Miryung Kim

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. She served as FSE Program Co-Chair, delivered keynotes at ASE and ISSTA, and given distinguished lectures at CMU and UIUC. She has also worked with 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.

News (more here)

Prof. Kim received the IEEE TCSE New Directions Award (News)
Congratulations on WhyFlow (sensemaking taint analysis), accepted to ICSE 2026.
Congratulations on Change-And-Cover (regression test augmentation with LLM), accepted to ICSE 2026.
Prof. Kim gave a keynote on constraining fuzzing at the Fuzzing workshop at ISSTA
Thanks to Samsung for sponsoring projects on AI-based coding assistants.
Congratulations on DuoReduce (compiler debugging for MLIR), accepted to FSE 2025.
Congratulations on SynthFuzz (testing AI accelerator compilers), accepted to ICSE 2025.
Prof. Kim gave a keynote at Dagstuhl on Code Search in April 2024.
Prof. Kim gave a Distinguished Lecture at UC Riverside in April 2024.
Prof. Kim’s former PhD student Tianyi Zhang received NSF CAREER.
Our paper on API Stability and Adoption received the Most Influential Paper Award from ICSME 2023 .
Prof. Kim gave a Distinguished Lecture at Max Planck Institute in 2023.
Prof. Kim gave a Distinguished Lecture at CMU in 2023.
Prof. Kim gave a Keynote at the Symposium on SE for Machine Learning Applications in 2023.
Prof. Kim gave a talk on Future of Software Engineering for Big Data and HW Heterogeneity at ICSE 2023.
Prof. Kim gave a keynote at Dagstuhl Seminar on Software Bug Detection: Challenges and Synergies .
Prof. Kim gave an invited talk at MPI-SWS Research Symposium in 2023.
Prof. Kim served as a Program Chair of FSE 2022 (News).
Prof. Kim gave a Keynote at ISSTA 2022 (News).
Our research on testing quantum software is selected for ACM SIGSOFT Research Highlights ( News ).
Prof. Kim received the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award (News).
Prof. Kim became an ACM Distinguished Member (News).
Prof. Kim gave Distinguished Lectures at UIUC and University of Minnesota in 2021.
Our paper on refactoring received the Most Influential Paper Award from ICSME 2020 .
Prof. Kim served as Program Co-Chair of ESEC/FSE 2022.
Prof. Kim gave a Keynote at ASE 2019 .
Prof. Kim was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Prof. Kim’s former PhD students, Baishakhi Ray and Na Meng, received NSF CAREER.
Our team received a $4.9 M grant from the Office of Naval Research on Synergistic Software Customization.