Miryung Kim

Miryung Kim

Professor
Vice Chair of Graduate Studies
UCLA Computer Science
Engineering VI, Room 474
Los Angeles, CA 90095
email
TEL: 310-825-2858

Administrative Support:
Mr. Chris Bower
TEL: 310-825-4033

Research

Miryung Kim is a Professor and Vice Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA’s Computer Science Department. Recognizing an industry-wide shift toward data-intensive software engineering, she led early research on the emerging role of data scientists. By formalizing the "data scientist" role, this research helped establish the career path for data scientists in software teams, contributing to the growth of data science and AI majors in universities. Her work focuses on developer tools for data-intensive computing like Apache Spark, addressing scale and complexity challenges that traditional debugging and testing cannot meet.

For her work on data-driven software analytics and establishing the significance of code clones in industrial software evolution, she received the IEEE TCSE New Directions Award. Her research challenged the long-held belief that copy-and-paste programming is detrimental. Instead, she demonstrated how recurring code patterns from large-scale repositories could be analyzed to automate bug fixes, refactoring, and API updates---insights that inform modern AI-driven developer tools. She received ICSME Most Influential Paper Award for Android API evolution and another ICSME MIP Award for reconstructing refactorings from version histories.

Biography

Professor Kim received the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award for mentoring with emphasis on research excellence, diversity, and inclusion. Eight of her former students and postdocs are faculty members at institutions such as Columbia, Purdue, and Virginia Tech and five of them received NSF CAREER awards. She served as FSE Program Co-Chair, delivered keynotes at PLDI, ASE, and ISSTA, and given distinguished lectures at CMU and UIUC. She has also worked at Microsoft Research and is currently an Amazon Scholar at AWS. She is an ACM Distinguished Member, received two ICSME Test of Time Awards, an NSF CAREER Award, a Humboldt Fellowship, and awards from Microsoft, IBM, Google, and the Okawa Foundation.

History

Professor Kim completed her MS and PhD at the University of Washington under David Notkin and held a faculty position at UT Austin prior to UCLA. She graduated as No. 1 among all students in KAIST and received the Korean Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology Award, the highest honor given to an undergraduate student in Korea. She served 8 years as a live-in faculty member in UCLA residence halls to mentor undergraduate students and received the Doc Stevenson Faculty-in-Residence Award. She created Mommy Computer Science Camp, featured in PC Magazine.

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