Submitted Abstract
“Sleepless in Seattle” is a popular romantic comedy featuring renowned actors Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The project codename Sleepless@Seattle is a comical allusion to this movie: the project applicant will not be sleepless because of any sentimental reason (as in the movie), but rather because he will be so passionate about the research objectives laid down in this international mobility project roadmap. From a more practical and scientific point of view, the project offers a fantastic work environment at Seattle within renowned institutions, and offers wonderful opportunities to collaborate with world-leading researchers. Sleepless@Seattle is a mobility project for 8 months research stay at the University of Washington (UW) -main host institution- and Microsoft Research (MSR) -secondary host institution-. Both institutions are located at/nearby Seattle. Seattle is a great place for a research stay in computer science since the area concentrates a lot of high-tech experts. It is historically the home of the US aircraft industry. It is the home of giant high-tech companies such as Microsoft or Amazon, and hosts offices of companies such as Apple or Google. Seattle offers a vibrant research ecosystem spearhead by several research institutions such as UW and MSR. UW is one of the nation’s premier research-intensive universities. For more than 40 years, UW has ranked annually among the top five institutions in federal research obligations. At the UW, the host researcher is Michael Ernst, Professor of Computer Science. His primary technical interests are in software engineering, programming languages, security, program analysis, bug prediction, and testing. Ernst’s research combines strong theoretical foundations with realistic experimentation, with an eye to changing the way that software developers work. Prof. Ernst received numerous awards. In 2013, Microsoft Academic Search ranked Ernst #2 in the world, in software engineering research contributions over the past 10 years. At MSR, the host researcher is Dr. Thomas Zimmermann. He is a renowned researcher focusing on improving programmer productivity. He develops techniques and tools that make both managers and developers aware of history. His motto is “Learning from past successes and failures will help us to create better software”.Sleepless@Seattle aims at establishing both short and long-term collaborations with UW and MSR, and at providing all the ingredients to the applicant for shifting up to the next level of his research career. In a more fine-grained level, the objectives of Sleepless@Seattle are: * Get inspiration and fresh ideas, acquire new skills and competencies, impulse new research ideas.* Reinforce the existing research axis of the applicant and collaborate with the host researchers on shared research interests (e.g., program repair, software security, or empirical software engineering). * Learn new management skills and effective methods to lead a research group and supervise PhDs.* Establish long-term academic collaboration and try to start new industrial partnerships.Sleepless@Seattle will target specific important research topics: (1) Software Security, e.g., by developing new static analysis techniques to assess security properties of Android apps; (2) Debugging, and in particular Automated Program Repair (APR), for instance by proposing a radically new repair pipeline driven by bug reports rather than test cases; (3) Empirical Software Engineering, by investigating new methods to mine software repositories; (4) Natural Language Processing, e.g., to extract relevant information from human-written texts (such as bug reports) in software repositories.