Chennai Mathematical Institute

Seminars




12:00 noon, Seminar Hall
Code Variants and Their Retrieval

Venkatesh Vinayakarao
IIIT Sri City.
09-01-19


Abstract

Information plays a crucial role in our day to day life. In this talk, I introduce you to the principles and practices behind information retrieval using a case of code variants search. Code variants represent alternative implementations of a code snippet, where each alternative provides the same functionality, but has different properties that make some of them better suited to the overall project requirements. Developers routinely analyze existing code, find better reuse alternatives, and look to develop high-quality code. Our research shows that 25% to 40% of developer discussions in bug reports are about variants. However, searching for such code variants over the web has several challenges. Using knowledge driven approaches, we propose a system to automate the search for code variants.

Speaker Bio:

Venkatesh Vinayakarao is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIIT Sri City. He graduated with a PhD in 2018 from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi where he was the recipient of the Prime Minister's Research Fellowship. Prior to his PhD, he gained practical experience in building search engines by working with the Microsoft's Search Technologies Group (Bing Team). He has also served technical roles at Yahoo! and Nokia. He received an MS degree in Information Technology with specialization in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. His research interests are in building search engines, especially in handling source code content. His research work is published in reputed venues such as the Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) conference.