Mining Software Repository Made Easy – Boa Language and its Data Store

Software repositories, e.g. SourceForge, GitHub, etc. contain an enormous corpus of software and information about software. Scientists and engineers alike are interested in analyzing this wealth of information both for curiosity as well as for testing important research hypotheses. However, the current barrier to entry is prohibitive and the cost of such scientific experiments great. Furthermore, these experiments are often irreproducible.

This talk will describe our work on the Boa language and its data-intensive infrastructure. In a nutshell, Boa aims to be for open source-related research as Mathematica is to numerical computing, R is for statistical computing, and Verilog and VHDL is for hardware description. Our evaluation shows that Boa significantly decreases the burden of the scientists and engineers analyzing human and technical aspects of open source software development allowing them to focus on the essential tasks of scientific research.

This is a collaborative work with Robert Dyer, Hoan Nguyen and Tien Nguyen all at Iowa State University.

Speaker Details

Hridesh Rajan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Information Assurance at Iowa State University, where he has been since 2005. His research aims to improve software quality and programmer productivity by development and refinement of means of abstraction in computer programming languages.

Hridesh earned his MS and PhD, both in Computer Science, from the University of Virginia in 2004 and 2005 respectively. He earned his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (formerly IT-BHU) in 2000. At the Iowa State University, he has been recognized by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) with a CAREER award in 2009 and by the college of LAS with an Early Achievement in Research Award in 2010, and a Big-12 Fellowship in 2012. Before his graduate studies at the University of Virginia, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies in Bangalore India from 2000 – 2001.

Series:
Microsoft Research Talks
Date:
Speakers:
Hridesh Rajan
Affiliation:
Iowa State University

Series: Microsoft Research Talks