Biography

Francisco Servant is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Software Engineering and Software Technology (ITIS) of the University of Málaga. Before, he was Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech. You can find him at: Despacho 3.3.2.IV.

Francisco received a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the University of California, Irvine, advised by James A. Jones. He also holds a M.S. in Information and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Irvine, supervised by André van der Hoek. Francisco obtained his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Granada in Spain.

His research focuses on software development productivity, software quality, and software security.

He uses software evolution analysis and program analysis to create practical, efficient, and human-friendly techniques and tools that provide automatic support for all stages of software development. His research interests include software development productivity, software quality, mining of software repositories, program comprehension, and software visualization.

He has published articles in these areas at top software engineering conferences (e.g., ICSE, FSE, ASE) and journals (e.g., TOSEM, JSS). He also performed research for large technology companies, such as Microsoft Research and DreamWorks Animation.

Dr. Servant obtained the NSF CAREER award, an International Distinguished Researcher award, the Ramón y Cajal award, and the R3 Certificate for Research Quality and Independence. His research has been supported by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF), an International Distinguished Researcher award, and the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI).

News
2024 Paper accepted to Journal of Systems and Software (JSS)
2023 Received the R3 Certificate for Research Quality and Independence
2023 Research Grant Awarded: Proyecto de Generación de Conocimiento (PGC) by Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI)
2023 Paper accepted to Journal of Systems and Software (JSS)
2023 Paper accepted to ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
2023 Paper accepted to IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
2022 2x Papers accepted to Journal of Systems and Software (JSS)
2022 UMA Joined Universidad de Málaga
2021 Received the Ramón y Cajal Award. #1 position in my category.
2021 2x Papers accepted to Journal of Systems and Software (JSS)
2021 Paper accepted to IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)
2021 Paper accepted to International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
2021 URJC Joined Universidad Rey Juan Carlos as International Distinguished Researcher
2021 Received the NSF CAREER Award

Awards and Honors
2023 R3 Certificate for Research Quality and Independence. Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Spain.
2021 Ramón y Cajal Award (#1 in my category). Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Spain.
2021 International Distinguished Researcher. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
2021 NSF CAREER Award, National Science Foundation, U.S.A.
2020 Distinguished Reviewer Award, MSR 2020.
2019 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ASE 2019.
2019 Second Best Paper Award, SIGCSE 2019.
2018 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ESEC/FSE 2018.

Funding
2023–2026 “EGSVAI: Verificación De Software Eficiente Y Ecológica Mediante La Inteligencia Artificial”. Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), PID2022-142964OA-I00, Francisco Servant (PI), 2023–2026. Total: €128,750
2021–2025 “Autonomous Targeted Software Verification”. National Science Foundation (NSF) CCF-2046403 (CAREER), Francisco Servant (PI), 2021–2025. Total: $470,374

Publications

Peer-reviewed Journal Publications
JSS’24
Mohammed El Arnaoty, Francisco Servant. “OneSpace: Detecting cross-language clones by learning a common embedding space”. Journal of Systems and Software (JSS), February 2024, 111911, 23 pages.
JSS’23
Waad Aldndni, Na Meng, Francisco Servant. “Automatic prediction of developers’ resolutions for software merge conflicts”. Journal of Systems and Software (JSS), December 2023, 111836, 16 pages.
TOSEM’23
Xianhao Jin, Francisco Servant. “HybridCISave: A Combined Build and Test Selection Approach in Continuous Integration”. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), May 2023, 1049-331X, 39 pages.
JSS’22
Khadijah Al Safwan, Mohammed Elarnaoty, Francisco Servant. “Developers’ Need for the Rationale of Code Commits: An In-breadth and In-depth Study”. Journal of Systems and Software (JSS), July 2022, 111320, 25 pages.
JSS’22
Xianhao Jin, Francisco Servant. “Which Builds Are Really Safe to Skip? Maximizing Failure Observation for Build Selection in Continuous Integration”. Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) 188, June 2022, 111292, 18 pages.
JSS’21
Rafael Barbudo, Aurora Ramírez, Francisco Servant, José Raúl Romero. “GEML : A Grammar-based Evolutionary Machine Learning Approach for Design-Pattern Detection”. Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) 175, May 2021, 110919, 24 pages.
JSS’21
Ayaan M. Kazerouni, James C. Davis, Arinjoy Basak, Clifford A. Shaffer, Francisco Servant, Stephen H. Edwards, “Fast and Accurate Incremental Feedback for Students’ Software Tests Using Selective Mutation Analysis”. Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) 175, May 2021, 110905, 18 pages.

