Ajitha Rajan

Research

I am a Professor (Personal Chair of Software Testing and Verification) and Director of Research at the School of Informatics in the University of Edinburgh. My background includes postdoctoral positions at Oxford University and Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble. I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota (Aug 2009) under Prof. Mats Heimdahl.

My research focuses on two main directions:

Automated Software Testing — Test input generation, test oracles, and coverage applied to Autonomous Vehicles, AI Compilers, hardware accelerators, GO programs
Biomedical AI — Cancer survival models, interpretability/XAI for biological sequences like proteins, RNA Seq & medical images like MRI, X-Rays, Histopathology, Mammograms

I'm actively recruiting PhD students with strong programming and research skills in either software testing/program analysis/compilers (C++/Python) or explainability for NLP/CV with familiarity in bioinformatics.

Teaching

Software Testing (ST) — 3rd year UG (JUnit, practical testing concepts)
Introduction to Software Engineering (Inf2C-SE) — 2nd year UG

Open Positions

Fully funded PhD positions (UK/EU); exceptional overseas students may be considered. I also supervise CDT-funded students — see below for links.

Current Funded Projects

MANIFEST (2024–2028) — Cancer Immunotherapy Response Research Platform led by Francis Crick Institute (MRC funded)
Huawei Joint Lab project (2024–2026) — RobustCheck: Testing Robustness of Compiler Optimisations and Deep Learning Frameworks
Royal Society Industry Fellowship (2022–2025) — AutoTest: Testing AV perception on hardware accelerators (industry collaboration: Codeplay Ltd.)
KATY (2021–2025) — Edinburgh Lead PI — Clinical knowledge for personalised medicine for renal cancer (Horizon 2020 funded)

Research Group

Current PhD students & Postdocs

Amy Rafferty — Explainable AI for medical image analysis
Yulin Jin — Scenario-based testing for autonomous driving
Hans-Cristof Gasser — Tunable Immune Visibility in Protein Design
Nardiena Pratima — Explainable AI for Brian MRI diagnosis

Past Students & Alumni

Panos Stratis — Software test suite compilation & execution optimisations
Vanya Yaneva — Accelerating test executions on GPUs
Chao Peng — Test generation & coverage for GPU programs
Sefa Akca — Automated testing of smart contracts on blockchains
Foivos Tsimpourlas — Machine learning for compiler optimisations
Tongjie Wang — Multimodal Survival Analysis for Glioma
Nick Louloudakis — Automated testing of Deep Learning Frameworks
Xiaoliang Wu — Robustness and Explainability in Automatic Speech Recognition and Speaker Verification
Piyush Borole — Explainable AI for Biomedical Applications

Selected Projects

AutoTest (Royal Society Industry Fellowship) — Testing autonomous vehicle perception safety on hardware accelerators (Codeplay collaboration). Fully funded PhD studentship available.
KATY (H2020) — AI for Genomics and Personalised Medicine; Edinburgh Lead PI; focus on clinical knowledge & NLP for renal cancer.
EPSRC Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Node — Governance and regulation; UAVs and medical diagnostics focus.