David Lo’s Post

It has been a full and memorable week in Seoul celebrating the 40th anniversary of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'25) and attending both ASE and the co-located AIWare'25. This year marks my 19th consecutive ASE since ASE'07—and it is remarkable to see how the community has grown, with 1,000+ attendees this year. It has been a packed and rewarding week: * I was very happy to deliver an invited talk, “Building a Research Team, Brick by Brick,” at the New Faculty Symposium (slides: https://lnkd.in/gsVDXM3y). It was great to share experiences and to learn from many. Thank you very much Michael Pradel and Sukyoung Ryu for the organization! * I’m honored to have served as Vice Chair of the ASE Steering Committee since 2021, and grateful to be re-elected to continue for another 3 years, alongside Bernd Fischer as Chair. * It was a pleasure to serve on the ASE'25 Organizing Committee as co-chair of the Most Influential Paper (MIP) track with Lars Grunske, and to chair one of the MIP sessions featuring a great talk by Denys Poshyvanyk and Michele Tufano. * Our group had a full schedule this year, with 12 papers across research and journal-first tracks, each presented as oral presentations and posters—plus participation as session chairs, panelists, and speakers at the pre-ASE workshop at Korea University. These include presentations of two award-winning papers: - "My productivity is boosted, but ... Demystifying Users’ Perception on AI Coding Assistants — ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper (https://lnkd.in/gVTUgGyP) - "Stealthy Backdoor Attack for Code Models" — IEEE TSE Best Paper (https://lnkd.in/gH6zqqFv) Congratulations to Yunbo Lyu, Zhou Yang, Jieke Shi, Jianming Chang, Yue Liu, Bowen Xu, Jie Zhang, Hong Jin Kang, and Junda He! A special congratulations as well to Jieke Shi for delivering his first keynote at the 8th International Workshop on Advances in Mobile App Analysis (A-Mobile 2025). Altogether, close to 20 colleagues from various SE groups, part of the RISE center of Singapore Management University, attended ASE and/or AIWare this year—and brought home 3 new awards, including 2 by Xie Xiaofei. Truly proud of everyone. * One of my personal highlights was reconnecting with many mentees—including 3 who have just begun their faculty careers—along with mentees of mentees, and even mentees of mentees of mentees (made me feel happily “old” :-)). It was also wonderful to catch up with long-time friends such as Shahar Maoz, my co-author on our ASE'07 paper, and Bernd Fischer, one of the ASE'07 PC co-chairs, as well as many new friends. * I also managed to take a short break after the conference to enjoy beautiful Seoul, including the Changdeokgung Palace. A heartfelt thank you to Shin Yoo, Marcel Böhme, Lingming Zhang and the entire organizing team for delivering an excellent and memorable ASE 2025. Happy to be back in Singapore—refreshed, grateful, and ready to dive back into work!