Intelligence focusing on cancer survival models, interpretability for biological sequences and medical images. .
Figure below shows the different topics I am presently working on under each of these directions.



I am looking for PhD students with strong background in either

  • Software testing, program analysis and compilers. Students should have very strong programming skills, preferably in C++ and Python.
  • Exaplainability applied to Natural language processing or computer vision with some familiarity in bioinformatics. Students should have solid understanding of AI techniques and tools along with strong Python programming.

Fully funded PhD positions are available for UK/EU students. Exceptional overseas students will also be considered.

School of Informatics at Edinburgh University offer several fully funded PhD positions through numerous Centres for Doctoral Training (CDT). Please consider applyng if your interests are a good fit. These positions are highly competitive.


Research Group

Current PhD Students

Tongjie Wang
Multi-modal prediction models for cancer survival.

Xiaoliang Wu
Automated Testing of Speech Recognition Systems.

Amy Rafferty
Explainable AI for Medical Image Analysis.

Nick Louloudakis
Testing Perception AI on Hardware Accelerators.

Piyush Borole
AI techniques for Vaccine Design.

Hans-Cristof Gasser
Explainable AI for Cancer Immunotherapy.

Past PhD Students

Panos Stratis
Software test suite compilation and execution optimizations.

Vanya Yaneva
Acceleratign test executions on GPUs

Chao Peng
Test generation and coverage for GPU programs.

Sefa Akca
Automated Testing of Smart Contracts on Blockchains.

Foivos Tsimpourlas
Machine Learning for Compiler Optimisations.


Current Funded Projects

  • Royal Society Industry Fellowship (2022 -- 2025) AutoTest: Testing Autonomous Vehicle Perception Safety on Hardware Accelerators. I am collaborating with Codeplay Ltd. to test safety and robustness of real-time perception systems on computing platforms in self-driving cars. I have a fully funded PhD studentship (funded at UK/EU fee level by Datalab and Codeplay) to work on this project. I am looking for a student with expertise in one or more of -- software testing, compilers and parallel architectures. Please contact me if you are interested.
  • H2020 European Project KATY (2021 -- 2025) - H2020 – DT-TDS-04-2020 AI for Genomics and Personalised Medicine in which I am Edinburgh Lead PI: 2021- 2025. Knowledge at the Tip of Your fingers: Clinical Knowledge for Humanity (KATY). The project involves 20 partners from 11 countries with clinical, AI and software engineering expertise to develop personalised treatment recommendations for Renal cancer. I am looking to hire a multi-year Research Assistant with expertise in NLP for this project. Please contact me if you are interested.
  • EPSRC Trustworth Autonomous Systems Node in Governance and Regulation (2020 -- 2024) - led by Prof. Ram Ramamoorthy from the School of Informatics. I am excited to be a Co-I working with several others on this project. project aims to ensure the trustworthiness of systems that put machines in charge of decisions with particular focus on the design of frameworks for responsibility and accountability. The project will focus on UAVs and medical diagmostics as application domains.
  • Bytedance/TikTok project (2020 -- 2022) - The project focuses on testing techniques for Android Applications.

Teaching

  • Software Testing (ST) - 3rd year UG course introducing software testing concepts and providing practical experience with JUnit. I have been teaching this course since 2015.
  • Computer Programming - Skills and Concepts (CP) - 1st year UG course introducing C programming. I co-taught this course in 2017/18 and 2018/19.
  • Embedded Systems (ES) - 4th year UG course (2017/18).
  • Introduction to Software Engineering (Inf2C-SE) - 2nd year UG course (2014/15).

Recent News

I edited a book along with Thomas Wahl for the European funded project, CESAR. The book was published by Springer in March 2013. A glimpse of the book is available here.