Peer-reviewed Top-tier Conference Publications
IEEE S&P’23
Sk Adnan Hassan, Zainab Aamir, Dongyoon Lee, James C. Davis, Francisco Servant, “Improving Developers’ Understanding of Regex Denial of Service Tools through Anti-Patterns and Fix Strategies”. Proceedings of the 44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Technical Research Track (IEEE S&P 2023), San Francisco, CA, U.S.A., May 2023, pp. 1238–1255. Acceptance Rate: 17%.
IEEE S&P’21
James C. Davis, Francisco Servant, Dongyoon Lee, “Using Selective Memoization to Defeat Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS)”. Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Technical Research Track (S&P 2021), San Francisco, CA, U.S.A., May 2021, pp. 1–17. Acceptance Rate: 8%.
ICSE’21
Xianhao Jin, Francisco Servant, “What helped, and what did not? An Evaluation of the Strategies to Improve Continuous Integration”. Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering, Technical Research Track (ICSE 2021), Madrid, Spain, May 2021, pp. 213–225. Acceptance Rate: 22%.
ICSE’20
Xianhao Jin, Francisco Servant, “A Cost-efficient Approach to Building in Continuous Integration”. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Technical Research Track (ICSE 2020), Seoul, South Korea, July 2020, pp. 13–25. Acceptance Rate: 21%.
ASE’19
Louis G. Michael IV, James Donohue, James C. Davis, Dongyoon Lee, Francisco Servant, “Regexes are Hard: Decision-making, Difficulties, and Risks in Programming Regular Expressions”. Proceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Technical Research Track (ASE 2019), San Diego, CA, U.S.A., November 2019, pp. 415–426. Acceptance Rate: 23%. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.
ESEC/FSE’19
Khadijah Al Safwan, Francisco Servant, “Decomposing the Rationale of Code Commits: The Software Developers’ Perspective”. Proceedings of the 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Technical Research Track (ESEC/FSE 2019), Tallinn, Estonia, August 2019, pp. 397–408. Acceptance Rate: 24%.
ESEC/FSE’19
James C. Davis, Louis G Michael IV, Christy A. Coghlan, Francisco Servant, and Dongyoon Lee, “Why Aren’t Regular Expressions a Lingua Franca?”. Proceedings of the 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Technical Research Track (ESEC/FSE 2019), Tallinn, Estonia, August 2019, pp. 443–454. Acceptance Rate: 24%.
SIGCSE’19
Ayaan M. Kazerouni, Clifford A. Shaffer, Stephen H. Edwards, Francisco Servant. “Assessing Incremental Testing Practices and Their Impact on Project Outcomes”. Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Technical Research Track (SIGCSE 2019), February 27-March 2, 2019, Minneapolis, MN, USA, pp. 407–413. Acceptance Rate: 32%. SIGCSE’19 2nd Best Paper Award.
ESEC/FSE’18
James C. Davis, Christy A. Coghlan, Francisco Servant, and Dongyoon Lee, “The Impact of Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in Practice: an Empirical Study at the Ecosystem Scale”. Proceedings of the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE’18), Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA, November 2018, pp. 246–256. Acceptance Rate: 19%. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.
ICSE’17
Francisco Servant, James A. Jones, “Fuzzy Fine-grained Code-history Analysis”. Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017), Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 2017, pp. 746–757. Acceptance Rate: 16%
FSE’12
Francisco Servant, James A. Jones, “History Slicing: Assisting Code-Evolution Tasks”. Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2012), Research Triangle Park, NC, USA, November 2012, pp. 43:1–43:11. Acceptance Rate: 16.9%
ICSE’12
Francisco Servant, James A. Jones, “WhoseFault: Automatic Developer-to-Fault Assignment Through Fault-Localization”. Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2012), Zurich, Switzerland, June 2012, pp. 36–46. Acceptance Rate: 21%

