I lead the Practical and Actionable Software Engineering Research (PASER) group at Auburn University. Members of the PASER group work on software engineering research problems that have implications for practitioners.

Advisees

  1. Wan-Syun Anita Cheng, M.Sc. Student, Auburn University Web
  2. Yue Zhang, PhD Student, Auburn University Web
  3. Pemsith Mendis, PhD Student, Auburn University Web
  4. Shazibul Islam Shamim, PhD Student, Auburn University Web

Collaborators

  1. Syed Rafiul Hussain, Assistant Professor, Penn State University Web
  2. Rahul Pandita, Staff Researcher, GitHub, USA Web
  3. Chris Parnin, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, USA Web
  4. Stacy Prowell, Distinguished Researcher, Oak Ridge National Lab, TN Web
  5. Shubhra Kanti Karmaker Santu, Assistant Professor, Auburn University Web
  6. Hossain Shahriar, Associate Professor, University of West Florida Web
  7. Anthony Skjellum, Director, SimCenter; Professor, Computer Science, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, TN Web

Alumni

  1. Farzana Ahmed Bhuiyan (PhD), first appointment as research scientist at Meta (formerly known as Facebook)
  2. Dibyendu Brinto Bose (BSc), first appointment as PhD student at Virginia Tech
  3. Carlos Medrano (BSc), first appointment as site reliability engineer at Google
  4. Justin Murphy (MSc), first appointment as security analyst at CISA, DHS
  5. Raunak Shakya (MSc), first appointment as software engineer at Energy Domain
  6. Anceito Rivera (BSc), first appointment as software engineer at SAIC

Awarded External Grants

  1. Sole PI, SHF: Core: Small: Resilient Operations for Deployment Units Used in Container Orchestration, U.S. National Science Foundation (October 2023 - September 2026). Amount: 553,295 USD (Total), 553,295 USD (Share of Auburn University).
  2. Sole PI, REU Supplement for SaTC: TTP: Small: eSLIC: Enhanced Security Static Analysis for Configuration Scripts, U.S. National Science Foundation (May 2023 - August 2024). Amount: 12,000 USD (Total), 12,000 USD (Share of Auburn University).
  3. Co-PI, Hands-on Learning Modules for Software Supply Chain Security Education, U.S. National Security Agency (February 2023 - August 2025). PI: Hossain Shahriar, and Nazmus Sakib (Kennesaw State University), Amount: 75,000 USD (Total), 34,968 USD (Share of Auburn University).
  4. Lead PI, SaTC: EDU: Authentic Learning Modules for DevOps Security Education, National Science Foundation (June 2022 - Sep 2025). Co-PI: Hossain Shahriar (Kennessaw State University) and Fan Wu (Tuskegee University), Amount: 399,882 USD (Total), 154,006 USD (Share of Auburn University).
  5. Co-PI, Tennessee Tech Cybercorps Renewal: An Enahnced and Integrated Scholar Experience in Cybersecurity, National Science Foundation (July 2021 - July 2022), Amount: 1,917,081 USD. PI: Muhammad Ismail, Co-PI: Denis Ulybychev, Eric Brown, Maanak Gupta (Tennessee Tech University)
  6. Lead PI, Cybersecurity Mini Grant (Sub-award), National Science Foundation (Dec 2020 - Mar 2021), Amount: 5,000 USD. Co-PI: Dennis Ulybychev (Tennessee Tech University)
  7. Lead PI, SaTC: TTP: Small: eSLIC: Enhanced Security Static Analysis for Detecting Insecure Configuration Scripts, National Science Foundation (Oct 2020 - Sep 2023). Co-PI: Chris Parnin (NC State University), Amount: 444,720 USD (Total), 177,995 USD (Share of Auburn University).
  8. Co-PI, EDGE Curriculum Development Grant, Tennessee Tech University (Jan 2020 - May 2020), PI: Maanak Gupta (Tennessee Tech University), Amount: 5,000 USD (Total)

Noteworthy Achievements of PASERs

  1. Shazibul Islam Shamim, Bronze Award, Student Research Competition, ESEC/FSE 2021
  2. Akond Rahman, Distinguished Reviewer, Mining Software Repositories (MSR) 2021
  3. Akond Rahman, 2019-2020 Nominee for the Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, NC State University
  4. Akond Rahman, 2019-2020 COE Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award, NC State University
  5. Akond Rahman, 2019-2020 CSC Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, NC State University
  6. Farzana Ahamed Bhuiyan, Best Student Paper Award, 33rd Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS) 2020
  7. Akond Rahman, ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ICSE 2019 - Technical Track
  8. Akond Rahman, ACM SIGSOFT Best Paper Award, ICSE 2018 - Doctoral Symposium
  9. Akond Rahman, Microsoft Open Source Challenge 2016 - Grand Prize
  10. Shazibul Islam Shamim, Best Poster Award, Bioinformatics and Stringology Conference (BIOS) 2015

Open Source Software

  1. SLI-KUBE for Kubernetes Manifests
  2. LOPSUL for Python-based Open Source ML Projects
  3. TAMA for Ansible
  4. SLAC for Ansible
  5. SLIC for Puppet
  6. ACID for Puppet