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
- CHAI Hub Seed project - Causally-Guided and Clinically Interpretable AI for Chest Disease Detection in NHS Imaging
- 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
- Nardiena Pratima — Explainable AI for Brian MRI diagnosis
- Aidan Dakhama - Correctness Testing of AI Compilers
- 3 new PhD students joining in September 2026
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
- Hans-Cristof Gasser — Tunable Immune Visibility in Protein Design
Recent News
2026 Highlights
- February 2026 — PC Chair along with Adrian Francalanza for 24th International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2026)
- January 2026 — Presented our paper at ACM SIGPLAN CC 2026 on "DiTOS: Fault Detection and Localization in the ONNX Optimizer" with Nikolaos Louloudakis
- January 2026 - Paper accepted at SEAMS 2026, held with ICSE in April 2026.
- PC Member: ICSE, FSE, ASE, ISSTA.
2025 Highlights
- December 2025 - Paper accepted at CC'26 and ICSE'26.
- November 2025 - Article accepted in Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal.
- June 2025 — ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Reviewer Award, ISSTA 2025
- July 2025 — Paper accepted at Machine Learning for Healthcare: "Can interpretability and accuracy coexist in cancer survival analysis?" (Piyush Borole et al.)
- June 2025 — "Go-Oracle" accepted at ESEM 2025 (Foivos Tsimpourlas et al.)
- June 2025 — Best Paper Award at ICHI 2025
- May 2025 — Multiple acceptances: IJCAI, XAI, ESEM, ICHI and other venues (see publication page for details)
2024
- Director of Research for School of Informatics
- Promoted to Professor (Chair in Software Testing & Verification).
- SICSA Best Supervisor Award.
- Publications in ICSE, ICASSP, Communications Biology, and others.