Miryung Kim
AI + SE Seminar Series (October 31 2025. 11 AM – 12 PM EST)
Reinventing Testing for Big Data and Heterogeneous Computing
The rise of big data, machine learning, and AI necessitates re-evaluating automated software testing techniques to achieve desired developer productivity gains. In this talk, I will reflect on my group’s experience of designing custom fuzzers for data-intensive computing and heterogeneous hardware domains. I will discuss the need to encode domain-specific constraints, custom feedback guidance, custom search strategies, and custom mutation operators to make the fuzzing solutions effective for a specialized domain. Then, reflecting on this manual specialization effort, I will discuss a new direction on how we should strive to bootstrap a domain-specific testing engine with minimal manual effort. Toward this vision of bootstrapping a domain-specific testing engine without paying too much, I will share several ongoing effort to find the right balance between the universality of a fuzzer and its effectiveness in a specialized domain: (1) custom mutation synthesis from examples, (2) automated grammar refinement to constrain fuzzing, (3) LLM-guided constraint-generation for mutation, and (4) a lightweight DSL for context-guided input generation.
Bio
Miryung Kim is a Professor and Vice Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA’s Computer Science Department. She has done early work in mining software repositories, a field now recognized as AI for Software Engineering. Her work on clone clones laid the groundwork for automated clone detection, removal, and management. These insights into code clones became foundational for the current landscape of AI-powered coding assistants. She received two Test of Time awards for her contributions to understanding Android API stability and adoption, and for refactoring identification from version histories by tracking clones in evolving software. Her studies on refactoring in industry have also contributed to understanding how large-scale systems are re-architected for continuous evolution.
She has produced eight tenure-track faculty members at institutions such as Columbia, Purdue, and Virginia Tech. For her dedication to nurturing the next generation of academics, she received the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award in 2022. She has also served as a Program Co-Chair of FSE 2022 and has been a Keynote Speaker at ASE 2019 and ISSTA 2022. She gave Distinguished Lectures at CMU, UIUC, etc. Additionally, she spent time as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research, and is an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Web Services.
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