Allison Sullivan, PhD

Allison Sullivan, PhD

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

About me

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), a member of the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) at UTA, the faculty advisor for UTA’s SWE club and a member of the College of Engineering Arlington Women in Engineering organization (COE AWE). Here is my current CV.

I am lead professor of SCOPE lab which focuses on improving techniques to show the correctness of all program executions. You can explore our projects and see the types of things SCOPE lab gets up too. We are hiring! See lab website for details.

I obtained my PhD in the Software Verification, Validation and Testing (SVVAT) group at the University of Texas at Austin (hook’em) in 2017. My adviser is Sarfraz Khurshid. I obtained my M.S. degree in software engineering at UT Austin in 2014 and my B.S. degree in software engineering from The University of Texas at Dallas in 2012 (whoosh). My PhD dissertation can be found here.

Research Interest

My main goal is to improve software reliability by focusing on:

  • Automated Software Engineering: Test/Oracle Generation, Automated Bug Localization and Repair, Regression Testing, and Mutation Testing
  • Formal Methods and Programming Languages: Model Based Testing, First-Order Logic, Program Synthesis, Model Checking and Symbolic Execution
  • Upcoming Service: FSE Demo 2023 (PC Member), ISSRE 2023 (PC Member), SCAM 2023 (PC Member), FormaliSE 2024 (PC Member).

News.

  • July 2023: One paper “Crucible: Graphical Test Cases for Alloy Models” accepted into ISSRE 2023.
  • July 2023: One paper “Live Programming for Finite Model Finders” accepted into ASE NIER 2023.
  • June 2023: Two papers accepted into MODELS 2023.
  • April 2023: Presented a talk Proofreading the Proofreader: The Benefits of Unit Tests for Software Models at Never Work in Theory 2023!
  • Janurary 2023: On maternity leave - baby Arcadia arrived on the 7th!
  • November 2022: One paper “Abstract Alloy Instances” accepted into FM 2023.
  • October 2022: I am chairing the search for 2 new software engineering faculty memebers. If interested, please apply here.
  • September 2022: Our recent NSF grant is being talked about in the media.
  • September 2022: Attend GHC 2022 with a cohort of 10 female computer science students from UTA.
  • July 2022: One paper “REACH: Refining Alloy Scenarios by Size” accepted into ISSRE 2022. Congratulations Ana!
  • July 2022: I have received a NSF CISE Core grant to work on incremental analysis of software models across their development, testing and synthesis. Total: 490k
  • March 2022: One paper “Towards Automated Input Generation for Sketching Alloy Models” accepted into FormaliSE 2022. Congratulations Ana!
  • Feburary 2022: Congratulations Anahita on getting her master’s thesis work written up in Wired.
  • Feburary 2022: Moderator for the `Career Paths in Computing’ panel at SCRF.
  • Feburary 2022: Panelist for `The Graduate School Experience’ panel at OurCS@DFW.
  • Feburary 2022: Hosted a workshop on z3 at OurCS@DFW.
  • Feburary 2022: Gave a presented on CS vs SE vs CE majors and on Career Paths in Computing at Digitial Divas.
  • Janurary 2022: Served on the ICSE Demo PC.
  • Decemeber 2021: Resha presented her work on current limtiations of automated repair tools at UTA’s UROP Fall semester wrap up.
  • October 2021: Presented our solution enumeration tool Hawkeye at ISSRE2021).
  • July 2021: One paper accepted into ISSRE 2021!
  • June 2021: One paper accepted into FSE Demo 2021. Congratulations Tanvir!
  • June 2021: I have recieved a NSF FmitF award to investigate improvements to Alloy’s scenario finding functionality.
  • March 2021: I will be a judge for UTA’s College of Engineering Innovation Day.
  • More: (Older News).

Hobbies


I love puzzles just as much as my cat likes laying out over all the puzzle pieces. In my downtime, I play video games: I have a weekly discord get together with all my close friends in Texas. I equally enjoy getting out of the house. Since I stopped running marathons, I’ve taken to hiking – I have a goal to visit every national park in the United States. I am also eager to get out and explore the world – I enjoy backpacking with my husband internationally.