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GUSTAVO ANSALDI OLIVA

Gustavo Ansaldi Oliva
Hi, I'm a Principal Researcher at Huawei Canada and an Adjunct Professor at Queen's University.

At Huawei, I lead teams building LLM training and evaluation pipelines aimed at improving model capabilities in real-world software engineering tasks. My main research interests include SE4AI, AI4SE, and agentic software engineering. I am also interested in software ecosystems, software analytics, and programmable blockchains.

Before joining Queen's as an Adjunct Professor, I was a Research Fellow at the same university under the supervision of Prof. Ahmed Hassan. I earned my PhD from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil under the supervision of Prof. Marco Gerosa. Before joining Huawei, I worked for IBM Brazil and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

PUBLICATIONS

Last 10 years

Journal Papers

  1. [EMSE 25] Predicting long time contributors with knowledge units of programming languages: An Empirical Study. Md. Ahasanuzzaman, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan. Springer Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2025.
  2. [EMSE 24] UPC Sentinel: An Accurate Approach for Detecting Upgradeability Proxy Contracts in Ethereum. Amir Mohammad Ebrahimi, Bram Adams, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan. Springer Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2024.
  3. [EMSE 24] A Large-Scale Exploratory Study on the Proxy Pattern in Ethereum. Amir Mohammad Ebrahimi, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan. Springer Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2024.
  4. [ARXIV 24] Rethinking Software Engineering in the Foundation Model Era: A Curated Catalogue of Challenges in the Development of Trustworthy FMware. Ahmed E. Hassan, Dayi Lin, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Keheliya Gallaba, Filipe R. Cogo, Boyuan Chen, Haoxiang Zhang, Kishanthan Thangarajah, Gustavo A. Oliva, Jiahuei Lin, Wali Mohammad Abdullah, Zhen Ming Jiang. Arxiv 2024 (arXiv:2402.15943).
  5. [EMSE 23] Using Knowledge Units of Programming Languages to Recommend Reviewers for Pull Requests: An Empirical Study. Md. Ahasanuzzaman, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan. Springer Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2023.
  6. [TSE 23] Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Ethereum Smart Contracts: A Large-Scale Exploratory Study. Amir Mohammad Ebrahimi, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 2023.
  7. [JSS 23] Finding Associations between Natural and Computer Languages: A Case-Study of Bilingual Lda Applied to the Bleeping Computer Forum Posts. Kundi Yao, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan, Muhammad Asaduzzaman, Andrew Malton, and Andrew Walenstein. Journal of Systems and Software (JSS), 2023.
  8. [EMSE 22] What makes Ethereum blockchain transactions be processed fast or slow? An empirical study. Michael Pacheco, Gustavo A. Oliva, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, and Ahmed E. Hassan. Springer Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2022.
  9. [TOSEM 22] Is my transaction done yet? An empirical study of transaction processing times in the Ethereum Blockchain Platform. Michael Pacheco, Gustavo A. Oliva, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, and Ahmed E. Hassan. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 2022.
  10. [EMSE 21] An empirical study of same-day releases of popular packages in the npm ecosystem. Filipe Cogo, Gustavo A. Oliva, Cor-Paul Bezemer, and Ahmed E. Hassan. Springer Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2021.
  11. [TSE 21] The impact of feature importance methods on the interpretation of defect classifiers. Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Shaowei Wang, Gustavo A. Oliva, Yasutaka Kamei, Ahmed E. Hassan. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 2021.
  12. [TSE 21] Deprecation of packages and releases in software ecosystems: A case study on npm. Filipe Cogo, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 2021.
  13. [TOSEM 20] Developing Cost-Effective Blockchain-Powered Applications: A Case Study of the Gas Usage of Smart Contract Transactions in the Ethereum Blockchain Platform. Abdullah Ahmad Zarir, Gustavo A. Oliva, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang, Ahmed E. Hassan. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 2020.
  14. [EMSE 20] Code Cloning in Smart Contracts: A Case Study on Verified Contracts from the Ethereum Blockchain Platform. Masanari Kondo, Gustavo A. Oliva, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang, Ahmed E. Hassan, Osamu Mizuno. Springer Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2020.
  15. [EMSE 19] An Exploratory Study of Smart Contracts in the Ethereum Blockchain Platform. Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang. Springer Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2019.
  16. [TSE 19] An Empirical Study of Dependency Downgrades in the npm Ecosystem. Filipe Cogo, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 2019.
  17. [JSS 16] Using contextual information to predict co-changes. Igor S. Wiese, Reginaldo Ré, Igor Steinmacher, Rodrigo T. Kuroda, Gustavo A. Oliva, Christoph Treude, Marco A. Gerosa. Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) - Special Issue on Context for Software Development, 2016.
  18. [IJWSR 16] A Static Change Impact Analysis Approach based on Metrics and Visualizations to Support the Evolution of Workflow Repositories. Gustavo A. Oliva, Marco A. Gerosa, Fabio Kon, Dejan Milojicic, and Virginia Smith. International Journal of Web Services Research (IJWSR) - Special Issue on Data Quality in Big Data and Trust, 2016.
  19. [CAI 15] Evolving the System’s Core: A Case Study on the Identification and Characterization of Key Developers in Apache Ant. Gustavo A. Oliva, José Teodoro da Silva, Marco A. Gerosa, Francisco W. Santana, Claudia M. L. Werner, Cleidson R. B. de Souza, and Kleverton C. M. de Oliveira. Computing and Informatics (CAI) - Special Issue on Selected Papers from CRIWG, 2015.
  20. [LATAM 15] Do Historical Metrics and Developers Communication Aid to Predict Change Couplings? Igor S. Wiese, Rodrigo T. Kuroda, Reginaldo Ré, Rodrigo S. Bulhões, Gustavo A. Oliva, Marco A. Gerosa. IEEE Latin America Transactions (IEEE LATAM), 2015. (written in Brazilian Portuguese)
  21. [SOCA 13] A Systematic Literature Review of Service Choreography Adaptation. Leonardo A. F. Leite, Gustavo A. Oliva, Guilherme M. Nogueira, Marco A. Gerosa, Fabio Kon, and Dejan Milojicic. Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA), 2013.

