Welcome to the IDEAS laboratory

The IDEAS lab (Intelligent Dependability Engineering for Adaptive Software laboratory) consists of a group of computer scientists based in Birmingham, UK. The group's main research topic has been on the intersection between Artificial (Computational) Intelligence (e.g., Natural Computation and Machine Learning) and Software Engineering, particularly related to fields such as Self-Adaptive Systems, Search-Based Software Engineering, Data-Driven Software Engineering and Intelligent Performance Engineering.

The group is currently recruiting highly-motivated and excellent Ph.D. students to work in one (or more) of the research fields above. Funding opportunities are available; please get in touch if you are interested. More details can be found at here.

  Recent News

2024

• 28/11/2024: Our paper entitled "Dividable Configuration Performance Learning" has been accepted in an upcoming issue at the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. This work extends our FSE’23 paper on a framework that divides the samples for configuration learning; compatible with arbitrary local models and with tailored hypervolume-based depth selection. Congratulations Jingzhi! The preprint is here.
• 01/10/2024: Our paper entitled "Deep Configuration Performance Learning: A Systematic Survey and Taxonomy" has been accepted in an upcoming issue at the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. Congratulations Jingzhi! The preprint is here.
• 25/08/2024: Our paper entitled "Multimodal Emotion Recognition by Fusing Video Semantics in Video Learning Scenarios" has been accepted by the 31st ICONIP. Congratulations Yuan, Xiaomei, Hanxu, and Yanlin!
• 24/07/2024: Our paper entitled "Contexts Matter: An Empirical Study on Contextual Influence in Fairness Testing for Deep Learning Systems" has been accepted by the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2024, 34 out of 149 acceptance rate). This work provides new insights into fairness testing for AI systems. Congratulations Chengwen! The preprint is here.
• 01/05/2024: Our paper entitled "MMO: Meta Multi-Objectivization for Software Configuration Tuning" has been accepted in an upcoming issue at the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. This work provides a theory on why and how multi-objectivization works for configuration tuning, along with an improved normalization that removes the need for setting weight. Congratulations Pengzhou! The preprint is here.
• 02/04/2024: I am delighted to serve as an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS), the best journal for software/system adaptation and quality assurance research. Please consider submitting your best work!
• 21/03/2024: Glad to announce that Jingzhi from the group has passed his PhD viva with minor correction. Congratulations Dr. Gong!
• 22/01/2024: Two papers from the IDEAS group are accepted to FSE'24 with no major revision requested; one on "Adapting Multi-objectivized Software Configuration Tuning" and the other on "Predicting Configuration Performance in Multiple Environments with Sequential Meta-Learning". Well done Jingzhi! Please stay tuned for the preprints.
• 14/01/2024: Dr. Chen has been invited to serve as a PC member for ISSTA'24 and AutoML'24. Please consider submit your papers!

2023

• 09/11/2023: Dr. Chen has been invited to serve as a Research Track PC member for the 47th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2025. Very glad to be able to help one of the flagship conferences for Software Engineering again after a few years. Please consider submitting your papers!
• 26/08/2023: Dr. Chen has been invited to serve as a PC member for the Web Conference (WWW), 2024. Very glad to be part of the system community beyond Software Engineering. Please consider submitting your papers!
• 06/08/2023: Very glad that Dr. Chen has been invited to attend the Dagstuhl Seminar 23302 on Software Architecture and Machine Learning (link); extremely happy to meet old and new colleagues for some insightful discussions!
• 06/05/2023: Our paper entitled "Predicting Software Performance with Divide-and-Learn" has been accepted at the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) with two strong accepts and no revision requested; acceptance rate 12.7% (60 out of 473). Congratulations Jingzhi! The preprint is here.
• 24/03/2023: We will be delivering a tutorial on how to evaluate multi-objective SBSE solutions at ICSE 2023. See you all in Melbourne!
• 07/01/2023: Dr. Chen has been once again invited to serve as a PC member for the IEEE CEC and IEEE IJCNN, 2023. Please consider submit your papers!
• 04/01/2023: Dr. Chen has been once again invited to serve as a PC member for the 2023 Mining Software Repositories (MSR) Conference. Please consider submit your papers!
• 02/01/2023: Dr. Chen has been once again invited to serve as a PC member for the 18th Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS), 2023. Please consider submit your papers!

