Title: Towards Engineering Green, Fast, and Reliable Mobile Applications

Speaker: Yepang Liu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

Time: 10:00 am, Sept 14th, 2016

Venue: Seminar Room (334), Level 3, Building 5, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract: Mobile application's energy efficiency, runtime performance, and platform compatibility are three critical factors that affect user experience. However, many mobile applications on the market suffer from bugs that can cause significant energy waste, severe performance degradation, and various compatibility problems. Locating such bugs is labor-intensive. Automated bug finding techniques are thus desirable. Unfortunately, due to limited understanding of these non-functional bugs, there exist no mature techniques to assist developers. To bridge the gap, we investigated popular open-source Android applications to study representative energy, performance, and compatibility bugs. Along the way, we have gained deep insights into the bugs' characteristics and root causes, which enabled us to design effective program analysis techniques for automatic bug detection. In this talk, I will introduce our techniques and how we leveraged them to uncover many previously-unknown bugs in real-world Android applications.

Bio: Yepang Liu is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He received his Bachelor degree in computer science from Nanjing University in 2010 and his Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering from HKUST in 2015. His main research area is software engineering with a focus on software testing and analysis. He is also broadly interested in other areas such as adaptive systems and mobile computing. Dr. Liu’s work has been published in various top software engineering journals and conferences and has been recognized by several awards including two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper awards (received at ICSE 2014 and ASE 2016), one featured TSE article in 2014, and one Platinum-level Research Artifacts honor at FSE 2016. He has also been actively serving as reviewers and organizers of major international conferences and journals and received two ACM SIGSOFT Service awards at FSE 2014. Homepage: http://www.cse.ust.hk/~andrewust/