Na Meng

Associate Professor
Computer Science
Virginia Tech

nm8247@vt.edu

Gilbert Place, Room 4311A

Na Meng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech since 2021. 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. She started working in Virginia Tech as an Assistant Professor in 2015. 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

04/2025: Our paper on "An Exploratory Study on Build Issue Resolution Among Computer Science Students" received the Distinguished Paper Award of CSEE&T 2025!

04/2025: Our proposal on "Developing the NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant Proposal and Spencer Foundation Large Research Grant Proposal for Creativerse" got funded by the Center for Educational Networks and Impacts (CENI) at Virginia Tech!

04/2025: Our Paper on "Programming of Automation Configuration in Smart Home Systems: Challenges and Opportunities" got accepted by TOSEM!

03/2025: Our paper on "Simulating Personalized Smart-Home Activity Datasets with Generative AI: A Case Study" has been accepted at ICPS 2025!

03/2025: Congratulations to Bowen Shen for successfully defending his PhD dissertation!

03/2025: Our project on "PriHEOS: A Privacy-Preserving Home Energy Optimization System" got funded by CCI!

02/2025: Our paper on "A Comprehensive Indoor Environment Dataset from Single-family Houses in the US" got accepted by the Data journal!

01/2025: We are organizing The First International Workshop on Large Language Model-Oriented Empirical Research. Please submit your awesome work on or before the deadline 02/25/2025!

01/2025: Our paper on "Detecting Metadata-Related Bugs in Enterprise Applications" got accepted by FSE 2025

12/2024: Our paper on "An Exploratory Study on Build Issue Resolution Among Computer Science Students" got accepted by CSEE&T 2025!

12/2024: Congratulations to Rishith Gandham for successfully defending his MS thesis!

Current Students

Bowen Shen (PhD student, Fall 2018 - ) bowenshe@vt.edu
Md Mahir Asef Kabir (PhD student, Fall 2019 - ) mahir.kabir.prof@gmail.com
Sheikh Shadab Towqir (PhD student, Spring 2020 - ) shadabtowqir@vt.edu
Yeana Bond (PhD student, Fall 2023 - ) yeana@vt.edu

Teaching

CS6704: Software Engineering Research [Spring17][Spring19][Spring21][Fall24]
CS5704: Software Engineering [Spring16][Spring18][Spring20][Spring24]
CS3304: Comparative Languages [Fall16][Fall17][Fall18][Fall20]
CS3704: Intermediate Software Design and Engineering [Fall15][Fall19][Spring22][Fall23][Fall24]

Selected Research Topics

Security coding practices[SecDev22][ICPC22][IEEE S&P'22][TSE22][SecDev20][TIFS19][ICSE19][ICSE18]
Artificial intelligence and software engineering[IJCNN21][TDSC19][ICSME18a][ICSME17a]
Automated program generation[ESEC/FSE21][ITiCSE21][IJCAI19]
Automated program transformations [ASE20][ICPC19][MOBILESoft18][ICSE15][ICSE13][PLDI11]
Software bugs and fixes[ASE22][TOSEM'22][SANER22][ICSE21][JSS19][ICSME18b][EMSE17][ICSME17b][ICPC17]
Program comprehension[ICSE20][LCTES19][JSS18]
Cyber-Physical Systems[JOBE'22][CRC22]

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 and GitHub for details.

Funding

Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI)-P4TLGZ22, CCI-PMH7EUMV, CCI-PE6GLBAE, ONR N00014-22-1-2057, NSF-2006278

Graduated Students

Publications

Activities

Cultures