2022

• 25/10/2022: Our paper entitled "Do Performance Aspirations Matter for Guiding Software Configuration Tuning? An Empirical Investigation under Dual Performance Objectives" has been accepted in an upcoming issue at the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. Congratulations! The preprint is here.
• 22/10/2022: Our paper entitled "DebtCom: Technical Debt-Aware Service Recomposition in SaaS Cloud" has been accepted in an upcoming issue at the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. Congratulations Satish! The preprint is here.
• 21/09/2022: Our paper "Multifaceted Hierarchical Report Identification for Non-Functional Bugs in Deep Learning Frameworks" has been accepted by the 29th IEEE Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference. Congratulations Guoming! Preprint is here.
• 03/08/2022: Dr. Chen has been invited to serve as a PC member for the 2023 ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE). Please consider submit your papers.
• 24/03/2022: Our paper "On Reporting Performance and Accuracy Bugs for Deep Learning Frameworks: An Exploratory Study from GitHub" has been accepted by the 25th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering. Congratulations Guoming! Preprint is here.
• 24/03/2022: Our paper "Does Configuration Encoding Matter in Learning Software Performance? An Empirical Study on Encoding Schemes" has been accepted by the IEEE/ACM 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference. Congratulations Jingzhi! Preprint is here.
• 28/02/2022: Our paper "Planning Landscape Analysis for Self-Adaptive Systems" has been accepted by the 17th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS), 2022. Preprint is here.
• 15/02/2022: Our paper "Lifelong Dynamic Optimization for Self-Adaptive Systems: Fact or Fiction?" has been accepted by the 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2022). Preprint is here.
• 05/02/2022: Dr. Chen has been invited to serve as a PC member for IEEE IJCNN, FUZZ-IEEE, and IEEE CEC 2022. Excited to review excellent work for the Computational Intelligence community!
• 28/01/2022: Our paper entitled "The Weights can be Harmful: Pareto Search versus Weighted Search in Multi-Objective Search-Based Software Engineering" has been accepted in an upcoming issue at the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. Congratulations! The preprint is here.

2021

• 27/12/2021: The group currently has positions open for new Ph.D. applications; for Chinese nationals, there are up to 50 scholarships available in a competitive basis, see details here.
• 18/12/2021: A paper entitled "Lifelong Dynamic Optimization for Self-Adaptive Systems: Fact or Fiction?" has been accepted at the 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER); acceptance rate 24.1% (48 out of 199). Congratulations! The preprint is here.
• 11/08/2021: Dr. Chen has been invited to serve as a PC member for the 2022 Mining Software Repositories (MSR) Conference. Please consider submit your papers.
• 11/07/2021: Dr. Chen has been invited to serve as a PC member for the 17th Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS), 2022. Please consider submit your papers.
• 21/05/2021: Our paper entitled "Multi-Objectivizing Software Configuration Tuning" has been accepted at the 29th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE); acceptance rate 24.5% (97 out of 396). Congratulations! The preprint is here.

• 07/04/2021: Dr. Chen has been invited to serve as a PC member for the 18th IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), 2021. Please consider submit your papers.

2020

• 28/11/2020: Our paper entitled "How to Evaluate Solutions in Pareto-based Search-Based Software Engineering? A Critical Review and Methodological Guidance" has been accepted in an upcoming issue at the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. This is a two-years effort that summarizes five common issues on the use of quality indicator/evaluation for Pareto-based SBSE from 95 primary studies, based on which the first theoretical and methodological guidance for correctly evaluating the solution set has been proposed. We hope that this can be of helpful to the SBSE community! The open-accessed paper is available at here.

