Introducing Dr Valerio Terragni and his Research in Software Testing

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Since early 2021, Valerio Terragni has been a Lecturer in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Software Engineering at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. Valerio completed a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Computer Science at The University of Milano-BICOCCA, in Milan, Italy. In 2017, he obtained his PhD in Computer Science from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong. From 2017 to 2020, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the USI Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. 

Valerio research interests are in the area of software testing and program analysis. In particular, much of his past and current research projects focus on the automatic generation of test cases and oracles, genetic programming and search-based software engineering, mobile app testing and analysis, and testing non-deterministic software systems. You can find more information about his research and publications here https://valerio-terragni.github.io/

Valerio is the principal investigator of a research project awarded with a Facebook Research grant of 100,000 USD in the 2021 round. This grant will enable Valerio to investigate new methods to automatically test Web Enable Simulations (WES) of the Facebook platform. More specifically, Facebook has recently deployed MIA (Metamorphic Interaction Automaton) to test a WES of the Facebook platform. MIA relies on manually-crafted metamorphic relations to address the test oracle problem. Metamorphic relations express relations that are expected to hold among multiple executions of the software system under test. However, manually identifying metamorphic relations is a costly and labor-intensive activity. Indeed, many metamorphic relations might exist – currently unknown to Facebook engineers – that capture behaviors and properties of Social Networks that are useful to expose platform faults. To address this limitation, this project aims at leveraging Valerio’s recent research outcomes to automatically generate metamorphic relations for WESs. 

For more information about the grant and the announcement of the winners, check here: https://research.fb.com/blog/2021/09/announcing-the-winners-of-the-2021-rfp-on-agent-based-user-interaction-simulation-to-find-and-fix-integrity-and-privacy-issues/