Biography and education
Shibbir Ahmed is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas State University. He received his Ph.D in 2024 from Iowa State University under the supervision of Professor Dr. Hridesh Rajan.
His research spans the intersection of Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science. He is particularly working on Software Engineering for trustworthy Machine Learning. Recently, he has worked on ensuring the reliability of Deep Learning software by specifying and checking contracts on deep learning APIs. He proposed design by contracts for deep learning APIs. Recently, he has developed an innovative method for inferring preconditions from deep learning models and utilized them to determine the trustworthiness of its prediction during deployment. He has collaborated on various research projects, resulting in publications at peer-reviewed conferences and journals, including ICSE and ESEC/FSE, EMSE, and TDS, with support from the US National Science Foundation. Furthermore, he has served as an external and sub-reviewer for the conferences, MSR, ASE, ICSE, and journals TSE, TOSEM, etc.
His research spans the intersection of Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science. He is particularly working on Software Engineering for trustworthy Machine Learning. Recently, he has worked on ensuring the reliability of Deep Learning software by specifying and checking contracts on deep learning APIs. He proposed design by contracts for deep learning APIs. Recently, he has developed an innovative method for inferring preconditions from deep learning models and utilized them to determine the trustworthiness of its prediction during deployment. He has collaborated on various research projects, resulting in publications at peer-reviewed conferences and journals, including ICSE and ESEC/FSE, EMSE, and TDS, with support from the US National Science Foundation. Furthermore, he has served as an external and sub-reviewer for the conferences, MSR, ASE, ICSE, and journals TSE, TOSEM, etc.
Teaching Interests
Research Interests
Featured scholarly/creative works
- Rajan, H., Imtiaz, S. M., & Ahmed, S. (2024). Engineering Deep Learning Models Through Decomposition, Modularization, and Interface Specifications. In Proceedings of the 2030 Software Engineering (SE’2030) colocated with The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2024) (p. 4). ACM. Retrieved from https://conf.researchr.org/home/2030-se
- Ahmed, S., Gao, H., & Rajan, H. (2024). Inferring Data Preconditions from Deep Learning Models for Trustworthy Prediction in Deployment. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 1–13). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3597503.3623333
- Ahmed, S., Imtiaz, S. M., Khairunnesa, S. S., Cruz, B. D., & Rajan, H. (2023). Design by Contract for Deep Learning APIs. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. San Francisco, CA, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). https://doi.org/10.1145/3611643.3616247
- Khairunnesa, S. S., Ahmed, S., Imtiaz, S. M., Rajan, H., & Leavens, G. T. (2023). What kinds of contracts do ML APIs need? Empirical Software Engineering, 28(6). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10320-z
- Ahmed, S., Islam, M. J., & Rajan, H. (2022). Semantics and Anomaly Preserving Sampling Strategy for Large-Scale Time Series Data. ACM/IMS Transactions on Data Science, 2(4), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3511918
Featured awards
- Award / Honor Recipient: Publication Award for publishing research paper at FSE'2023 and ICSE’2024, Iowa State University. 2023 - 2024
- Award / Honor Recipient: Research Excellence Award recognizing outstanding research accomplishments, Iowa State University. 2019 - 2024
- Award / Honor Recipient: Awarded 2nd place at poster presentation, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University. 2023
- Award / Honor Recipient: NSF Travel Grant to attend and present poster at Midwest PL Summit, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 2023
- Award / Honor Recipient: ACM SIGPLAN Travel Grant for attending PLDI’2023, SIGPLAN Professional Activities Committee. 2023

Featured service activities
- Reviewer / Referee
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
- Reviewer / Referee
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE)
- Member
Comprehensive Exam Committee
- Reviewer / Referee
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’2024) Technical Track Sub-Reviewer
- Other
39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2024)
- Other
21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR’2024)