Exciting Opportunity: If you are working on Trustworthy & Responsible AI we invite you to our Community Workshop on Nov 4-5 at CU Boulder to find how you can collaborate with our PhD students and faculty from 4 top research universities. I would love to schedule a discovery session to learn how we can serve you with our resources.

SHORT BIO
Danny Dig is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Following an entrepreneurial leave at JetBrains Research, he leads research on trustworthy agentic AI and Generative AI for Software Engineering, combining large language models with program analysis and human oversight to build more reliable AI systems. Danny is the founder and Executive Director of the NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center on Pervasive Personalized Intelligence (PPI Center) and is leading a multi-university initiative to establish a large-scale Center on Trustworthy AI. His research has received 12 distinguished paper and impact awards, and software developed by his research group has been incorporated into widely used developer tools used by millions of software engineers every day. His research is funded by NSF, Google, Microsoft, Intel, JetBrains, Oracle, IBM, Trimble, NEC, and Boeing.

RESEARCH INTERESTS
Successful software undergoes constant change. Our research addresses two important questions:

1. What changes occur most often in practice?
2. How can we automate them to improve programmers' productivity and software quality?

General interests:- Agentic software engineering, automated refactoring, LLM-powered program analysis and transformation, design & architectural patterns, and broadly interested in concurrency and parallelism, mobile computing, software development processes, program analysis, software testing, and software evolution

Practical Research Impact:

• our research on detecting async errors in .NET programs now ships with the official release of Microsoft Visual Studio
• ICSM'05 paper wins the Most Influential Paper Award (N-10 years) at ICSME'15. The citation reads "The ICSM'05 paper has had the most impact and has stood the test of time best, it has had a profound influence on the upcoming field of API analysis."
• our refactorings that empower Java programmers to use lambda expressions are shipping with the official release of the NetBeans IDE.
• PhD research on record-and-replay of API-level refactoring ships with the official release of the Eclipse IDE and are used by millions of Java developers.
• the automatic inference of refactorings has been used at large companies like Google and IBM, and dozens of research labs.
• our ASTGen test generation framework is used in the testing infrastructure at Oracle.
• empirical studies (one and two) on usage of concurrent libraries have influenced the development of the official libraries in .NET and Java.
• our resource on learning parallelism in .NET receives more than 150,000 visitors.
• I developed the world's first open-source refactoring engine for Java, and was downloaded over 17,000 times.

NEWS:

• July 2026: I am humbled and grateful to receive the Most Influential Paper award (N-10 years) at ASE'26 for our paper on the practice of Continuous Integration in Open-Source Software.
• June 2026: I am grateful to CU Boulder's Research and Innovation Office (RIO) for funding our planning workshop for a new Center on Trustworthy AI. We invite leaders from industry, academia, and government to join us in building the foundations of responsible and trustworthy AI.
• June 2026: I am grateful and deeply honored to receive the 20-year Test of Time award at ECOOP'26 for our refactoring detection paper from ECOOP'06. Once you experience the significance of enabling a whole community of researchers go further and do more, personal success no longer matters.
• May 2026: In Fall'26 I'm excited to teach the second iteration of the course on Building AI Agents (CSCI 7000-009).
• Nov 2025: Excited to speak about GenAI and how it shapes future leaders at the AI Summit in NY.
• Nov 2025: Stoked to announce two GenAI classes I am teaching in Spring'26. (i) Building Software Agents -- CSCI 7000-005 -- we design, build, and evaluate GenAI-powered software agents through cutting-edge research discussions and a hands-on team project that students can showcase in their portfolio or resume. (ii) AI-Driven Leadership -- CSCI 7000-006 -- we discover how to harness generative AI as a thinking partner to enhance strategic reasoning, problem-solving, and leadership in this hands-on seminar for future technical leaders.
• April 2025: Excited to launch a brand-new course on GenAI-powered Software Engineering in Fall 2025. We are exploring how GenAI improves the developer productivity and learn new software development workflows enabled by AI Assistants and Agents.
• April 2025: We are doing a 2-day version of the AIware Bootcamp at the ICSE'25 conference. Register and details here.
• Oct 2024: I am joining a group of thought leaders teaching how to use GenAI for software engineering development and research. Learn more about the AIware Leadership Bootcamp.
• May 2024: I gave a webinar at JetBrains Academy on understanding, connecting, and effective teaching Gen Z students.
• April 2024: We organized the IDE Workshop at ICSE'24, building up a community of researchers and IDE builders that deeply care about practical impact on software developers by leveraging the massive outreach of IDEs.
• Feb 2022: I am honored to receive the IoT Innovator of 2021 award, and to be in a community of thought leaders who are shaping the future of IoT systems. I view this award as truly a recognition for our whole team of faculty, students, and industry members at the PPI Center.
• Sept 2021: Congratulations to my PhD student Malinda Dilhara for winning the first prize in the ACM Student Research Competition at the flagship ACM conference in SE (FSE'21) for novel research that improves the productivity of ML engineers.
• Aug 2021: Congratulations to my PhD student Ameya Ketkar for successfully defending his PhD dissertation on Automating Type Changes. And many thanks to collaborators, colleagues, and members of his committee: it truly takes a village to raise a world-class PhD researcher.
• Sept 2020: Launching the PPI Center despite all the challenges caused by a pandemic. Watch this short video to see how we add value to industry.

