Sumon Biswas
Postdoctoral Researcher
Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Email: sumonb@cs.cmu.edu
About Me
I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher at School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, where I work in the Institute for Software Research (ISR). I’m working with Dr. Eunsuk Kang on ensuring fairness and safety of high-assurance AI based software systems. I received Ph.D. in Computer Science from Iowa State University (ISU) under the supervision of Dr. Hridesh Rajan. For my dissertation, I worked on verifying and reasoning algorithmic fairness in ML pipeline.
My research at the intersection of SE and AI focuses on identification, design, and verification of fairness and safety properties. At CMU, I’m working on the DARPA project Verified Security & Performance Enhancement of Large Legacy Software (V-SPELLS), to model and verify safety of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). Prior to joining CMU, I worked in the NSF TRIPODS Institute D4 (Dependable Data-Driven Discovery), where I led the research on fairness engineering. I also worked on the Boa compiler to enable large-scale static analysis and mining of ML software.
I am on the academic job market! Feel free to reach out. Find my CV and statements (research, teaching, diversity).
- Software Engineering (SE)
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Programming Languages (PL)
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Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2022
Iowa State University
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M.S. in Computer Science, 2021
Iowa State University
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B.S. in Information Technology, 2015
Jahangirnagar University
Research
I’m broadly interested in the intersection of SE and AI with particular focus in the SE for AI area. Unlike traditional software systems, AI based software is data-intensive, uncertain, and posing significant ethical and safety risks for society. My research in the area established fairness as a non-functional SE property for AI based software. By adopting both formal and empirical SE approaches, I aim to achieve safety and fairness through analysis of software abstractions and real-world implementations.
- Fairness verification and reasoning: fairness verification of DNN (ICSE'23), causal reasoning in ML (FSE'22), compositional fairness (ICSE'23)
- Design fair and safe AI: root cause analysis of bias (FSE'21), fair AutoML for trade-off (FSE'23), long-term analysis for safety (FSE-SE4SafeML'23)
- AI engineering and static analysis: AI software architecture (ICSE'22), ML technical debts (FSE'22), Repay debts using LLMs (ICSE'24*), large-scale ML code mining (MSR'19)
Currently, I’m working on ensuring fairness and safety of learning-based software systems (socio-technical and cyber-physical). In particular, I’m designing novel analysis framework and safe-by-construction methods that guarantee certain properties. In the near future, I’m aiming to build adaptive techniques towards sustainable AI/ML software.
Experience
Publications
Services
Journal Reviewer
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TOSEM: Serving in the Board of Distinguished Reviewers for ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM).
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TSE: Serving as the reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE).
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EMSE: Serving as a reviewer for Springer Journal - Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE).
Conference Program Committees (PC)
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ICSE'25: Serving as the Program Committee member of Technical Track of ICSE 2025.
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ICSE'24: Served as the Program Committee member of Technical Track of ICSE 2024.
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ASE'23: Serving as the Program Committee member of Technical Track of ASE 2023.
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ASE'23: Serving as the Program Committee member of Industry Showcase (Papers) Track of ASE 2023.
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ICSE'23: Served as the Program Committee member of Student Research Competition track of ICSE 2023.
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ASE'22: Served as the Program Committee member of Industry Showcase track of ASE 2022.
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ASE'22: Served as the Program Committee member of Late Breaking Results track of ASE 2022.
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ESEC/FSE'22: Served as the Program Committee member of Doctoral Symposium track of ESEC/FSE 2022.
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OOPSLA'21 AEC: Served in the program committee of Artifact Evaluation Track of ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA'21).
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MSR'21: Served as the shadow program committee member of the Technical Track of International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2021).
Organizing Committees
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Mentor @ ICSE SMeW : Served as a Mentor in ICSE 2023 SMeW - Student Mentoring Workshop.
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Onsite Judge @ ICSE'23 SRC: Served as the Onsite Judge of ICSE SRC held at Melbourne, Australia.
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Accessibility Chair @ SPLASH'20-21: Served the organizing committee of ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications (SPLASH 2020 and SPLASH 2021) with OOPSLA, ECOOP and REBASE in Chicago, IL.
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Web Chair @ Midwest Big Data Summer School: Served in the organizing committee of the Midwest Big Data Summer School 2021 in Ames, IA, United States.
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WiDS Ambassador: Served as the WiDS Ambassador (Women in Data Science) to organize and promote ISU event as part of the annual WiDS Worldwide Conference organized by Stanford University.
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Panelist @ ESEC/FSE'20: Served the panel discussion of the session on Fairness at ACM ESEC/FSE 2020 in Sacramento, CA.
