Kim, Miryung

Biography:

Miryung Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her B.S. in Computer Science from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 2001 and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Washington in 2003 and 2008 respectively.

Her research focus is in software engineering, specifically in software evolution. Her forte is in gathering insights into software evolution through user studies and mining software repositories. Based on these insights, she builds new software engineering tools and infrastructures and evaluate them to show how those solutions can improve current software development practices. She enjoys applying machine learning techniques and human-centered approaches to software engineering problems.

Her dissertation work lays a foundation for a new generation of code understanding and analysis tools by replacing the textual diffs that currently characterize code changes with high-level logical descriptions. In particular, she invented a novel program differencing approach that automatically extracts high-level changes descriptions as first order logic rules. She is also known for her work on code clones. By studying how code clones evolve in code repositories, she found a surprising result that code cloning is not inherently bad and that immediate and aggressive refactoring may not be the best solution for managing code clones. She is one of the leading researchers in the emerging area of mining software repositories. She is a member of ACM and IEEE and has served as a program committee member and a reviewer for many peer-reviewed conferences, workshops, and journals in software engineering.