REUSE Alumnus Receives Prestigious Goldwater Scholarship

Research Experience for Undergraduates in Software Engineering (REUSE) program alumnus John Billos was among those to be awarded the highly prestigious Barry S. Goldwater Scholarship for excellence in STEM research, leadership, and potential . 

Established in 1986. The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue research careers in the fields of the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics. The Goldwater Scholarship is the preeminent under-graduate award of its type in these fields.

Billos, a junior at Wake Forest University studying Computer Science, was a member of Summer 2021 REUSE cohort. As a part of the program, Billos worked closely alongside Institute for Software Research faculty members Vincent Hellendoorn and Rohan Padhye on a project which aimed to analyze the naturalness of fuzzer-generated tests. Results from that work formed the basis of a paper, “On the Naturalness of Fuzzer-Generated Code”, which was presented at the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2022) earlier this month. 

With support from the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates’ program, the REUSE program is geared towards providing undergraduate students from institutions with limited software engineering research opportunities the chance to work on challenging, innovative research projects. Students spend the summer on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus working closely with the Institute for Software Research’s renowned faculty to explore topics ranging from information visualization to self-adaptive system architecture. Capitalizing on the ISR’s tradition in collaborative and cross-disciplinary research, students in the REUSE program have the chance to work with researchers across the School of Computer Science, including Societal Computing, Human Computer Interaction, Robotics, and more.