Rahul GopinathAndreas Zeller

Talk slides and details for "The Devil's Guide to Doing your PhD" are now available. See you on Monday at #ASE2026!

conf.researchr.org/details/ase

Rahul GopinathAndreas Zeller

Talk slides and details for "On Impact in Software Engineering Research" are now available. See you on Monday at #ASE2026: conf.researchr.org/details/ase

Rahul GopinathAndreas Zeller
* How Grammar-Based Synthetic Data Shapes Behavior Learning: An Empirical Study of Input Generation Strategies

* Can Open-Weight LLMs Predict Test Outcomes from Traces? A Cross-Subject Boundary Study on Tests4Py

* Failure Explanations: The Missing Abstraction between Debugging and Repair

* Execution Features and Their Relations to Faults: A Replication on Defects4J

At #ASE2026 tomorrow, visit these workshop presentations by my students Tural and Marius:

* How Grammar-Based Synthetic Data Shapes Behavior Learning: An Empirical Study of Input Generation Strategies

* Can Open-Weight LLMs Predict Test Outcomes from Traces? A Cross-Subject Boundary Study on Tests4Py

* Failure Explanations: The Missing Abstraction between Debugging and Repair

* Execution Features and Their Relations to Faults: A Replication on Defects4J

All details: conf.researchr.org/profile/ase

Rahul Gopinath

The University of Sydney is hiring tenure-track faculty in Engineering, and software engineering researchers are very welcome to apply!

Happy to answer questions, so reach out anytime.

Apply here.

#SoftwareEngineering #AcademicJobs #AcademicMastodon #Hiring

Rahul GopinathTodd Sundsted
Release v3.12.0 of Ktistec

This release encompasses two broad sets of changes: widening the pool of candidates for feeds and more carefully checking the origin of inbound activities (broadly FEP-fe34, Origin-based security model).

Candidates for feeds were originally limited to posts in the actor's mailboxes. This decision made authorization easy but omitted clearly acceptable posts (for example, posts addressed to the public collection) that arrived via other means (for example, filling in a thread).

Prior to this release, inbox processing did not consistently define an object's origin nor did it apply consistent rules to what it admitted based on the origin.

FEP-fe34 is still not fully enforced, and truth be told, I'm still reviewing some of its mandates, so I'm not yet listing it in Ktistec's federation documentation.

Here's the full list of changes:

Added

  • Notify a deck pane when it has new posts.

Fixed

  • Retry an unresolved quote authorization.
  • Label a draft with the status of its quote request.
  • Compare origins when deciding whether to trust an IRI, key document, or owner.
  • Ignore a trailing slash when matching a dereferenced document's IRI.
  • Allow only Create and Update to update objects.
  • Ignore an inbound vote that fails the FEP-9967 checks.
  • Expand commonly omitted ActivityStreams context terms.
  • Break a long link rather than let it overflow.

Changed

  • Widen the feed scan to every object the server holds.
  • Address a published feed by slug rather than by id.

Removed

  • The proxyUrl property from the actor document.

I am still working hard on the feed deck. Both notifications and feed ordering now work. It's now my preferred reading interface, and should be ready by the next release!

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse

Rahul GopinathAndreas Zeller
This is a talk announcement.

GOTO Copenhagen • Sep 28 - Oct 2, 2026
goto;

Fuzzing your way to better test inputs

Andreas Zeller
Faculty at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

gotocph.com

I will be presenting our latest #Fandango work at the #GOTO conference on September 30 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Let's meet at GOTO! gotocph.com/2026

Rahul GopinathAndreas Zeller

In the past months, I have had a number of great PhD students pass their exams:

* Leon Bettscheider for "Input Grammars in Practice - Methods for Symbolic Mining, Systematic Evaluation, and Grey-Box Testing": scholar.google.com/citations?u

* Masudul Hasan Masud for "Addressing Socio-Technical Blind Spots in Modern Software Systems": linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:l

* Abdullah AlHamdan for “Security Analysis of Modern JavaScript Runtimes”: linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:l

Big congratulations to all!

Rahul GopinathSIGPLAN

SIGPLAN’s treasurer, Alex Potanin, details where the money goes for running conferences and the SIG’s other community activities. 💸 blog.sigplan.org/2026/07/20/si

Rahul GopinathLaurence Tratt

New post: Test-case Reducers Are Underappreciated Debugging Tools. The more I've used these tools, the more ways I realise they can be used! This post starts at the basics and works up to things like reducing on properties other than just the length of the input. tratt.net/laurie/blog/2026/tes

Rahul GopinathAndreas Zeller

I have been selected into the inaugural class of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy: www2.sigsoft.org/academy/inaug