Dr. Ridwan Shariffdeen

I am a Principal Research Scientist at SonarSource focusing on developing AI agentic capabilities for software engineering. Previously I was a Research Fellow at Secure Software Research Group, Department of Computer Science at School of Computing, National University of Singapore, advised by Abhik Roychoudhury where the focus of my research was on automated program repair, software security and software engineering automation. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science from the same group, during which my focus was on repairing software vulnerabilities using program synthesis, code transplantation and concolic repair.

I received a Bachelor of Science(BSc) Honors (Hons) degree from the Computer Science & Engineering Department at University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. During my bachelor degree I researched on automated solutions to proactively scale cloud resources. I've also worked as a Senior Software Engineer (Cloud/Security) at OrangeHRM on HR Tech where my focus was on System Security and Automation Technology.

Thanks to the support of my research mentors, I was fortunate to begin working on research early in my undergraduate career. I’m happy to help ambitious undergraduate students interested in software engineering get started with research, please feel free to email me!

Recent and Ongoing Activities

• Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE)
• Program Committee Member in the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'26)
• Program Committee Member in the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2025)
• Member of the ACM TOSEM Board of Distinguished Reviewers
  
• Reviewer for Springer Nature Empirical Software Engineering
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Recent updates

Featured Publications

[ICSE-SEIP'25]
	Detecting Python Malware in the Software Supply Chain with Program Analysis
	Ridwan Shariffdeen, Behnaz Hassanshahi, Martin Mirchev, Ali El Husseini, Abhik Roychoudhury
	(One-line Abstract) an inter-package analysis technique to detect malicious packages in the Python ecosystem
	47th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Software Engineering in Practice track (SEIP)
	Note: Our artifact @ 10.5281/zenodo.14607268, was evaluated as Available , Functional and Reusable .
[TOSEM'25]
	Vulnerability Repair via Concolic Execution and Code Mutations
	Ridwan Shariffdeen, Christopher Timperley, Yannic Noller, Claire Le Goues, Abhik Roychoudhury
	(One-line Abstract) Combination of semantic repair and search-based repair for security vulnerabilities
	ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
[APR'24]
	Program Repair Competition 2024
	Ridwan Shariffdeen, Yannic Noller, Martin Mirchev, Haifeng Ruan Xiang Gao, Andreea Costea, Gregory J Duck, Abhik Roychoudhury
	(One-line Abstract) summary and results of the first international program repair competition
	2024 IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Automated Program Repair (APR)
[ICST'24]
	Evolutionary Testing for Program Repair
	Haifeng Ruan, Hoang Lam Nguyen, Ridwan Shariffdeen, Yannic Noller and Abhik Roychoudhury
	(One-line Abstract) a co-evolution approach that generates tests and repairs in a unified workflow using EvoSuite
	17th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) 2024
[ICSE'23]
	Cerberus: A Program Repair Framework
	Ridwan Shariffdeen, Martin Mirchev, Yannic Noller, Abhik Roychoudhury
	(One-line Abstract) a language agnostic platform for automated program repair
	IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2023, Tool Demonstrations track
	Note: Our framework including the tools and benchmarks is open sourced at Github
[ICSE'22]
	Trust Enhancement Issues in Program Repair
	Yannic Noller, Ridwan Shariffdeen, Xiang Gao, Abhik Roychoudhury
	(One-line Abstract) A systematic evaluation if state of the art APR can meet developer expectations
	IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2022
	Note: Our artifact @ 10.5281/zenodo.5908381, was evaluated as Available , Functional and Reusable .
[ISSTA'21]
	Automated Patch Backporting in Linux (Experience Paper)
	Ridwan Shariffdeen, Xiang Gao, Gregory J Duck, Shin Hwei Tan, Julia Lawall, Abhik Roychoudhury
	(One-line Abstract) Patch backporting technique that can automatically transfer patches from the mainline version of Linux into older stable versions
	30th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) 2021, 12 pages
	Note: Our artifact @ 10.5281/zenodo.4764704, was evaluated as Available , Functional and Reusable .
	Note: FixMorph tool is now open-sourced in Github
	Note: Our data, empirical evaluation, and replication package are available @ fixmorph.github.io
🏆	Award: Our artifact was awarded the "Distinguished Artifact Award" at ISSTA'21
[PLDI'21]
	Concolic Program Repair
	Ridwan Shariffdeen, Yannic Noller, Lars Grunske, Abhik Roychoudhury
	(One-line Abstract) Detecting and discarding over-fitting patches via systematic co-exploration of the patch space and input space
	42nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) 2021, 16 pages
	Note: Our artifact @ 10.5281/zenodo.4668317, was evaluated as Available , Functional and Reusable .
	Note: CPR tool is now open-sourced in Github
	Note: Our data, empirical evaluation, and replication package are available @ cpr-tool.github.io
[TOSEM'21]
	Automated Patch Transplantation
	Ridwan Shariffdeen, Shin Hwei Tan, Mingyuan Gao, Abhik Roychoudhury
	(One-line Abstract) Identifying patch insertion points, as well as namespaces translation across programs via symbolic execution
	ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 30(1), pages 1-36, 2021.
	Note: Selected as journal-first contribution to be presented at ICSE'21
	Note: PatchWeave tool is now open-sourced in Github
	Note: Our data, empirical evaluation, and replication package are available @ patchweave.github.io
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