University Awards
Recognising Excellence

University Research Recognition Award

How do we trust computing systems generated by autonomous agents? For two decades, my research has pursued a single vision — trusted automatic programming -- with focus on automatically extracting the intent behind software with mathematical precision. As AI generates more of our computing systems, automatically verifying AI-generated systems becomes critical. This crucially depends on capturing the intent of the code accurately. ”
Professor Abhik Roychoudhury
Provost's Chair Professor

Department of Computer Science, School of Computing
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Research interests

  • Trustworthy software systems and agentic AI
  • AI for code and automatic programming
  • Program analysis and software security

Research achievements

Professor Roychoudhury is a global pioneer in automated program repair and automatic programming, having built the field around the principle of intent inference—achieving automatic programming through specification inference rather than search-based methods. This research has earned academic recognition, including a Test of Time Award (2023), and given rise to AutoCodeRover, an agentic AI tool for code that was spun off as a startup, acquired by SonarSource, and commercialised as the SonarQube Remediation Agent now used by enterprises worldwide. His work has realised the vision of trusted automatic programming, taking it from academic research through innovation and enterprise deployment, into production-grade tools used by many enterprises.

Professor Roychoudhury founded research in greybox fuzzing, thereby reinvigorating research into effective security-testing techniques; the “power schedule” algorithm he introduced is embedded by default in AFL++, the industry-standard fuzzing engine used to secure software infrastructure worldwide. He is also responsible for establishing the field of directed greybox fuzzing through his work on AFLGo, techniques that now power Google’s OSS-Fuzz, which has uncovered over 13,000 vulnerabilities across more than 1,000 critical software projects.

Publication credits

  • Published over 200 peer-reviewed articles in flagship computer science journals and conferences.
  • Authored field-defining papers on fuzz testing (2016–2017) that catalysed a research community and continue to shape how security testing of software is conducted today.

International standing

  • Editor-in-Chief, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), one of the top 10 computer science journals by impact (since 2025).
  • Senior Science Advisor at SonarSource, one of only two such advisors (since 2025).
  • Steering Committee Chair, ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) (2023–2029).
  • Programme Chair, International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (2024).
  • Associate Editor, Communications, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (since 2023).
  • Steering committee member of many flagship conferences in computer science, including ICSE (2021–2027), FSE (since 2019), and the ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) (2016–2023).

Awards and accolades

  • Inaugural class of the ACM Software Engineering Academy (2026), honouring individuals whose cumulative contributions have shaped 50 years of software engineering
  • Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2024)
  • Inaugural recipient, NUS Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award (2024)
  • Most Influential Paper Award (10-Year Test of Time Award), International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (2023)
  • IEEE New Directions Award, for contributions to symbolic execution (2022)

Education

  • PhD, MSc (State University of New York at Stony Brook)
  • BEng (Jadavpur University)
 Honour Roll Recipients