Na Meng

Associate Professor
Computer Science
Virginia Tech

nm8247@cs.vt.edu

2226 KWII

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

10/2022: Our paper on "Mastery: Shifted-Code-Aware Structured Merging" got accepted by SETTA 2022, and received the Best Paper Award!

08/2022: Our paper on "How Do Developers Follow Security-Relevant Best Practices When Using NPM Packages?" was accepted by SecDev.

07/2022: Our paper on "Detecting Build Conflicts in Software Merge for Java Programs via Static Analysis" was accepted by ASE.

06/2022: Our paper on "A Characterization Study of Merge Conflicts in Java Projects" was accepted by TOSEM.

05/2022: I received the Distinguished Reviewer Award from ICPC 2022.

03/2022: Our poster on "Comprehensive Comparisons of Embedding Approaches for Cryptographic API Completion" was accepted by ICSE.

03/2022: Our paper on "Example-Based Vulnerability Detection and Repair in Java Code" was accepted by ICPC 2022.

03/2022: Our paper on "Being the Developers’ Friend: Our Experience Developing a High Precision Tool for Secure Coding" was accepted by IEEE Security & Privacy.

02/2022: Our paper on "Automatic Detection of Java Cryptographic API Misuses: Are We There Yet?" was accepted by Transactions on Software Engineering.

01/2022: Our paper on "A Cost-Effective, Scalable, and Portable IoT Data Infrastructure for Indoor Environment Sensing" was accepted by Journal of Building Engineering.

12/2021: Our paper on "A Lightweight Approach of Human-Like Playtest for Android Apps" was accepted by SANER 2022.

10/2021: Our project on "Soft Auditing on Trust for Detecting Clandestine Executions with Maximum Deployability" got funded by ONR.

09/2021: Our paper on "Graph-Based Simulation for Cyber-Physical Attacks on Smart Buildings" was accepted by CRC 2022.

Current Students

Bowen Shen (PhD student, Fall 2018 - ) bowenshe@vt.edu
Ying Zhang (PhD student, Spring 2019 - ) yingzhang@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
Sheik Murad Hassan Anik (PhD student, Spring 2020 - ) murad@vt.edu
Tung Dao (PhD student, Fall 2020 - ) T.Dao@cvent.com
Waad Aldndni (PhD student, Spring 2022 - ) waada@vt.edu
Hemayet Ahmed Chowdhury (MS student, Summer 2021 - ) hemayetahmedc@vt.edu
Suhani Khurana (MS student, Fall 2021 - ) suhanik@vt.edu
Zeheng Ye (MS student, Fall 2022 - ) zehengye@vt.edu

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][Spring22]

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

ONR N00014-22-1-2057, NSF-2006278, NSF-1929701, NSF-1845446, ONR N00014-17-1-2498, NSF-1565827

Graduated Students

Publications

Activities

Cultures