Publications (30)
Future of Software Engineering Research: The SIGSOFT Perspective
Massimiliano Di Penta, Kelly Blincoe, Marsha Chechik +4
As software engineering conferences grow in size, rising costs and outdated formats are creating barriers to participation for many researchers. These barriers threaten the inclusi…
Early Verification of Legal Compliance via Bounded Satisfiability Checking
Nick Feng, Lina Marsso, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh +1
Legal properties involve reasoning about data values and time. Metric first-order temporal logic (MFOTL) provides a rich formalism for specifying legal properties. While MFOTL has…
A Software Engineering Perspective on Testing Large Language Models: Research, Practice, Tools and Benchmarks
Sinclair Hudson, Sophia Jit, Boyue Caroline Hu +1
Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming ubiquitous both as stand-alone tools and as components of current and future software systems. To enable usage of LLMs in the high…
Assurance Case Development for Evolving Software Product Lines: A Formal Approach
Logan Murphy, Torin Viger, Alessio Di Sandro +2
In critical software engineering, structured assurance cases (ACs) are used to demonstrate how key system properties are supported by evidence (e.g., test results, proofs). Creatin…
Social, Legal, Ethical, Empathetic and Cultural Norm Operationalisation for AI Agents
Radu Calinescu, Ana Cavalcanti, Marsha Chechik +2
As AI agents are increasingly used in high-stakes domains like healthcare and law enforcement, aligning their behaviour with social, legal, ethical, empathetic, and cultural (SLEEC…
Operationalizing Human Values in the Requirements Engineering Process of Ethics-Aware Autonomous Systems
Everaldo Silva Júnior, Lina Marsso, Ricardo Caldas +2
Operationalizing human values alongside functional and adaptation requirements remains challenging due to their ambiguous, pluralistic, and context-dependent nature. Explicit repre…
Diagnosis via Proofs of Unsatisfiability for First-Order Logic with Relational Objects
Nick Feng, Lina Marsso, Marsha Chechik
Satisfiability-based automated reasoning is an approach that is being successfully used in software engineering to validate complex software, including for safety-critical systems.…
Towards Certified Analysis of Software Product Line Safety Cases
Ramy Shahin, Sahar Kokaly, Marsha Chechik
Safety-critical software systems are in many cases designed and implemented as families of products, usually referred to as Software Product Lines (SPLs). Products within an SPL va…
Optimizing Computation of Recovery Plans for BPEL Applications
Jocelyn Simmonds, Shoham Ben-David, Marsha Chechik
Web service applications are distributed processes that are composed of dynamically bounded services. In our previous work [15], we have described a framework for performing runtim…
Assessing Visually-Continuous Corruption Robustness of Neural Networks Relative to Human Performance
Huakun Shen, Boyue Caroline Hu, Krzysztof Czarnecki +2
While Neural Networks (NNs) have surpassed human accuracy in image classification on ImageNet, they often lack robustness against image corruption, i.e., corruption robustness. Yet…
The Last Decade in Review: Tracing the Evolution of Safety Assurance Cases through a Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis
Mithila Sivakumar, Alvine Boaye Belle, Jinjun Shan +6
Safety assurance is of paramount importance across various domains, including automotive, aerospace, and nuclear energy, where the reliability and acceptability of mission-critical…
Normative Requirements Operationalization with Large Language Models
Nick Feng, Lina Marsso, S. Getir Yaman +9
Normative non-functional requirements specify constraints that a system must observe in order to avoid violations of social, legal, ethical, empathetic, and cultural norms. As thes…
Abstraction Engineering
Nelly Bencomo, Jordi Cabot, Marsha Chechik +4
Modern software-based systems operate under rapidly changing conditions and face ever-increasing uncertainty. In response, systems are increasingly adaptive and reliant on artifici…
LEGOS-SLEEC: Tool for Formalizing and Analyzing Normative Requirements
Kevin Kolyakov, Lina Marsso, Nick Feng +2
Systems interacting with humans, such as assistive robots or chatbots, are increasingly integrated into our society. To prevent these systems from causing social, legal, ethical, e…
Lifting Datalog-Based Analyses to Software Product Lines
Ramy Shahin, Marsha Chechik, Rick Salay
Applying program analyses to Software Product Lines (SPLs) has been a fundamental research problem at the intersection of Product Line Engineering and software analysis. Different…
