ITEC Research Seminar: Effectively Leveraging the Knowledge of the Crowd

A vast amount of Software Engineering (SE) knowledge continues to accumulate at a rapid peace. For example, GitHub hosts 67M project repositories and millions of lines of source code which are contributed by developers. Stack Overflow has accumulated an enormous amount of programming knowledge through the answering of questions by the crowd. Developers of new systems can benefit from these SE knowledge base if they can leverage them effectively. In this talk, Dr. Shaowei Wan first presents the top challenges that developers face when leveraging such crowd knowledge, e.g. challenges associated with retrieving relevant knowledge, seeking new knowledge and ensuring the quality of the knowledge. Wang’s recent work for addressing/alleviating these challenges will also be introduced. For instance, to help developer retrieve source code (an important form of SE knowledge), Wang developed a code search engine called CodeHow, which improves the effectiveness of conventional code search engines by considering potential application programming interfaces (APIs) to which a user query refers. This work is part of Wang’s long-term research program, which focuses on helping developers leverage the knowledge of the crowd more effectively. Wang’s ultimate goal is to enable developers to effectively leverage high-quality, secure, accurate and comprehensive knowledge.
Dr. Shaowei Wang is a postdoctoral fellow in the Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (SAIL) at Queen’s University, Canada. He obtained his Ph.D. from Singapore Management University and his BSc from Zhejiang University (Top-10 Global Universities for Computer Science and Engineering by U.S. News). His research interests include knowledge retrieval in a Software Engineering (SE) context, knowledge sharing and management, software analytics, and mining software repositories. He has published 26 publications in premier software engineering conferences (ASE and ICSME) and journals (TSE, EMSE, and ASE). He has served as the program committee member of ICPC 2017-2019, SANER 2019, and MSR 2019. He also serves as a reviewer for TSE, EMSE, and TOSEM. He is one of four recipients of the 2018 distinguished reviewer award for the Springer EMSE (SE’s highest impact journal). Find more information at sites.google.com/site/wswshaoweiwang.