Accomplishments
Research Projects
Design and Architecture of Data Science Pipelines
We study, design, and analyze the DS pipeline architecture consisting stages such as preprocessing, modeling, training, evaluation, etc.
Causal Fairness in Machine Learning Pipeline
We used causal reasoning to measure fairness of components and remove them from machine learning pipeline.
Fairness Engineering in ML Models
We have studied the software engineering concerns of fairness in real-world machine learning models.
ML Repo Dataset from GitHub
This dataset is created by mining 5M Python program snapshots. The code is transformed to AST for static analysis.
Large-Scale Mining of Data-Science Software from GitHub
Mining and analyzing data-science repositories can provide insights from historical data.
Academic Projects
Teaching
COMS 309 - Software Development Practices
This is one of the largest computer science classes taught at Iowa State (~250 class size). I taught it for three semesters. One of the great experience in the course is to supervise many software project teams.
- Topics: Develop complex software in a team: from idea to release 🔘 Software development criteria: client-server architecture, relational database, multi-user setting, concurrent features, e.g., online chat 🔘 Utilizing SE tools e.g., IDE, source-control, Git.
COMS 327: Advanced Programming Techniques
This is also a very large class which I TA’ed for three semesters. Being heavy on the programming practices, I taught problem-solving, live coding, debugging, and testing.
- Topics: Differences between managed (Java) and unmanaged languages (C/C++) 🔘 Design and build large programs from specification 🔘 Memory management in C and C++ 🔘 Templates and standard library 🔘 Concurrent and network programming.
Recent News
| August 2023: | Our position paper got accepted in the FSE'23 Workshop on Dependability and Trustworthiness of Safety-Critical Systems with Machine Learned Components |
| May 2023: | Presented two research papers in ICSE'23 at Melbourne |
| May 2023: | Served as onsite judge in ACM Student Research Competition at ICSE 2023 |
| May 2023: | Joined the ICSE'23 SMeW - Student Mentoring Workshop as a Mentor |
| May 2023: | Paper accepted in ESEC/FSE'23 research track. |
| Feb 2023: | ICSE paper artifact accepted and got three badges. |
| Dec 2022: | Two papers accepted at ICSE'22 research track. |
| Sep 2022: | Joined the Program Committee of ICSE 2024 technical track. |
| Aug 2022: | I’ve been invited to serve the Board of Distinguished Reviewers for the Journal TOSEM (ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology). |
| Jun 2022: | Paper accepted in ESEC/FSE'22 research track. |
| May 2022: | Presented ICSE'22 paper on Data Science Pipeline in-person at Pittsburgh, PA. |
| May 2022: | Joined ISR at Carnegie Mellon University as a Postdoctoral Researcher |
| May 2022: | Received Research Excellence Award from Iowa State University. |
| Apr 2022: | Organized the Women in Data Science (WiDS) event at ISU and served as an ambassador of WiDS Global, Stanford University. |
| Apr 2022: | Defended my Ph.D. thesis “Understanding and Reasoning Fairness in Machine Learning Pipelines”. |
| Apr 2022: | I’ve been awarded ACM SIGSOFT CAPS grant to attend ICSE'22 in-person at Pittsburgh. |
| Mar 2022: | Artifact accepted for my ICSE'22 paper on Data Science Pipelines. |
| Feb 2022: | Gave an invited talk at the CREATE SE4AI group organized by Concordia University, Polytechnique Montreal, Queen’s University, and University of Alberta. |
| Dec 2021: | Paper accepted at ICSE'22 research track. |
| Aug 2021: | Present paper on Fair Preprocessing in ESEC/FSE'21. |
| Jul 2021: | Awarded ACM SIGSOFT CAPS grant to attend ESEC/FSE'21. |
| Jun 2021: | Artifact accepted for ESEC/FSE'21 paper on Fair Preprocessing. |
| Jun 2021: | Joined the program committee of the artifact track of OOPSLA'21. |
| Jun 2021: | Received publication award from ISU computer science department for publishing in the top-tier venues. |
| Jul 2020: | Attending ICSE 2021 conference. |
| Apr 2021: | Paper accepted in ESEC/FSE'21 research track. |
| May 2021: | Passed the Ph.D. candidacy exam. |
| Jan 2021: | Selected for Shadow PC for the MSR'21 technical track. |
| Nov 2020: | Attending OOPSLA'21 conference. |
| Nov 2020: | Present paper on ML Fairness in ESEC/FSE'20. |
| Jul 2020: | Attending ICSE 2020 conference. |
| May 2020: | Organizing Mid-West Big Data Summer School. |
Recent Posts
Contact
- sumonb@cs.cmu.edu
- (515) 708-6166
- TCS Hall 461, 4665 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
- DM Me
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