• 15/08/2020: Dr. Chen has been invited as a PC member for the 16th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS), 2021. Please consider submit your papers.

• 11/08/2020: Our paper entitled "BiLO-CPDP: Bi-Level Programming for Automated Model Discovery in Cross-Project Defect Prediction" has been accepted at the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE). Congratulations! Stay tuned for the preprint!

• 11/07/2020: Our SEAMS paper (here) won the best (student) paper award! Congratulations to all the collaborators!

• 21/04/2020: Our paper entitled "DeepSQLi: Deep Semantic Learning for Testing SQL Injection" has been accepted at the 29th ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), a top venue for research on software testing. Congratulations! Please read the paper here.

• 24/03/2020: Our paper entitled "Synergizing Domain Expertise with Self-Awareness in Software Systems: A Patternized Architecture Guideline" has been accepted in an upcoming issue at the Proceedings of the IEEE. This is among the first work that proposes an architectural framework to guide the synergy between Software Engineering expertise and AI algorithms, creating SE specialised AI for self-aware and self-adaptive software. The preprint is available at here.

• 08/03/2020: Our paper entitled "DATESSO: Self-Adapting Service Composition with Debt-Aware Two Levels Constraint Reasoning" has been accepted by the 15th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS), a top venue for research on self-adaptive software systems, co-located with ICSE 2020. Congratulations! Please read the paper here.

  Featured Publications

• IEEE TSE'24b J. Gong, T. Chen and R. Bahsoon. Dividable Configuration Performance Learning. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2024, to appear.
• IEEE TSE'24a P. Chen, T. Chen and M. Li. MMO: Meta multi-objectivization for software configuration tuning. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 50, no. 6, 2024.
• ACM TOSEM'23b T. Chen and M. Li. Do Performance Aspirations Matter for Guiding Software Configuration Tuning? An Empirical Investigation under Dual Performance Objectives. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, vol. 32, no. 3, 2023.
• ACM TOSEM'23a T. Chen and M. Li. The Weights can be Harmful: Pareto Search versus Weighted Search in Multi-Objective Search-Based Software Engineering. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, vol. 32, no. 1, 2023.
• IEEE TSE'22 M. Li, T. Chen, and X. Yao. How to Evaluate Solutions in Pareto-based Search-Based Software Engineering? A Critical Review and Methodological Guidance. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 48, no. 5, 2022.
• Proc. IEEE'20 T. Chen, R. Bahsoon and X. Yao. Synergizing Domain Expertise with Self-Awareness in Software Systems: A Patternized Architecture Guideline. Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 108, no. 7, 2020.
• Elsevier IST'19 T. Chen, M. Li and X. Yao. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Seeding Search-based Multi-Objective Optimization with Prior Knowledge for Software Service Composition. Elsevier Information and Software Technology, vol. 114, 2019.
• ACM TOSEM'18 T. Chen, K. Li, R. Bahsoon and X. Yao. FEMOSAA: Feature Guided and Knee Driven Multi-Objective Optimization for Self-Adaptive Software. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, vol. 27, no. 2, 2018. (The most frequently downloaded article for TOSEM according to the usage statistics in Aug 2018)
• ACM CSUR'18 T. Chen, R. Bahsoon and X. Yao. A Survey and Taxonomy of Self-Aware and Self-Adaptive Cloud Autoscaling Systems. ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 51, no. 3, 2018.
• IEEE TSE'17 T. Chen and R. Bahsoon. Self-Adaptive and Online QoS Modeling for Cloud-Based Software Services. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 43, no. 5, 2017. (The 5th most frequently downloaded article for TSE according to the usage statistics in May 2017; 2nd in June; 3rd in July; top 50 thereafter)
• IEEE TSC'17 T. Chen and R. Bahsoon. Self-Adaptive Trade-off Decision Making for Autoscaling Cloud-Based Services. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, vol. 10, no. 4, 2017. (Top 50 most frequently downloaded article for TSC according to the usage statistics in Aug 2017)

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