Robert Dyer // UNL

My current research interests are in software engineering and programming languages. I apply data analytics techniques (mining software repositories) to study how developers use programming languages, to help gain insight into features they use and how they use them. I believe future programming languages can be better designed by leveraging data.

I am also working on ARG-V and PAClab for automatically generating benchmark programs for program analysis researchers.

I am a lead researcher and engineer for the Boa language and infrastructure. Boa is a virtual laboratory for data-intensive research on open-source software development. Boa provides better abstractions for easily and efficiently mining ultra-large-scale software repositories.

Recent and Select Publications

ICSE: Boa: A Language and Infrastructure for Analyzing Ultra-Large-Scale Software Repositories Robert Dyer, Hoan Anh Nguyen, Hridesh Rajan, Tien N. Nguyen. May 23, 2013.
Acceptance rate: 85/461 (18.43%)
MSR: Escaping the Time Pit: Pitfalls and Guidelines for Using Time-Based Git Data Distinguished Paper Award Samuel W. Flint, Jigyasa Chauhan, Robert Dyer. May 17, 2021.
Acceptance rate: 48/140 (34.29%)
MODULARITY: Modular Reasoning in the Presence of Event Subtyping Best Paper Award Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Robert Dyer, Rex D. Fernando, José Sánchez, Hridesh Rajan. March 18, 2015.
Acceptance rate: 12/25 (48.00%)
NEW ICSE: An LLM-Based Agent-Oriented Approach for Automated Code Design Issue Localization Fraol Batole, David OBrien, Tien N. Nguyen, Robert Dyer, Hridesh Rajan. May 1, 2025.
Acceptance rate: 140/642 (21.81%)
NEW MSR'25: pyMethods2Test: A Dataset of Python Tests Mapped to Focal Methods Idriss Abdelmadjid, Robert Dyer. April 29, 2025.
Acceptance rate: 38/63 (60.32%)
NEW EMSE: WIASZZ: Work Item Aware SZZ Salomé Perez-Rosero, Robert Dyer, Samuel W. Flint, Shane McIntosh, Witawas Srisa-An. March 1, 2025.
NEW EMSE: How Do Developers Use Type Inference: An Exploratory Study in Kotlin Samuel W. Flint, Ali M. Keshk, Robert Dyer, Hamid Bagheri. January 16, 2025.
NEW Mining Work Items to Streamline Software Maintenance Tasks Salomé Perez-Rosero. December 1, 2024. A Ph.D. dissertation at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Current Students

Samuel W. Flint
Ph.D.
He is interested in the empirical evaluation of programming languages and language constructs using large datasets, as well as through methods like eye-tracking to better understand how developers comprehend code as they read or write.
Fatemeh Raei Dehaghi
UNL, Ph.D.
Idriss Abdelmadjid
UNL, Master's
Aswin Suriya Kumar Muthukrishnan
UNL, Master's
Mihir Maruvada
BS/CS, Undergraduate
Charles Moloney
BS/ME+CS, Undergraduate