Conference Papers

  1. [ASE 25] SPICE: An Automated SWE-Bench Labeling Pipeline for Issue Clarity, Test Coverage, and Effort Estimation. Gustavo Oliva, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Aaditya Bhatia, Haoxiang Zhang, Yihao Chen, Zhilong Chen, Arthur Leung, Dayi Lin, Boyuan Chen, Ahmed E. Hassan. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2025 (ASE). Research Track.
  2. [FSE 24] Rethinking Software Engineering in the Era of Foundation Models: A Curated Catalogue of Challenges in the Development of Trustworthy FMware. Ahmed E. Hassan, Dayi Lin, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Keheliya Gallaba, Filipe Roseiro Cogo, Boyuan Chen, Haoxiang Zhang, Kishanthan Thangarajah, Gustavo Oliva, Jiahuei (Justina) Lin, Wali Mohammad Abdullah, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang. ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, 2024 (FSE). Industry Track.
  3. [MSR 22] Mining the Ethereum Blockchain Platform: Best Practices and Pitfalls. Gustavo A. Oliva. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2022. Tutorial.
  4. [ESEC/FSE 21] The Gas Triangle and its Challenges to the Development of Blockchain-Powered Applications. Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan. ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), 2021. Ideas, Visions and Reflections (IVR) track.
  5. [ESEC/FSE 21] Code Cloning in Smart Contracts: A Case Study on Verified Contracts from the Ethereum Blockchain Platform. Masanari Kondo, Gustavo A. Oliva, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang, Ahmed E. Hassan, Osamu Mizuno. ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), 2021. Journal-first track.
  6. [ICSE 21] An Empirical Study of Dependency Downgrades in the npm Ecosystem. Filipe Cogo, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2021. Journal-first track.
  7. [ICSE 21] An Exploratory Study of Smart Contracts in the Ethereum Blockchain Platform. Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2021. Journal-first track.
  8. [MODELS 19] Pitfalls Analyzer: Quality Control for Model-Driven Data Science Pipelines. Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Gustavo Ansaldi Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan, Juergen Dingel. MODELS conference, 2019.
  9. [ISSRE 15] Experience report: How do structural dependencies influence change propagation? An empirical study. Gustavo A. Oliva, Marco A. Gerosa. IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), 2015.
  10. [OSS 15] An Empirical Study of the Relation Between Strong Change Coupling and Defects Using History and Social Metrics in the Apache Aries Project. Igor S. Wiese, Rodrigo T. Kuroda, Reginaldo Ré, Gustavo A. Oliva, and Marco A. Gerosa. International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS), 2015.
  11. [OSS 15] Why Statically Estimate Code Coverage is So Hard? A Report of Lessons Learned. Maurício F. Aniche, Gustavo A. Oliva, and Marco A. Gerosa. International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS), 2015.
  12. [CRIWG 14] Using Structural Holes Metrics from Communication Networks to Predict Change Dependencies. Igor S. Wiese, Rodrigo T. Kuroda, Douglas N. R. Junior, Reginaldo Ré, Gustavo A. Oliva, Marco A. Gerosa. International Conference on Collaboration and Technology (CRIWG), 2014.
  13. [ICWS 13] A Change Impact Analysis Approach for Workflow Repository Management. Gustavo A. Oliva, Marco A. Gerosa, Dejan S. Milojicic, Virginia Smith. International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), 2013.
  14. [CSMR 13] What do the Asserts in a Unit Test Tell us about Code Quality? A Study on Open Source and Industrial Projects. Maurício F. Aniche, Gustavo A. Oliva, Marco A. Gerosa. European Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (CSMR), 2013.
  15. [CRIWG 12] Characterizing Key Developers: A Case Study with Apache Ant. Gustavo A. Oliva, Francisco W. Santana, Kleverton C. M. de Oliveira, Cleidson R. B. de Souza, and Marco A. Gerosa. International Conference on Collaboration and Technology (CRIWG), 2012.

