My general areas of interest are in the domain of software engineering with an emphasis on applying machine learning to different areas studied in the domain, like defect prediction, security bug report prediction, data privacy and forensic readiness.
For defect prediction, my research has shown that less data (as low as 10 percent of original data) can make comparable and sometimes better models for defect prediction or classification. Additionally, I have studied cross project defect prediction (CPDP) and confirmed that despite previous work, CPDP can be successful when the training data is filtered.
Privacy issues are clear with CPDP since it requires data-sharing. I've studied what makes a good privacy algorithm for software engineering data and have shown that privacy can be achieved with little degradation to utility of defect-prediction models.
More recently, my research has expanded to text analysis on software engineering artefacts in order to predict the unwanted presence of security bug reports in publicly accessible bug tracking systems.
With colleagues, we have explored the intuition that security bug reports were challenging to predict with text-based predictors because of what we termed “security cross words”, i.e., security related keywords which were present in both security and non-security bug reports.
We came up with a solution to reduce the number of non-security bug reports used to build text-based predictors. The output of this work is a ranked list of bug reports, where the actual security report are closer to the top of the list.
Currently I am finding solutions to privacy issues in software engineering, and working on projects for implementing privacy awareness, and forensic readiness in cyber-physical systems.
Position
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PostDoc Researcher
Lero - The Irish Software Engineering Research Center at the University of Limerick
(2014 - 2018)
Activities
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NLSE Workshop Program Committee Member (2018)
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SERF Workshop Program Committee Member (2017)
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iRENIC Workshop Program Committee Member (2016)
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MSR Program Committee Member (2015, 2018)
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FSE Tools Program Committee Member (2014)
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PROMISE Repository (June 2012 - 2014)
Maintenance of data-sets in the repository -
PROMISE Conference (2011 and 2012)
Provided admin support on handling the publications -
Colloquium XII For Aspiring Minority Doctoral Candidates
Served on student panel at this event answering questions about Student life and experience as a Doctoral Student.
Education
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West Virginia University
PhD Degree in Computer Science, 2014 -
West Virginia University
Masters Degree in Computer Science Earned, 2010 -
Coppin State University
Bachelors Degree in Computer Science Earned, 2008
Awards
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WVU Chancellor Scholar
Provided funding for PhD studies, (2011 - 2014) -
MDOT Fellow
From Maryland Department of Transportation, (June 2007 - December 2007) -
Howard Hughes Fellow
Summer internship at Johns Hopkins University - Analysing Neuro-data, (Summer 2005) -
Honors College of Coppin State University
Provided funding for Undergraduate studies (August 2004 - December 2007)