Hi there! I am Akond, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) at Auburn University. I am also a faculty member at the Auburn Cyber Research Center.

Research Interests

My research interests are in software engineering focused on DevOps and Secure Software Development. I rely on a wide range of techniques, such as model checking, program analysis, and statistical methods to pursue my research goals. My research has been graciously supported by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Academic Achievements

I was awarded the NC State CSC Outstanding Dissertation Award and the NC State College of Engineering Distinguished Dissertation Award from NC State University for my PhD dissertation titled Anti-patterns in Infrastructure as Code. Previously, I won the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2019. I am also winner of the ACM SIGSOFT Doctoral Symposium Award at ICSE 2018, and the Microsoft Open Source Challenge Grand Prize in 2016.

Background

I completed my PhD in Computer Science at North Carolina State University, where I was supervised by Dr. Laurie Williams. I was born in Bangladesh, a beautiful country in South Asia. I completed my B.Sc. at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, and M.Sc. at University of Connecticut.

News

• November 01, 2024: My PhD student, Shamim’s paper on Kubernetes security configurations got accepted at ICSE 2025! Congratulations Shamim!!
• August 31, 2024: Our collaborative paper on AI assistants got accepted at CCS 2024!
• August 22, 2024: Presented our Kubernetes-related research at the CAE-R community event.
• May 25, 2024: Congratulations to my second PhD student, Shamim on defending his PhD! He will start as a tenure-track assistant professor at Kennessaw State University.
• April 15, 2024: Congratulations to Sibat on his FSE paper acceptance! Well done!
• March 27, 2024: Congratulations to my PhD student Yue on winning the 100+ Women Strong Outstanding Departmental Annual Graduate Award! Well done, Yue !!
• Jan 20, 2024: Our paper on container orchestration smells got accepted at MSR 2024. Congrats to Yue, Rachel, and Wilson!
• Nov 22, 2023: Our paper on Ansible security got accepted at the Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE)!
• Nov 01, 2023: Our paper on compiler defects got accepted at ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)!
• August 15, 2023: NSF has funded our project on container orchestration. This is my first CORE grant as the sole PI. Excited!
• May 25, 2023: I presented our work on Kubernetes security analysis to practitioners at WindRiver, on May 24, 2023.
• April 19, 2023: I will be leading a discussion panel at the Empirical Evaluation of Secure Development Processes Dagstuhl Seminar. Second time this year!
• April 06, 2023: Our paper got accepted at the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) Journal!
• March 30, 2023: Congrats to Brinto and Ruanak on their paper acceptance at the Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE)!
• Feb 10, 2023: Our grant on software supply chain security was funded. Thanks NSA!
• Nov 26, 2022: Congrats to Shamim and Brinto on their paper acceptance at the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM).
• Sep 20, 2022: Congrats to Farzana on her first transactions journal (ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security)!
• Aug 01, 2022: Started as a tenure-track assistant professor at Auburn University.
• June 15, 2022: Our SATC grant was funded. Thanks NSF!
• May 05, 2022: Congratulations to Farzana for successfully defending their Ph.D. thesis.

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