Software Automation, Generation & Engineering
Building the next generation of
intelligent developer tools
The SAGE Lab is a software engineering research lab in Orlando, FL, affiliated with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. We study how engineers build software — and design the automation that helps them do it faster and more accurately.
The lab also engages in consulting activities across a range of clients, delivering fast, focused solutions to the software, AI, and IT problems faced by modern companies & organizations.
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$5M+
In external research funding
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45
Publications since 2021
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11
Sponsored research awards
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16
Students mentored
About the lab
We make it as easy as possible for engineers to go from ideas to working software.
Our research
The SAGE Research Lab pursues a more complete understanding of how engineers build software, and designs the next generation of intelligent tools to automate the software engineering process. Our work spans AI for software engineering, agentic software engineering, bug reporting, software security, and automated UI analysis — combining machine learning, program analysis, computer vision, and natural language processing to attack problems that practicing developers actually face.
Awards & funding
Our research is award-winning: our papers appear at the top publication venues in software engineering, machine learning, and computer security and have earned multiple Distinguished Paper Awards. The lab's director is also a recipient of the National Science Foundation's prestigious CAREER Award. Sustaining the Lab's work takes real investment, and we are fortunate to have earned over $5 million in external funding from government agencies and industry partners.
Consulting
Beyond academic research, the lab brings its expertise directly to practice through consulting services for companies, government bodies, and legal clients — advising on software engineering process and quality, on adopting AI and agents across the development lifecycle, and on the technical questions that arise in audits and litigation.
Our people
We are equally proud of our people. The lab is a training ground: students work on research from their first semester, publish at major conferences, and present their results internationally. Our alumni go on to high-caliber positions at leading technology companies and research institutions, and through our teaching and mentorship we help educate the software engineering and technology workforce of Florida and the nation.
What we work on
Research focus areas
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AI for Software Engineering
Our lab conducts research that aims to leverage new advances in artificial intelligence (with a focus on MLLMs & Deep Learning) to help build automated developer tools. Additionally, we examine how to best design tools and practices to engineer reliable systems that make use of artificial intelligence.
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Agentic Software Engineering
Coding agents are being handed more and more of the software engineering process. We work on making them genuinely useful to developers, and on understanding what they can and cannot do — using machine learning interpretability techniques to explain their behavior and designing new forms of benchmarking to measure it honestly.
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Bug Reporting
Given the complexity of modern applications, bugs often continue to persist after release, and users need effective mechanisms to report them. Our research has pioneered interactive bug reporting systems, and we continue to advance error reporting methods for software.
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Software Security
Given that software is interwoven into users' personal lives, the stakes of software security and privacy have never been higher. Our research examines how we can apply software engineering principles and practices to help ensure the security of complex software systems.
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Automated UI Analysis
The Graphical User Interface represents a rich source of information that describes software in a visual manner, allowing users to intuitively understand software functionality. Our research aims to automatically analyze user interfaces to automate software tasks.
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Open Science
Our lab follows open science practices. We strive to make all of our papers, software, and data freely available to the public to support replication, scientific progress, and the advancement of software engineering research.
Latest
Lab News
- July 2026: The third SAGE Lab Ph.D. student has graduated! Congrats to SM Hasan Mansur for defending his dissertation “Automated User Interface Design and Understanding through Multimodal Artificial Intelligence”. Hasan joins Stephen F. Austin State University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Fall 2026!
- July 2026: One research-track paper entitled “Automated Program Repair for UI-centric Android Bugs: How Far are We?” accepted to ISSTA'26! Congrats to SAGE Lab members Junayed, Sparsh, and Atish!
- June 2026: One industry-track paper entitled “Lost in Transmission: An Information Theoretic Account of Unsupervised Software Traceability” accepted to ICSME'26!
- June 2026: One vision paper entitled “Test Coverage Analysis of Agentic Pull Requests” accepted to ICSME'26! Congrats to SAGE Lab member Atish!
- May 2026: The second SAGE Lab Ph.D. student has graduated! Congrats to Junayed Mahmud for defending his dissertation “Multimodal Learning for Automated Bug Report Management”. Junayed joins Deloitte as a Machine Learning Engineer!
- May 2026: One research paper entitled “Fusing UI Structure and Semantics for Feature-oriented App Screen Retrieval and Clustering” accepted to ICSME'26! Congrats to SAGE Lab member Arun!
- May 2026: One journal paper entitled “Reassessing Code Authorship Attribution in the Era of Large Language Models” accepted to TOSEM! Congrats to SAGE Lab member Atish!
- March 2026: I have been recognized as a “Reach for the Stars” awardee by UCF for 2026 — the university's highest honor given to pre-tenure faculty. Thanks UCF!
Have a hard software problem?
The lab's consulting practice brings university-grade expertise in software engineering and AI to industry, government, and legal clients — from process and quality reviews to custom tooling and expert testimony.