Research & Development
Postdoctoral Position in Software Engineering: Program Analysis and Repository Mining
Summary
The postdoctoral researcher will investigate software repair without test suites or specifications, combining program analysis with patterns mined from software. The role includes designing, implementing, and evaluating a framework across languages.
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Opportunity summary
Employment type: Full time. Requisition: 4341. A 2-year postdoctoral researcher position is available at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in the Software Engineering section of the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute (MMMI). The successful candidate will contribute to the VILLUM Experiment project “Is Correctness Necessary?
An Experiment in Test-Free Program Repair.” The project investigates whether software bugs can be repaired using information found in the code itself, without relying on test suites or specifications. The position is available from February 1, 2027.
The application deadline is November 15, 2026, at 11:59 PM/23:59 (CET/CEST) Project Description Generating code is becoming cheap; establishing whether it is correct is not. Large language models can now produce and modify software at remarkable speed, and practices such as “vibe coding” are widening the gap between code generation and validation.
Requiring a carefully designed test suite or specification for every generated fragment is unlikely to scale. Yet most automated repair techniques depend on exactly such a correctness oracle: without a failing test or specification, they have neither a clear repair target nor a way to assess a proposed change.
This project challenges that dependency by investigating whether software bugs can be repaired using evidence already present in the code1 …
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