Chanchal K. Roy is Director of the industry-stream, multi-University NSERC CREATE graduate program on Software Analytics Research (SOAR), Co-Director of Software Research Lab (SRLab) and Professor of Software Engineering/Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan (USask), Canada. He had been the co-lead of the Big Data Analytics/Data Management group of an NSERC Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) on Food security and a co-investigator of another CFREF grant on water security where he mostly focuses on establishing Big Data cloud frameworks, Big Data analytics techniques, and high-speed processing pipelines towards analyzing, modelling, visualizing and exploring petabytes of heterogeneous types of crop phenotype and water related data.
As the lead author of the widely used NiCad code clone detection system, he has published more than 240 refereed publications, with many of them in premier software engineering conferences and journals that have been cited more than 13,000 times with an h-index of 52 (Google Scholar). Dr. Roy has been (co-)supervising or has (co-)supervised a total of 113 (Undergrad#27, MSc#37, PhD#24, Postdoc#7, Others#18) highly qualified personnel (HQP). Dr. Roy works in the broad area of software engineering, with particular emphasis on software clone detection and management, software evolution and maintenance, recommender systems in software engineering, and big data analytics in software engineering. His contributions to the software maintenance community, and particularly to the software clones community have been highly influential, winning three Most Influential Paper awards at SANER 2018, ICPC 2018 and SANER 2021. Recently, he received the Clones Lifetime Achievement award and became only the second person internationally to receive such as an award. He has been recognized with the New Scientist Research Award of the College of Arts and Science at USask, the University wide New Researcher Award, and GSA Advising Excellence Award. He is one of three Canadian computer scientists honoured with a prestigious award for young researchers, a 2018 Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award by CS-Can/Info-Can, a national, non-profit society dedicated to representing all aspects of computer science and the interests of the discipline across Canada. Dr. Roy was a vision keynote speaker at WCRE/CSMR 2014 on software clones, and a keynote speaker at IWSC 2018, IEEE R10HTC 2018, BIM 2021, STI 2021, Confluence 2023, BIM 2023, Confluence 2024 and Confluence 2025. He has attracted over $6M in external funding since joining the USask, including an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement Grant, NSERC CREATE grant, CFI John R. Evans Leaders Fund (CFI-JELF) grant and leading major roles in two CFREF grants in Food Security and Water Security.
He is in the editorial board of a couple of journals and has been a regular reviewer of the major journals of the area including IEEE transactions in software engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, ACM Computing Surveys, Journal of Systems and Software, Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Science of Computer Programming, Information and Software Technology and so on. Dr. Roy is also heavily involved with the international community by serving as General Chair, Program Co-chair, Steering Committee member and Program Committee member of the premier and major conferences of his area.
Dr. Roy has been extensively featured in the media including at the daily Star Phoenix, the daily Prothom Alo (English version, Bangla Version), the largest daily in Bangladesh with over 7.6 millions daily readers (Bangla version of the news), and at the University News (The Clone Detector: New Researcher Award, USask researcher honoured for achievements in computer science, Clone wars: finding buggy code copies). Dr. Roy’s recent collaborative work on a new way of searching Stack Overflow was featured in Stack Overflow blogs which then subsequently was featured in most of the major tech news websites and blogs such as ACM Tech news, TechRepublic, i-programmerinfo, Hacker News, SD Times, and reddit.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science, 2009
Queen’s University at Kingston, ON, Canada
Dissertation: Detection and Analysis of Near-Miss Software Clones
Advised by: Prof. James R. Cordy
Master of Science in Computer Science (Software Systems Engineering), 2004
RWTH Aachen University of Technology, Aachen, Germany
Thesis: Modelling Programming Languages for Distributed and Concurrent Systems in Specification Languages
Advised by: Priv.-Doz. Dr. Thomas Noll
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering, 1998
Khulna University, Khulna, Bangladesh
Project Thesis: Design Issues of Local Area Networks
Advised by: Prof. Sakhawat Hossain
Appointments at USask
| 2019-Present | Professor, Computer Science |
| 2014-19 | Associate Professor, Computer Science |
| 2009-14 | Assistant Professor, Computer Science |
Honours
| 2019 | New Researcher Award, University of Saskatchewa. This competition is among all the young professors (within 10 years of PhD) with the University of Saskatchewan. |
| 2018 | CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prizes. This competition is among all the young computer science professors (within 10 years of PhD) in Canada. |
| 2018 | 10-year Most Influential Paper Award (MIP) at The 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER’18), Campobasso, Italy for WCRE 2008 paper, ” C. K. Roy, James R. Cordy: An empirical study of function clones in open source software”. An MIP award certificate with the following citation: “For influencing future studies in software cloning through the development of an extensive benchmark dataset“ |
| 2018 | 10-year Most Influential Paper Award (MIP) at the 26th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2018) for ICPC 2008 paper, ” C. K. Roy, James R. Cordy: NICAD: Accurate Detection of Near-Miss Intentional Clones Using Flexible Pretty-Printing and Code Normalization”. |
| 2018 | New Scientist Research Award, College of Arts and Science, University of Saskatchewan, 2018. This competition is among all the young Science Professors (within 10 years) of the College and only one was awarded in this category. |
| 2018 | TCSE Distinguished Paper Award Nomination with M. M. Rahman at ICSME 2018, the 34th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2018), pp. 473-484, Madrid, Spain. |
| 2016 | Excellence in Supervision Award (2015-16) from the Department of Computer Science of University of Saskatchewan. |
| 2016 | Best paper award with Svajlenko at SEKE 2016, 28th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2016), 426-433, Redwood City, California. |
| 2014 | Best Paper Award with Kitnab et al., CASCON 2014, the 2014 Conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research, Toronto, Canada. |
| 2014 | Beat Paper Nomination Certificate Award, ICSME 2014, 30th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution. |
| 2014 | Second Best Poster Award, CSER 2014, Consortium for Software Engineering Research (CSER), Spring Meeting, April 2014, Edmonton, Canada. |
| 2012 | Best Paper Award, with Mondal et al., ACM SAC 2012, 27th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. |
| 2009 | Best Paper Award, 4th Mutation Workshop. |
| 2008 | Best Poster paper Award, Canadian Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering. |