SURE Summer Symposium winner values experience in iSE Lab

Chi Vu spent the summer as an NSERC USRA student working under the supervision of Dr. Banani Roy in the Interactive Software Engineering and Analytics Lab (iSE Lab).

Vu decided to pursue an NSERC USRA in the iSE Lab after taking Dr. Roy's CMPT 270 course. "Through her lecture delivery and overall demeanour, I could tell that Dr. Roy was a professor who cared about her students and wanted them to do well in the class," she recounted. "I wanted to be a part of her research and gain some experience relevant to my field of study."

Dr. Roy, iSE's lab director, and her research team​ primarily focus on engineering Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMSs) to support large-scale data analysis for scientists. Dr. Roy has been awarded ​the NSERC discovery grant with supplement based on this research. They have ​already developed two cloud-based SWfMSs, VizSciFlow and SciWorCS, that are being used by some P²IRC researchers.

By engineering the systems, Dr. Roy along with her HQP and collaborators have been working on driving novel analytic techniques, such as computational architectures for analyzing data, high-throughput workflows for analysis and computation of large datasets, computational and statistical methods for analysis, data provenance, and distributed processing of heterogeneous data. 

The iSE lab research team also focuses on software analytics research​, which aims to study cost​, benefit, and risk issues using controlled experiments, user studies, mining software repositories, and empirical studies in interactive and collaborative software developments. With this work, they propose new theories, programming abstractions and concepts, techniques​, and tools to assist developers in the cost-effective and predictable design, implementation, reengineering, maintenance, and evolution of scalable, sustainable, and trustworthy software systems.

VizSciFlow, a visually guided script-based framework for supporting composition of complex scientific workflows with minimal cognitive load concisely but precisely, is a collaborative research project of Dr.  Roy where she works with other P²IRC researchers, including Dr. Kevin Schneider, Dr. Chanchal Roy and Dr. Lingling Jin. PhD student Mainul Hossain has been actively working with Dr. Roy and other collaborators to develop VizSciFlow. Multiple research papers on prestigious venues have already published based on this research project, and several are underway.

Over the summer, Vu worked on integrating different bioinformatics tools in VizSciFlow for composing workflows. She also developed multiple bioinformatics workflows that can be run in VizSciFlow more efficiently and effectively than popular existing platforms such as Galaxy and CoGe. 

Her time in the iSE Lab has been an enlightening experience for Vu. "This project definitely piqued my interest in research," she said. "I like the nature of the work and the excitement of learning existing knowledge while also creating new knowledge. I have learned so much and enjoyed every moment of it. After this summer, I will continue working in the lab part-time in addition to taking classes."

Thinking of the future, Vu isn't counting anything out. "Working in research showed me reasons to pursue a career in academia. I will keep them in mind as I continue exploring my options."

Read more about the SURE Summer Symposium here.