I am a Postdoc working in the Decal lab at UC Davis with Prof. Premkumar Devanbu. My current research focus is on applying natural language models to new software engineering tasks. My latest work has centered around improving the understandability of decompiled binary code using a pre-trained language model for C. During my PhD I focused on the human aspect of API evolution to understand how and why APIs evolve and its impact on API consumers. Going forward I would like to enhance the API evolution process by devising a semantic aware approach that is able to automatically migrate consumer code from one API to another.
In my spare time I enjoy taking in a lot of sports (favorite sport teams include: Manchester United, Indian cricket team and LA Lakers), hiking in the hills and traveling to far flung places of the world. Fun fact: the background image of this page is generally related to the area I am currently in.
Advisor: Prof. Premkumar Devanbu
Advisor: Alberto Bacchelli
Promotor: Arie van Deursen
Thesis title: The impact of API evolution on API consumers and how this can be affected by API producers and language designers
Thesis grade: 9.0
American equivalent: A+
Thesis advisor: Alberto Bacchelli
Thesis title: fine-GRAPE: fine-Grained APi usage Extractor An Approach and Dataset to Investigate API Usage
Thesis grade: 9.0
American equivalent: A+
Thesis advisor: Alexandru Iosup
Graduated with honors and cum laude
@article{sawant2019react,
title={Revisiting Test Smells in Automatically Generated Tests: Limitations, Pitfalls, and Opportunities},
author={Panichella, Annibale and Panichella, Sebastiano and Fraser, Gordon and Sawant, Anand Ashok and Hellendoorn, Vincent},
journal={Proceedings of the 36th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2020)},
year={2020}
}
@article{sawant2019react,
title={To react, or not to react: Patterns of reaction to API deprecation},
author={Sawant, Anand Ashok and Robbes, Romain and Bacchelli, Alberto},
journal={Empirical Software Engineering},
volume={24},
pages={3824--3870},
year={2019}
}
@inproceedings{sawant2018why,
title={What Makes a Code Change Easier to Review: An Empirical Investigation on Code Change Reviewability},
author={Ram, Achyudh and Sawant, Anand Ashok and Castellucio, Marco and Bacchelli, Alberto},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE). forthcoming},
year={2018}
}
@inproceedings{sawant2018why,
title={Why are features deprecated? An investigation into the motivation behind deprecation},
author={Sawant, Anand Ashok and Huang, Guangzhe and Vilen, Gabriel and Stojkovski, Stefan and Bacchelli, Alberto},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 34th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2018)},
year={2018}
}
@inproceedings{sawant2018understanding,
title={Understanding Developers’ Needs on Deprecation as a Language Feature},
author={Sawant, Anand Ashok and Aniche, Mauricio and van Deursen, Arie and Bacchelli, Alberto},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 40th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018). forthcoming},
year={2018}
}
@article{sawant2017reaction,
title={On the reaction to deprecation of clients of 4+ 1 popular Java APIs and the JDK},
author={Sawant, Anand Ashok and Robbes, Romain and Bacchelli, Alberto},
journal={Empirical Software Engineering},
pages={1--40},
year={2017},
publisher={Springer}
}
@inproceedings{sawant2016deprecation,
author = "A. A. Sawant and A. Bacchelli.",
title = "On the reaction to deprecation of 25,357 clients of 4+1 popular Java APIs.",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)",
year = "2016",
pages = "in press",
organization = "IEEE press"
}
@inproceedings{oosterwaal2016,
author = "S. Oosterwaal, A. van Deursen, R. Coelho, A. A. Sawant and A. Bacchelli.",
title = "Visualizing Code and Coverage Changes for Code Review",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (2016) Demo Track",
year = "2016",
pages = "in press",
organization = "ACM press"
}
@Article{Sawant2016,
author="Sawant, Anand Ashok
and Bacchelli, Alberto",
title="fine-GRAPE: fine-grained APi usage extractor -- an approach and dataset to investigate API usage",
journal="Empirical Software Engineering",
year="2016",
pages="1--24",
issn="1573-7616",
doi="10.1007/s10664-016-9444-6",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9444-6"
}
@inproceedings{sawant2015dataset,
title={A dataset for API usage},
author={Sawant, Anand Ashok and Bacchelli, Alberto},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories},
pages={506--509},
year={2015},
organization={IEEE Press}
}
I am a Postdoctoral scholar working on the application of Machine Learning for Software Engineering at the Decal lab at the University of California Davis, USA. My current research focuses on improving data collection for deep learning tasks. My work on improving data fidelity makes tasks such as the recovery of inlined functions from binaries and variable names and types from obfuscated code achievable. Furthermore, I seek to enhance current deep learning models for code with a notion of semantic understanding by leveraging execution traces generated on a large scale, thus making complex tasks such as automatically dealing with API evolution realizable. My earlier research centered around mining API usage and understanding API evolution by conducting empirical studies on API usage data and conducting qualitative studies to understand the developer perspective on API evolution.