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ISSTA: Post-conference post by Lina QiuThu 2 Aug 2018

Hi everyone, this is Lina Qiu. I attended the ISSTA conference this year, and was also a student volunteer for the conference. I enjoyed the conference a lot, and learned many things. First, I am so touched by people’s passions about doing researches in the community, no matter who they are. Everyone is so passionate about their research topics, and they love what they do. Even when they are very well-know professors, they are still passionate about solving problems via doing researches, and they are still passionate when they are talking about works they did like a decades ago. This impresses me a lot, and what I learned from this is that to be a good researcher, one need to be passionate about the researches they are doing all the time. During the conference, I also met with a couple of well-known professors, like Dr. Frank Tip, Dr. Andreas Zeller, Dr. Julian Dolby, etc. I had very fruitful discussions with them, regarding what are the things that professors/supervisors care the most about a PhD applicant, if industry working experiences is good for pursuing a PhD degree, and how to do great during PhD studies, etc. I also met with Dr. Eric Borden, to discuss some potential future collaborations. And that discussion was also inspiring. As for the talks that caught my interest, the top one on the list must be the keynote talk (Pluggable Type Systems Reconsidered) given by Dr. Michael D. Ernst. The talk itself is also very entertaining. I learned a lot from the talk, like how to do researches with good quality, and how important a research project need to be reproducible, and how to be a good researcher and also a good talker/presenter, etc. Other talks that I also enjoyed a lot include “Test input generation with Java PathFinder: Then and Now”, “CiD: Automating the Detection of API-related Compatibility Issues in Android Apps”, etc. I also like the poster session, during which I had many interesting discussions with other students and professors, and learned a lot about different research topics in the field. To conclude, I really enjoyed the conference, and would love to attend more conferences like this again in the future!