Software and Programmer Efficiency Research Group

Welcome to the web site of the Sape research group at the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Lugano. Our group is interested in the area between programming languages, runtime systems, and software engineering, with a focus on the efficiency of software, its users, and its developers.

Explore our Publications and Tools to find out more about our work, and check out the list of our Group Members.

Concurrency	Essence of Software
Perceptible Performance	Programmer Education

Open Positions

Are you an excellent student interested in doing a PhD in the areas of programming languages and software engineering? In our ParaBoost project we currently have two fully-funded PhD student positions focusing on research on concurrent speculative execution in virtual machines. And in our FAN project we are looking for fully funded PhD students and a post-doc for research on the foundations of dynamic analysis.

Meeting Us

If you are interested in our research, and if you are in Switzerland or the Milan area, contact us, and we can meet up. You can also meet us at the following events:

• Evaluate'12 workshop, Beijing, China, June 15, 2012
  Collaboration involving Matthias on "Improving Experimental Evaluation through Education"
• ECOOP'12 conference, Beijing, China, June 14-16, 2012
• PLDI'12 conference, Beijing, China, June 11-13, 2012
  Talk by Dmitrijs "Algorithmic Profiling"
• USER'12 workshop at ICSE, Zurich, Switzerland, June 5, 2012
  Dmitrijs discussing "Is Essence a Measure of Maintainability?"
• IFIP WG 2.4 Meeting, Vadstena, Sweden, May 20-25, 2012
  Participation by Matthias as an observer
• Imperial College, London, Friday-Saturday, February 24-25, 2012
  Participation in ECOOP'12 PC Meeting by Matthias
• Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, Friday, October 28, 2011
  Talk by Matthias "Software: Design and Performance"
• SPLASH/OOPSLA'11 conference, Portland, OR, October 23-27, 2011
  Talk by Milan "Catch Me If You Can: Performance Bug Detection in the Wild"
• EduSymp'11 symposium, Wellington, Tuesday, October 18, 2011
  Talk by Matthias "Models and Clickers for Teaching Computer Science"
• MODELS'11 conference, Wellington, October 16-21, 2011
  Talk by Dmitrijs "Vision Paper: The Essence of Structural Models"
• Victoria University of Wellington, Friday, October 14, 2011
  Talk by Matthias and Dmitrijs "Software: Design and Performance"

Why Sape?

Sape stands for "software and programmer efficiency". Our research goal is to measure, understand, and improve the efficiency of systems, software, and the humans who use and develop them. Sape also is the name of an instrument, which is a nice pun, given that we often "instrument" systems to observe their behavior. Moreover, SAPE is the Nasdaq stock symbol for "Sapient", which means "wisdom, or the ability of an organism or entity to act with judgment". Currently, all members of our group are homo sapiens.