Miryung Kim

Biography

Miryung Kim is a Professor and Vice Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA's Computer Science Department. She has done early work in mining software repositories, a field now recognized as AI for Software Engineering. Her work on clone clones laid the groundwork for automated clone detection, removal, and management. These insights into code clones became foundational for the current landscape of AI-powered coding assistants. She received two Test of Time awards for her contributions to understanding Android API stability and adoption, and for refactoring identification from version histories by tracking clones in evolving software. Her studies on refactoring in industry have also contributed understanding into how large-scale systems are re-architected for continuous evolution.

Beyond her work on code clones, she led the first large-scale study into the emerging role of data scientists. This research identified key subcategories of data-focused roles in software teams and influenced the development of new data science majors at universities. Driven by the need to support data-intensive development, she has helped establish new directions in Software Engineering for data intensive computing and heterogeneous computing. Her group has developed a series of data-intensive developer tools, making code-centric tools viable within data-intensive environments such as Apache Spark.

She has produced eight tenure-track faculty members at institutions such as Columbia, Purdue, and Virginia Tech. For her dedication to nurturing the next generation of academics, she received the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award in 2022. She has also served as a Program Co-Chair of FSE 2022 and has been a Keynote Speaker at ASE 2019 and ISSTA 2022. She gave Distinguished Lectures at CMU, UIUC, etc. Additionally, she spent time as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research, and is an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Web Services.

Awards and Honors: She received an ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award, an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, two 10 Year Retrospective Test of Time Awards from ICSME, an NSF CAREER award, a Microsoft Software Engineering Innovation Foundation Award, an IBM Jazz Innovation Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and an Okawa Foundation Research Award. She is a Humboldt Fellow from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and is an ACM Distinguished Member. Details on awards.

History: She graduated as No. 1 among all students in KAIST and received the Korean Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology Award, the highest honor given to an undergraduate student in Korea. She received her MS and PhD from the University of Washington under the supervision of David Notkin. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, moved to UCLA as an Associate Professor with tenure in 2014, and was promoted to a Full Professor in 2019. 

Diversity: She is recognized for my impact on diversity and inclusion at UCLA, serving as a faculty-in-residence for eight years. She received the Robert Stevensen Faculty in Residence Award (given to one faculty in each year). She created Mommy Computer Science Camp, featured in PC Magazine. 

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