Abductive Vibe Coding (Extended Abstract)
Logan Murphy, Aren A. Babikian, Marsha Chechik
When software artifacts are generated by AI models ("vibe coding"), human engineers assume responsibility for validating them. Ideally, this validation would be done through the cr…
Solving Set Constraints with Comprehensions and Bounded Quantifiers
Mudathir Mohamed, Nick Feng, Andrew Reynolds +3
Many real applications problems can be encoded easily as quantified formulas in SMT. However, this simplicity comes at the cost of difficulty during solving by SMT solvers. Differe…
Risk Under Pressure: Compute-Aware Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness in Language Models
Malikeh Ehghaghi, Boglárka Ecsedi, Marsha Chechik +1
Adversarial robustness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report attack success rate (ASR) under fixed query budgets, implicitly treating all attacks as equally…
Automated Repair of Requirements for Cyber-Physical Systems in Simulink Requirements Tables
Aren A. Babikian, Alessio Di Sandro, Federico Formica +2
The development of complex software systems, e.g., cyber-physical systems (CPSs), involves continuous evolution of both system implementations and their requirements. These two art…
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Autonomous Systems Quality Assurance and Prediction with Digital Twins
Marsha Chechik, Arianna Fedeli, Gianluca Filippone +4
This volume contains the proceedings of the First International Workshop on Autonomous Systems Quality Assurance and Prediction with Digital Twins (ASQAP 2025), which was held in H…
If a Human Can See It, So Should Your System: Reliability Requirements for Machine Vision Components
Boyue Caroline Hu, Lina Marsso, Krzysztof Czarnecki +3
Machine Vision Components (MVC) are becoming safety-critical. Assuring their quality, including safety, is essential for their successful deployment. Assurance relies on the availa…
Multi-CoLoR: Context-Aware Localization and Reasoning across Multi-Language Codebases
Indira Vats, Sanjukta De, Subhayan Roy +5
Large language models demonstrate strong capabilities in code generation but struggle to navigate complex, multi-language repositories to locate relevant code. Effective code local…
Compositional Generator Equivalence (Extended Version)
Anthony Vandikas, Kiarash Sotoudeh, Marsha Chechik
Property-based testing (PBT) is a powerful technique for software verification that relies on random input generators and "shrinking" processes to find and minimize counterexamples…
Property-Driven Synthetic Data Engineering for Data-Scarce Software Systems: Reflections from the Breast Cancer Domain
Aurora Francesca Zanenga, Andrea Bombarda, Marsha Chechik +4
Modern software systems increasingly depend on data for analysis, prediction, testing, and decision-making. Yet many important domains, including medicine, safety-critical systems,…
Applying Declarative Analysis to Software Product Line Models: An Industrial Study
Ramy Shahin, Robert Hackman, Rafael Toledo +3
Software Product Lines (SPLs) are families of related software products developed from a common set of artifacts. Most existing analysis tools can be applied to a single product at…
Robust Vacuity for Branching Temporal Logic
Arie Gurfinkel, Marsha Chechik
There is a growing interest in techniques for detecting whether a logic specification is satisfied too easily, or vacuously. For example, the specification "every request is eventu…
Analyzing and Debugging Normative Requirements via Satisfiability Checking
Nick Feng, Lina Marsso, Sinem Getir Yaman +11
As software systems increasingly interact with humans in application domains such as transportation and healthcare, they raise concerns related to the social, legal, ethical, empat…
PLACIDUS: Engineering Product Lines of Rigorous Assurance Cases
Logan Murphy, Torin Viger, Alessio Di Sandro +1
In critical software engineering, structured assurance cases (ACs) are used to demonstrate how key properties (e.g., safety, security) are supported by evidence artifacts (e.g., te…
Variability-aware Datalog
Ramy Shahin, Marsha Chechik
Variability-aware computing is the efficient application of programs to different sets of inputs that exhibit some variability. One example is program analyses applied to Software…
Automatic and Efficient Variability-Aware Lifting of Functional Programs
Ramy Shahin, Marsha Chechik
A software analysis is a computer program that takes some representation of a software product as input and produces some useful information about that product as output. A softwar…