PhD Student
Carnegie Mellon University
Shrey Tiwari
Hey! I'm a PhD student in the Software and Societal Systems Department at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Rohan Padhye in the PASTA Lab. My research interests span Software Engineering, Programming Languages, and AI for Code.
My research aims to make software more reliable. I build precise static and dynamic analysis tools, develop automated testing techniques, study how bugs arise in real-world and AI-generated code, and use AI agents to detect and prevent bugs at scale.
During my PhD, I interned at Amazon's Automated Reasoning Group, advised by Dr. Rajeev Joshi and Dr. Vimuth Fernando, where I applied concurrency testing to Amazon Elastic File System. I also interned at Uber's Programming Systems group, advised by Dr. Sonal Mahajan and Dr. Yuxin Wang, where I used AI agents to validate static analysis alerts and improve automated code reviews. Before my PhD, I was a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India (Cloud Reliability team), advised by Dr. Akash Lal and Dr. Suman Nath, where I built program analysis tools to improve the reliability of Azure services.
News & Updates
🎉 Our paper on date/time pitfalls in open-source and LLM-generated Python code has been accepted to the Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) journal!
🧑🏻🏫 Teaching assistant for 17-313: Foundations of Software Engineering at CMU this fall!
🏔️ Excited to intern at Amazon in their Automated Reasoning Group this summer in Seattle!
🇧🇷 Attended ICSE 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil!
🏆 Honored to be selected as a Hima and Jive Fellow for the 2025-26 academic year! Grateful for this recognition and support of my research.
🎓 From student to guest lecturer - shared insights on bridging static analysis from research to production in CMU's Program Analysis class
🎙️ Excited to share my podcast episode! Dive into the wild world of temporal computations as I chat about my award-winning research on date/time bugs and my journey from industry to academia. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts!
🎉 Our paper on concurrency testing got accepted to OOPSLA 2025!
🧑🏻💻 Excited to kick off my summer internship with Uber's Programming Systems group
🏆 Delighted to receive the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MSR 2025!
🚀 One of my Uber internship projects is live! Learn more at Uber's uReview blog!
🧑🏻🏫 I will be mentoring a CMU undergraduate on her independent research study for the semester. More details to follow soon!
🎉 Our latest paper on date and time defects in software has been accepted to MSR 2025
👋 Serving as a Student Volunteer at SPLASH 2024. Come say hi if you're attending!
🧑🏻🏫 I will be mentoring three outstanding REU students throughout Summer '24. Update: Our paper on date and time defects in software is publicly available now!
🎓 I began my PhD journey at Carnegie Mellon University
🎉 Our paper on making software more robust against resource leaks has been accepted to OOPSLA 2023
🧑🏻💻 Joined Microsoft Research as a Research Fellow in the cloud reliability team led by Dr. Akash Lal
🎓 Graduated from PES University and joined Citrix as a Software Development Engineer
Publications
A Flood of Adoption, a Trickle of Change: A Representative OSS-500 Index of the AI Transition in Open-Source Software
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2027
Under Review
DateSAT: A Framework for Solving Date and Period Constraints
Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) 2027
Under Review
Chronically Buggy: Analyzing Date/Time Pitfalls in Open-Source and LLM-Generated Python Code
Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) 2026
It's About Time: An Empirical Study of Date and Time Bugs in Open-Source Python Software
Mining Software Repositories (MSR) 2025
🏆 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Fray: An Efficient General-Purpose Concurrency Testing Platform for the JVM
Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) 2025
Lightweight and Modular Resource Leak Checking (Extended Version)
State Of the Art in Program Analysis (SOAP) 2024
Inference of Resource Management Specifications
Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) 2023
Resource Leak Checker (RLC#) for C# code using CodeQL
Selected Projects
Application-Level Deterministic Simulation Testing for Distributed Systems
PASTA Lab, Carnegie Mellon University
Developing techniques that reduce a multi-node distributed system to a single multi-threaded process, so that controlled concurrency testing tools such as Fray can systematically explore component interactions, inject faults, and deterministically replay failures without changes to application code, and designing coverage-guided search strategies that steer the test exploration budget toward specific goals.
NilAway: An Intelligent Nil Panic Detection Tool for Go
Uber Technologies, Inc.
Built an LLM-agent post-processing stage for NilAway, Uber's static nil-panic detector for Go: the agent reasons over each reported alert, synthesizes a unit test that reproduces the panic, and ranks reproducible findings first so developers see validated bugs before unconfirmed warnings.
uReview: AI-Powered Automated Code Reviews
Uber Technologies, Inc.
Enhanced the review-generation pipeline of uReview, Uber's AI-powered code reviewer that analyzes over 90% of the company's roughly 65,000 weekly diffs, increasing the precision and recall of generated reviews and surfacing more actionable feedback for developers.
FixIt: A Precise and Scalable Dynamic Resource-Leak Detection Tool
Microsoft Research
Built FixIt, a dynamic resource-leak detector for C# and Java that adds lightweight instrumentation and drives the program with its existing unit-test suite, reaching approximately 79% accuracy.
Awards & Recognition
Hima and Jive Fellowship
Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D), Carnegie Mellon University
Selected as a Hima and Jive Fellow for the 2025-26 academic year in recognition of outstanding research contributions and academic excellence.
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2025), Ottawa, Canada
Honoured with the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for research presented at MSR 2025.
SIGPLAN Student Travel Grant
SPLASH 2024, Pasadena, USA
Received competitive SIGPLAN funding to present work at SPLASH 2024.
University Gold Medal
PES University
Awarded the Gold Medal for graduating 2nd out of 500+ Computer Science & Engineering students.
C.N.R Rao Merit Scholarship
PES University
Six-time recipient of the CNR Rao Merit Scholarship (every applicable semester).
MHRD Merit Scholarship
Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India
Six-time recipient of the MHRD Merit Scholarship (every applicable semester).
Teaching & Mentoring
Teaching Assistant
17-313: Foundations of Software Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
Teaching assistant for CMU's foundational software engineering course.
Research Study Mentor
PASTA Lab
Mentored an undergraduate student through her final-year research project, carried out as part of my ongoing research.
REUSE Program Mentor
Mentored three outstanding undergraduate students during the summer, contributing to CMU's recognition as having the best REU mentors in the United States.
Service
Admissions Committee
REUSE, 2026
Steering Committee
Software Engineering Seminar, 2025-2026
Reviewer
OOPSLA 2026, CAIS 2026, PLDI 2025, ISSTA 2024
Student Volunteer
SPLASH 2024
Past & Present Affiliations