Peer-reviewed Workshop Papers, Short Papers, and Other Conferences
MSR’23
Registered Report
Johan Linåker, Björn Lundell, Francisco Servant, Jonas Gamalielsson, Sachiko Muto, Gregorio Robles. “Public Sector Open Source Software Projects - How is development organized?”. International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2023), Registered Reports Track, Melbourne, Australia, May 2023, 7 pages.
JISBD’21
José Raúl Romero, Rafael Barbudo Lunar, Aurora Ramírez, Francisco Servant, “Detección de patrones de diseño con GEML: discusión y enfoque práctico”. Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos (JISBD 2021), Málaga, Spain, September 2021, 14 pages.
ICSE’21
Artifact
Xianhao Jin, Francisco Servant, “CIBench: A Dataset and Collection of Techniques for Build and Test Selection and Prioritization in Continuous Integration”. Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering, Research Artifact Track (ICSE 2021), Madrid, Spain, May 2021, pp. 166–167.
MSR’19
Mining Challenge
Xianhao Jin, Francisco Servant, “What Edits Are Done on Highly Answered Stack Overflow Questions? An Empirical Study”. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, Mining Challenge Track (MSR 2019), Montreal, Canada, May 2019, pp. 225–229.
ICSE’18
Poster
Lykes Claytor, Francisco Servant, “Understanding and Leveraging Developer Inexpertise”. Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018), Poster Track, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 2018, pp. 404–405.
MSR’18
Mining Challenge
Xianhao Jin, Francisco Servant, “The Hidden Cost of Code Completion: Understanding the Impact of the Recommendation-list Length on its Efficiency”. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2018), Mining Challenge Track, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 2018, pp. 70–73.
MSR’17
Mining Challenge
Aakash Gautam, Saket Vishwasrao, Francisco Servant, “An Empirical Study of Activity, Popularity, Size, Testing, and Stability in Continuous Integration”. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2017), Mining Challenge Track, Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 2017, pp. 495–498.
ASE’13
Doctoral Symposium
Francisco Servant, “Supporting Bug Investigation using History Analysis”. Proceedings of the 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Doctoral Symposium Track (ASE 2013), Silicon Valley, California, November 2013, pp. 754–757.
VISSOFT’13
Tool Demo
Francisco Servant, James A. Jones, “Chronos: Visualizing Slices of Source-Code History”. Proceedings of the 1st IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization, Tool Track (VISSOFT 2013), Eindhoven, Netherlands, September 2013, pp. 1–4.
ASE’11
Francisco Servant, James A. Jones, “History Slicing”. Proceedings of the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011), Lawrence, Kansas, USA, November 2011, pp. 452–455. Acceptance Rate: 37%
CHASE’10
Francisco Servant, James A. Jones, André van der Hoek, “CASI: Preventing Indirect Conflicts through a Live Visualization”. Proceedings of the Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2010), Cape Town, South Africa, May 2010, pp. 39–46.

Teaching

Universidad de Málaga
2024 Spring Introducción a la Ingeniería del Software.
Redes y Sistemas Distribuídos.
2023 Fall Análisis y Diseño de Algoritmos.
Ingeniería del Software.
2022 Spring Fundamentos de Software de Comunicaciones.
Protocolos e Interfaces de Comunicación.
Redes y Sistemas Distribuidos.
2022 Fall Redes Móviles Definidas por Software.

Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
2022 Spring Servicios y Aplicaciones en Redes de Ordenadores.
Servicios y Aplicaciones Telemáticas.
Servicios Telemáticos.

Virginia Tech
2020 Fall CS 3704: Intermediate Software Design and Engineering
CS 6704: Software Engineering Automation
2020 Spring CS 3704: Intermediate Software Design and Engineering
2019 Fall CS 5704: Software Engineering
2019 Spring CS 3704: Intermediate Software Design and Engineering
2018 Fall CS 4704: Software Engineering Capstone
CS5974 Independent Study
CS 6704: Software Engineering Automation
2018 Spring CS 3704: Intermediate Software Design and Engineering
2017 Fall CS 5704: Software Engineering
2016 Fall CS 6704: Software Engineering Automation
2016 Spring CS 3704: Intermediate Software Design and Engineering
2015 Fall CS 5704: Software Engineering

University of California, Irvine
2012 Spring IN4MATX 115: Software Testing and Quality Assurance.
2012 Winter IN4MATX 42: Informatics Core II.
IN4MATX 191C: Senior Design Project.
2011 Fall IN4MATX 113: Requirements Analysis & Engineering.
IN4MATX 191B: Senior Design Project.

Service

Chairing
2022 Proceedings Chair, International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS).
2021 Co-chair, International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Demonstrations Track.

Award Committees
2023 ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher Award.
ACM SIGSOFT Frank Anger Memorial Award.
ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Research Grants Reviews
2022 Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), Spain.
2021 National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S.A.
2016 National Science Foundation Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT), Canada.

Journal Reviews
2023 IEEE Software.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Journal (TSE).
Journal of Systems and Software (JSS).
Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE).
2022 Journal of Systems and Software (JSS).
Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE).
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Journal (TSE).
2021 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Journal (TSE).
Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE).
2020 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Journal (TSE).
Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE).
Journal of Systems and Software (JSS).
2019 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Journal (TSE).
Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE).
2018 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Journal (TSE).
IEEE Software.
Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE).
Journal of Systems and Software (JSS).
2017 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Journal (TSE).
2016 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Journal (TSE).
2015 Journal of Internet Services and Applications (JISA).
Journal of Systems and Software (JSS).
2013 Central European Journal of Computer Science (CEJCS).

Research Conferences Program Committee Member
2024 International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), Technical Track.
2023 Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Technical Track.
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Technical Track.
2022 International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Technical Track.
International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), Technical Track.
2021 International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) Track.
International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Technical Track.
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Judge for Student Research Competition (SRC) Track.
2020 International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Technical Track.
International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Technical Track.
Distinguished Reviewer Award.
2019 International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Technical Track.
International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), Judge for Student Research Competition (SRC) Track.
International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Short papers Track.
International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), Engineering Track.
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) Track.
2018 International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Technical track.
International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Artifacts track.
International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) Track.
International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), Industry Track.
International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), Demonstrations Track.
2012 International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), Demonstrations Track.
International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Mining Challenge Track.