Vikram Nitin
About Me
I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Columbia University, advised by Prof. Baishakhi Ray. My research interests are broadly in the field of software engineering and static analysis of code, with a recent focus on the Rust programming language.
More specifically, I’m working on automated modernization of legacy software applications. Some aspects of this problem are:
- Translating code from older languages (like C) to modern languages (like Rust) (ref. SpecTra).
- Refactoring code to follow modern design patterns and architectures (ref. CARGO).
- Detecting bugs that arise in the process of modernization (ref. Yuga).
Previously, I worked on neural networks and machine learning. I did my undergraduate thesis at the MALL lab, Indian Institute of Science, where I worked with Prof. Partha Talukdar on graph neural networks (relevant publications 1, 2, 3, 4). At Columbia, I initially worked on adversarial robustness of neural networks (relevant publications 1, 2) before pivoting to work on transformer models for code (relevant publication 1) which led into my current research on software engineering (relevant publications 1, 2).
In my spare time, I’m a performing Carnatic music singer. Here are some links [1, 2] to recent performances.
Research Interests
- Software Engineering: static analysis, microservice refactoring
- Programming Languages: memory safety of unsafe Rust, C to Rust translation
News
- [Oct. 2024] I’m attending the Doctoral Symposium at ASE 2024.
- [May. 2024] Yuga is accepted to TSE, to appear in the October 2024 issue!
- [Aug. 2023] I am on the organizing committee for MAPS 2023, co-located with ESEC/FSE.
- [Sep. 2022] CARGO has won a Distinguished Paper award (top 10%) at ASE 2022!
- [Jun. 2022] Our paper CARGO has been accepted at ASE 2022.
Publications
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Preprint
ArXiv Preprint, 2025. -
Preprint
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TSE
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. -
ASE
The 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2022. -
ACL NLP4Prog
The First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Programming (NLP4Prog), co-located with ACL-IJCNLP 2021. -
ECCV
The 16th European Conference on Conference Vision, 2020. -
ICLR
The 8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020. -
AAAI
InteractE: Improving Convolution-based Knowledge Graph Embeddings by Increasing Feature InteractionsThe 34th AAAI Conference on Artifical Intelligence (AAAI) 2020. -
CIKM
The 29th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2020. -
NeurIPS
The 33rd Conference on Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2019.
Services
Conference Reviewing
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022-2024 The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021-2022
Volunteering
The 7th Annual Symposium on Machine Programming (MAPS), co-located with ESEC/FSE 2023 Eighth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR-20) The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20)