Bio

Biography

Prof. Chanchal Roy is Professor of Software Engineering/Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. While he has been working on a broad range of topics in Computer Science, his chief research interest is Software Engineering. In particular, he is interested in software maintenance and evolution, including clone detection, Big Data analytics, recommendation systems, empirical software engineering, crowdsourcing and mining software repositories. He is 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.

He has written more than 150 publications that have been cited more than 6,000 times (Google Scholar profile). His contributions to the software maintenance community, and particularly to the cloning community, have been highly influential. He has recently been awarded with two Most Influential Paper (MIP) awards: he has been recognized with a ten-year MIP award at SANER 2018 for their WCRE 2008 paper (with Jim Cordy) on analysis of function clones in open source software, he has also been awarded another MIP award at ICPC 2018 for their ICPC 2008 paper on NiCad clone detection tool. He has been recognized with several prestigious awards. He received the New Scientist Research Award of the College of Arts and Science of the University of Saskatchewan and the University wide New Researcher 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 and invited speaker at SANER 2018, ICPC 2018 and at IEEE R10HTC 2018. He serves widely on the program committees of major software engineering conferences such as ICSE, ASE, ICSME, SANER, MSR, ICPC and SCAM. He served (has been serving) as chairs and/or organizing committee members in most of the conferences of his area including General Chair for ICPC 2014, SCAM 2019, IWSC 2015 and Program Co-chairs for IWSC 2012 and ICPC 2018. He is in the editorial board of Journal of Systems and Software 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.

He has attracted over $4M in external funding since joining at University of Saskatchewan, including an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement Grant, leading an industry stream inter-University NSERC CREATE grant Software Analytics Research (SOAR) and leading major roles in two CFREF grants in Food Security and Water Security. 

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.