Xin Xia
Biography
Xin Xia is the director and chief expert of the software engineering application technology lab, Huawei, China. To help developers and testers improve their productivity, his research focuses on mining and analyzing rich data in software repositories to construct various automated tool, as well as uncover interesting and actionable information. Prior to joining Huawei, he was an ARC DECRA Fellow and a lecturer at Monash University, Australia. Dr. Xia received his Ph.D in computer science from Zhejiang University, China in 2014. He received the ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher Award in 2022.
About the Talk
Bridging the Gap between AI and SE
Abstract
Today, data miners often apply or extend AI techniques to solve problems across many domains (e.g., social media, health informatics, and software systems); while domain experts leverage their own domain knowledge to solve their own problems. Data miners often apply their automated techniques to solve a wide range of problems across different domains with limited knowledge of the domain; while domain experts often have limited knowledge of automated techniques when solving their domain-specific problems.
My research tries to bridge the gap between both types of experts (i.e., Data miners and Domain Experts). In this talk, I will focus on the software engineering domain and I will give an overview of several challenges facing data miner and domain experts as they make use of automated techniques, in particular: (1) strong performance of techniques is not sufficient, instead a deeper understanding of the domain is essential; (2) an easy approach might perform better than a complex approach; (3) results should be presented in a domain-centric context. I will present examples from my research to explain what these challenges are, why they appear, and my efforts to avoid them.