smartSE Research Group
Intelligence Software Engineering Research Group — part of the School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Nantong University. We work on intelligent software engineering, software repository mining, empirical software engineering, software testing and maintenance.
About the group
The group belongs to the School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at Nantong University and is led by Xiang Chen.
Our interests include intelligent software engineering, software repository mining, empirical software engineering, software testing and maintenance. See our representative papers, the competition results of our students, and their outstanding theses.
About the director
Xiang Chen received the B.Sc. degree in the School of Management from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, in 2002, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer software and theory from Nanjing University, China, in 2008 and 2011. He is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Nantong University.
He has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers in refereed journals and conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, ACM Computing Surveys, Empirical Software Engineering, Information and Software Technology, Journal of Systems and Software, and the ICSE, FSE, ASE, ISSTA, ICSME, ICPC, SANER and ISSRE conferences, as well as leading Chinese journals such as Science China Information Sciences, Chinese Journal of Computers and Journal of Software. His papers have received more than 6,700 citations with an h-index of 44 (October 2026).
His research interests include software engineering — in particular software testing and maintenance — security vulnerability detection and understanding, large language models for software engineering, software repository mining and empirical software engineering. He received ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at ICSE 2021 and ICPC 2023, and has been listed among Stanford University's World's Top 2% Scientists (2023–2026) and CNKI's Most Cited Chinese Researchers TOP 1% (2024–2025).
He serves on the editorial board of Information and Software Technology, as an executive committee member of the CCF Technical Committees on System Software (since 2019) and on Software Engineering (since 2020), and as a reviewer for more than fifty journals in software engineering. He has filed more than 40 domestic patents (30+ granted) and 53 registered software copyrights.
He has supervised 21 master's students, five of whom received the National Scholarship for Master's Students, and has mentored students to more than 300 awards in contests such as ACM ICPC, the China Collegiate Computing Contest, the China Graduate AI Innovation Contest, Challenge Cup and the China Collegiate Software Testing Contest.
Contact
Room 1406, Building 34, Nantong University, 9 Seyuan Road, Nantong, Jiangsu 226019, China
Email: xchencs@ntu.edu.cn