Workshop Papers

  1. [SE2030 25] Rethinking Software Engineering in the Foundation Model Era: From Task-Driven AI Copilots to Goal-Driven AI Pair Programmers Ahmed E. Hassan,Gustavo A. Oliva, Dayi Lin, Boyuan Chen, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang. 2030 Software Engineering (SE 2030), colocated with FSE 2024.
  2. [MTD 14] Are the methods in your data access objects (DAOs) in the right place? A preliminary study. Maurício F. Aniche, Gustavo A. Oliva, Marco A. Gerosa. IEEE International Workshop on Managing Technical Debt (MTD), 2014.
  3. [IWPSE 13] What can commit metadata tell us about design degradation? Gustavo A. Oliva, Igor Steinmacher, Igor S. Wiese, Marco A. Gerosa. International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution (IWPSE) 2013.
  4. [SQM 12] Preprocessing Change-Sets to Improve Logical Dependencies Identification. Gustavo A. Oliva, Francisco W. Santana, Cleidson R. B. de Souza, Marco A. Gerosa. International Workshop on Software Quality and Maintainability (SQM), 2012.

Book Chapters

  1. [BOOK 15] Change Coupling between Software Artifacts: Learning from Past Changes. Gustavo A. Oliva and Marco A. Gerosa. The Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data, ed. Christian Bird, Tim Menzies, and Thomas Zimmermann. Morgan Kaufmann, 1st edition, 2015.
  2. [BOOK 12] An Integrated Development and Runtime Environment for the Future Internet Amira B. Hamida, Fabio Kon, Gustavo A. Oliva, Carlos E. M. dos Santos, Jean-Pierre Lorré, Marco Autili, Guglielmo de Angelis, Apostolo Zarras, Nikolaos Georgantas, Valérie Issarny, and Antonia Bertolino. FIA: The Future Internet Assembly – From Promises to Reality. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012.

MENTORING

PhD Students

  • Muhammad Ahasanuzzaman (Mar. 2020-present). Thesis topic: Knowledge Units of programming languages: A new perspective for code analysis.
  • Amir Mohammad Ebrahimi (Aug. 2020-Sep. 2025).. Thesis title: The Evolution of Smart Contracts: Investigating Technical Debt and Post-Deployment Maintenance Mechanisms
  • Filipe Cogo (Aug. 2017-Aug. 2020). Thesis title: Studying Dependency Maintenance Practices through the Mining of Data from NPM Packages. First job after graduation: Software Engineering Researcher at Huawei Technologies.

Master Students

  • Michael Pacheco (Sep. 2019-June 2022). Thesis title: Towards the Development of Cost-Effective Decentralized Applications: An Investigation of Transaction Processing Times on the Ethereum Blockchain Platform. First job after graduation: Software Engineering Researcher at Huawei Technologies.
  • Ahmad Abdullah Zarir (Sep. 2018-Sep. 2019). Thesis title: Studying the Gas Usage and Price of Transactions in the Ethereum Blockchain Platform. First job after graduation: Software developer at Amazon EconTech Canada.

Visitor Students

  • Masanari Kondo (Late 2018-Early 2019). Project topic: Blockchain and smart contracts.
  • Zhitao Lin (Jun 2019-Sep-2019). Project topic: Blockchain and smart contracts.

Undergraduate Students

  • Julia Yach (Late 2018-Early 2019). Project topic: Blockchain and smart contracts.

SERVICE

Conference Committees

Bootcamps, tutorials, and talks

Manuscript reviewing

  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) journal
  • Springer Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) journal
  • ACM Transactions on Software Engineering (TOSEM) journal
  • Journal of Systems and Software (JSS)
  • Journal of Software: Practice and Experience (SPE)
  • PeerJ Computer Science journal
  • IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC) journal
  • IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems (SMCA) journal
  • ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB) journal
  • Software Testing, Verification and Reliability (STVR)

AWARDS

  • Microsoft Azure for Research (sponsorship)
  • Scholarship from Capes and CNPq - Visiting Research Student at Queen's University for 5 months in 2014
  • Scholarship from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for the project High Performance Applications for Smart Cities with "The Machine": Modeling, Simulation, and Development
  • Scholarship from the European Commission FP7 Programme for the project CHOReOS: Scalable Choreographies for the Future Internet
  • Scholarship from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Brazil for the project Baile: Enabling Scalable Cloud Service Choreographies

CONTACT

Email: [first_name]@cs.queensu.ca
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