SELECTED AWARDS

• Most Impactful Paper (N-10) Award at ASE'26 for our ASE'16 paper.
• AITO Test of Time (N-20) Award at ECOOP'26 for our ECOOP'06 paper.
• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FSE'17 for this paper.
• IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award at ICSME'17 for this paper.
• ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Artifact Award at OOPSLA'17 for this paper
• Google Faculty Research Award (twice: in 2017 and 2015)
• IBM Best Paper Award at HICSS'17 for this paper.
• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FSE'16 for this paper
• 2016 NSF CAREER Award
• Most Influential Paper Award (N-10 years) at ICSME'15 for this paper from ICSM'05
• Best Paper Award at ICSME'15 for this paper
• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE'14 for this paper
• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ISSTA'13 for this paper
• Best Paper Award at ICST'13 for this paper
• Microsoft Software Engineering Innovation Foundation award, twice: in 2011 and 2013
• Best PhD Thesis Award from the CS department at UIUC (and also department-nominated for ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award)
• 1st Prize at inter-disciplinary Grand Finals of ACM Student Research Competition, 2006
• 1st Prize at ACM SIGPLAN Student Research Competition, held at OOPSLA'05

LEADERSHIP and SERVICE:

• Faculty Mentoring Chair: OOPSLA'21, ICSE'20, ASE'19, ICSE'19, ICSME'19, FSE'18
• Program Committee: FSE'27, FSE'26, ICSE'25, ICSE'22, ICSE'20, ICSE'19, ICSME'19, ICSE'17, ICSE'16 (Visions 2025 Track), ASE'15, ICSE'15 (NIER track), ASE'14, OOPSLA'13, ECOOP'13, ASE'13, IPDPS'13, ICSM'13, ICSE'13 (NIER track), FSE'12, OOPSLA'12 (ERC), ECOOP'12 (ERC), ICSM'12, MSEPT'12, WRT'12, CSMR'12, ISSTA'11, PPoPP'11 (ERC), ACM Student Research Competition at ICSE'11, Research Demos @ FSE'10, IWPSE'10, OOPSLA'09, IWMSE'09, IWPSE'09, WRT'09, HotSWUp'09
• Proceedings Chair: OOPSLA'13
• Co-Chair: IDE'26, IDE'25, IDE'24, MobileSoft'15, HotSWUp'12, WRT'11, WRT'08, HotSWUp'08
• Publicity Chair: ICSM'10.
• Chair: Doctoral Symposium @ ECOOP'07, WRT'07, PLoP'04

MOTTO "Success is not for the chosen few, but for the few who choose" - John Maxwell