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About Us

The Advanced Software Technologies Lab is led by Professor Zhendong Su.  We are part of the Institute for Programming Languages and Systems in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich.  We work in the areas of programming languages and compilers, software engineering, computer security, deep learning and education technologies.  Specific research projects that we are actively involved in can be found on our Research page.  

Recent Publications

Validating SMT Solvers for Correctness and Performance via Grammar-based Enumeration. Dominik Winterer, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of SPLASH/OOPSLA, Pasadena, CA, USA, October 20-25, 2024. (conditionally accepted)

SMT2Test: From SMT Formulas to Effective Test Cases. Chengyu Zhang, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of SPLASH/OOPSLA, Pasadena, CA, USA, October 20-25, 2024. (conditionally accepted)

When Your Infrastructure is a Buggy Program: Understanding Faults in Infrastructure as Code Ecosystems. Georgios-Petros Drosos, Thodoris Sotiropoulos, Georgios Alexopoulos, Dimitris Mitropoulos, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of SPLASH/OOPSLA, Pasadena, CA, USA, October 20-25, 2024. (conditionally accepted)

Understanding and Finding Java Decompiler Bugs. Yifei Lu, Weidong Hou, Minxue Pan, Xuandong Li, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of SPLASH/OOPSLA, Pasadena, CA, USA, October 20-25, 2024. [external page PDF]

The Hidden Program State Hurts Everyone. Sverrir Thorgeirsson, Oliver Graf, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of SPLASH/Onward! Essays, Pasadena, CA, USA, October 20-25, 2024.

HyperTheft: Thieving Model Weights from TEE-Shielded Neural Networks via Ciphertext Side Channels. Yuanyuan Yuan, Zhibo Liu, Sen Deng, Yanzuo Chen, Shuai Wang, Yinqian Zhang, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of CCS 2024, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, October 14-18, 2024.

See the Forest, not Trees: Unveiling and Escaping the Pitfalls of Error-Triggering Inputs in Neural Network Testing. Yuanyuan Yuan, Shuai Wang, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of ISSTA 2024, Vienna, Austria, September 16-20, 2024.

An Electroencephalography Study on Cognitive Load in Visual and Textual Programming. Sverrir Thorgeirsson, Chengyu Zhang, Theo Weidmann, Karl-Heinz Weidmann, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of ICER, Melbourne, Australia, August 13-15, 2024.

Validating the eBPF Verifier via State Embedding. Hao Sun, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of OSDI, Santa Clara, CA, USA, July 10-12, 2024.

Detecting Logic Bugs in Database Engines via Equivalent Expression Transformation. Zu-Ming Jiang, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of OSDI, Santa Clara, CA, USA, July 10-12, 2024.

Assessing Live Programming for Program Comprehension in Undergraduate Education. Oliver Graf, Sverrir Thorgeirsson and Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of ITiCSE, Milan, Italy, July 8-10, 2024.

Boosting Compiler Testing by Injecting Real-world Code. Shaohua Li, Theodoros Theodoridis, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of PLDI 2024, Copenhagen, Denmark, June 24-28, 2024. . [external page PDF] [external page Code]
🏆 Distinguished Artifact Award

Refined Input, Degraded Output: The Counterintuitive World of Compiler Behavior. Theodoros Theodoridis, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of PLDI 2024, Copenhagen, Denmark, June 24-28, 2024. [external page PDF] [external page Code]

UBfuzz: Finding Bugs in Sanitizer Implementations. Shaohua Li, Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of ASPLOS, San Diego, CA, USA, April 27-May 1, 2024. [external page PDF] [external page Code
🏆 Distinguished Artifact Award

Comparing Cognitive Load Among Undergraduate Students Programming in Python and the Visual Language Algot. Sverrir Thorgeirsson, Theo Weidmann, Karl-Heinz Weidmann, and Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of SIGCSE, Portland, OR, USA, March 20-23, 2024. [external page PDF]

Recursion in Secondary Computer Science Education: A Comparative Study of Visual Programming Approaches. Sverrir Thorgeirsson, Lennart Lais, Theo Weidmann, and Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of SIGCSE, Portland, OR, USA, March 20-23, 2024. [external page PDF]

API-driven Program Synthesis for Testing Static Typing Implementations. Thodoris Sotiropoulos, Stefanos Chaliasos, and Zhendong Su. In external page Proceedings of POPL, London, UK, January 17-19, 2024. [external page PDF] [external page Code]

Projects and Code

external page DBMS Testing:
400+ bugs in widely-used DBMS
(SQLite, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, and TiDB)

external page Project Yin-Yang for SMT Solver Testing:
[Z3/CVC4 bugs: 1,560 (total) / 1,061 (fixed)]

EMI & SPE Compiler Testing:
[GCC/LLVM bugs: 1,634 (total) / 1,076 (fixed)]

Algot: a visual, graph-​based programming language developed in our group.

You can find a more comprehensive list of our projects and code on our Research Pages

News


We'd like to congratulate Dominik Winterer on his successful PhD defense in September 2024 🥳. Thesis: Solidifying Modern SMT Solvers. Photo: Peter Müller, Dominik Winterer, Maria Christakis, Zhendong Su.  


eBPF Grant Award for Zhendong Su and Hao Sun


12 July 2024: Future of Software seminar with Andrea Reynolds [Talk Details]


Congratulations to Shaohua Li, Theodoros Theodoridis and Zhendong Su on their Distinguished Artifact Award at PLDI'24 for their artifact, external page Creal and related paper "external page Boosting Compiler Testing by Injecting Real-world Code". Well done!


Congratulations to Shaohua Li on his successful PhD defense in May 2024 🥳.  Thesis: Advancing Software Reliability from Code to Compilation.  Photo: Zhendong Su, Andreas Zeller, Shaohua Li and Mathias Payer.  


We won a Distinguished Artifact Award at ASPLOS’24 for our artifact, external page UBGen, and related paper external page "UBfuzz: Finding Bugs in Sanitizer Implementations".  Congratulations to Shaohua Li and Zhendong Su on their award!


We were at CGO 2024 in Ediburgh and won a couple awards at the Student Research Competition (SRC).  Congratulations to our students Michel Weber and Dalia Shaaban on their awards!  external page Read more on the SRC awards at CGO 

A complete list of our News & Events

Bachelor and Master Thesis

Our group has a wide range of possible topics for bachelor's and master's theses at ETH. We are broadly interested in programming languages and compilers, software engineering, computer security, deep learning and education technologies. To get an idea of our recent research activities, interested students are encouraged take a look at our publications and our various projects, such as the EMI compiler testing, the external page SQLancer project, external page Project Yin-Yang and Algot.  

Under these research areas, we have possible thesis topics ranging from software/system building, empirical investigations, to algorithmic and theoretical explorations. 

Interested students should follow our application procedure here.  

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