Bogdan Vasilescu

Associate Professor, Software and Societal Systems

Bio

Bogdan Vasilescu is an Associate Professor in the Software and Societal Systems Department of CMU's School of Computer Science. where he serves as Director of the Societal Computing PhD program.

Prior to joining CMU, he was a postdoc in the Davis Eclectic Computational Analytics Lab (DECAL) at UC Davis, where he worked with Vladimir Filkov and Prem Devanbu.

He obtained his PhD in Computer Science cum laude at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, in October 2014, under the supervision ofAlexander Serebrenik and Mark van den Brand (here's a 10 minute video summary of his thesis). His PhD work won the Best Dissertation Award from the Institute for Programming Research and Algorithmics. 

He also holds a master's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology (thesis advisor: Alexander Serebrenik) and an engineer's degree in Systems and Computer Science from University of Ploieşti, Romania (webpage in Romanian; thesis advisor: Gabriel Rădulescu).

Research

Software is being developed by increasingly distributed and increasingly diverse groups of individuals. How can distributed teams be empowered to develop software effectively and productively? How can technology help software teams do more with less? What effects does team composition have on productivity and code quality?

Vasilescu is engaged in interdisciplinary research to offer data-driven answers to these questions. His work draws from empirical software engineering, social computing, and computer-supported cooperative work. He collects Big Data from open-source software, which is widely used and, with the advent of social coding platforms like GitHub, extremely popular. He analyzes these data using mixed research methods from computer science and the social sciences (e.g., statistical analysis, grounded theory) to develop or validate theories about software engineering processes and outcomes.

Check out this recent talk for an overview of his work and a few representative research projects. You can find more of his recent talks here.