About Ben
Ben Smith is a third year PhD student in Computer Science at North Carolina State University working as a research assistant with Dr. Laurie Williams. He received his Bachelor's in Computer Science in May of 2007, and received his Master's of Science in Computer Science in May of 2009, and he hopes to receive his doctorate some time in 2012.
This fall, Ben will continue work on developing SQL Hotspot Coverage Metrics; more detail can be found in his SESS 2008 Paper on the subject. This past summer, Ben interned at IBM's Research Triangle Park location, helping to develop cloud computing solutions. This past spring, he worked as a Testing Manager for the NCSU CSC Senior Design Center (North Carolina State's capstone course for CSC).
He has also written an open source plugin, MuClipse which incorporates mutation testing into the popular IDE Eclipse. He has submitted an extended work on an empirical user study with Mutation Analysis tools to the Journal of Systems and Software, which has been accepted with minor revisions. Additionally, he has designed and created the website for ESEM 2009, and written several tutorials for open source (and proprietary) software development tools.
Extracurricular
Ben also enjoys playing Jazz Piano and has participated in many bands over the years, including the NC State Jazz Combo (2003-2009) and NC State Jazz Big Bands (I, II and III, 2003-2005). The NC State Jazz Combo has provided background music for many events, such as the Park Scholar's dinner, and this year's visit by President William Jefferson Clinton. He has also sat in with the Raleigh Jazz Orchestra. He plays many North Carolina State functions, including the Park Scholar's dinner, the Hood award dinner, the Founder's Day Dinner, sthe Menscer Cup, and the NC State Athletic Convention. Whereas computer science acts as Ben's scientific, mathematical foundation; music offers him a chance to be creative, social and collaborative. Many of Ben's musical products are contained on a web application he wrote called BINK!
Research
Journal Papers
- B. Smith and L. Williams, On Guiding the Augmentation of an Automated Test Suite via Mutation Analysis, Empirical Software Engineering, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 341-369, 2009.
- B.H. Smith and L. Williams, Should software testers use mutation analysis to augment a test set? Journal of Systems Software, vol. 82, no. 11, pp. 1819-1832, 2009.
Conferences/Workshops
- B. H. Smith and L. Williams, An Empirical Evaluation of the MuJava Mutation Operators," Testing: Academic and Industrial Conference Practice and Research Techniques (MUTATION 2007). TAICPART-MUTATION 2007, pp. 193-202, 2007.
- B. Smith, Y. Shin, and L. Williams, Proposing SQL statement coverage metrics, Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on Software engineering for secure systems (SESS 2008), pp. 49-56, 2008.
Posters
- B. Smith and L. Williams, Only Grey Box Testing Can Detect Input Validation and Error Message Information Leakage Vulnerabilities, presented at State of the Art in Testing and Analysis Day (SATA), March 2009.
Technical Reports
- Smith B. and Williams, A survey on code coverage as a stopping criterion for unit testing, North Carolina State University, Technical Report #2008-22.
Service
- Local Arrangements, Web Chair, ESEM 2009