Na Meng

Assistant Professor
Computer Science
Virginia Tech

nm8247@cs.vt.edu

2226 KWII

Na Meng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech since 2015. Before 2015, she received her B.E. in Software Engineering from Northeastern University (NEU) in China in 2006, and received her M.S. in Computer Science from Peking University in China in 2009. She obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin in 2014, advised by Miryung Kim and Kathryn S. McKinley. Her research interests include Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Software Security, and Artificial Intelligence. Her research group NiSE (iNnovations in Software Engineering) conduct various empirical studies and propose novel automatic approaches. The research mission is to reveal unknown and interesting phenomena in current software practices, to invent new tools that facilitate better software development and maintenance in the future, and to help with secure coding practices by developers. In particular, the group developed machine learning-based approaches to analyze source code and to predict developers' maintenance needs in the future. They also developed software engineering-based or programming language-based approaches to improve AI techniques. Dr. Meng received the NSF CAREER Award in 2019. Her research has been supported by NSF and ONR.

News

04/2021: Our paper on "Hero: On the Chaos When PATH Meets Modules" received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.

04/2021: Our paper on "Classifying Code Commits with Convolutional Neural Networks" is accepted by IJCNN 2021.

03/2021: Our paper on "PDL: Scaffolding Problem Solving in Programming Courses" is accepted by ITiCSE 2021.

12/2020: Our paper on "Exploring the Triggering Modes of Spectrum-Based Fault Localization: An Industrial Case" is accepted by ICST 2021.

12/2020: Our paper on "Hero: On the Chaos When PATH Meets Modules" is accepted by ICSE 2021.

Current Students

Bowen Shen (PhD student, Fall 2018 - ) bowenshe@vt.edu
Ying Zhang (PhD student, Spring 2019 - ) yingzhang@vt.edu
Mahir Kabir (PhD student, Fall 2019 - ) mahir.kabir.prof@gmail.com
Sheikh Shadab Towqir (PhD student, Spring 2020 - ) shadabtowqir@vt.edu
Sheik Murad Hassan (PhD student, Spring 2020 - ) murad@vt.ed
Tung Dao (PhD student, Fall 2020 - ) T.Dao@cvent.com
Yan Zhao (MS student, Fall 2019 - ) yanzhao@vt.edu
Yaxuan Zhang (MS student, Spring 2020 - ) yaxuan93@vt.edu
Rahul Agarwal (MS student, Spring 2020 - ) rahula@vt.edu
Hanwen Liu (MS student, Summer 2020 - ) liuhwen@vt.edu

Graduated Students

A complete list of graduated students can be found here

Teaching

CS6704: Software Engineering Research [Spring17][Spring19][Spring21]
CS5704: Software Engineering [Spring16][Spring18][Spring20]
CS3304: Comparative Languages [Fall16][Fall17][Fall18][Fall20]
CS3704: Intermediate Software Design and Engineering [Fall15][Fall19]

Selected Research Topics

Security coding practices [SecDev20][TIFS19][ICSE19][ICSE18]
Artificial intelligence and software engineering[TDSC19] [IJCAI19][ICSME18a][ICSME17a]
Automated program transformations [ASE20][ICPC19][MOBILESoft18][ICSE15][ICSE13][PLDI11]
Software Bugs and Fixes (Data analytics on Programs and Program Changes)[JSS19][ICSME18b][EMSE17][ICSME17b][ICPC17]
Program comprehension[ICSE20][LCTES19][JSS18]

Publications

A complete list of publications can be found here

Patent

System to uncover root cause of non-deterministic (flaky) tests (Patent Number 9,311,220).
Jungwoo Ha, Jaeheon Yi, Peter Dinges, Jeremy Manson, Caitlin Harrison Sadowski, Na Meng

Software

The implementations from nearly all of my publications are publicly available. Other researchers have used several of these implementations in their publications. See projects for details.

Activities

Funding

NSF-2006278, NSF-1929701, NSF-1845446, ONR N00014-17-1-2498, NSF-1565827