Dr. Dongdong SHE Awarded Distinguished Paper Award at ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis 2025

The Computer Science and Engineering Department proudly congratulates Dr. Dongdong SHE, our Assistant Professor, on his co-authored paper titled "RouthSearch: Inferring PID Parameter Specification for Flight Control Program by Coordinate Search." Dr. SHE's exceptional research has earned him the Distinguished Paper Award at ISSTA'25. The paper tackles an important problem in the Cyber-Physical System (CPS) security. They introduce RouthSearch, an effective and practical solution to detect PID misconfigurations in real-world flight control software that powers drones.

"RouthSearch: Inferring PID Parameter Specification for Flight Control Program by Coordinate Search"

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) such as drones are widely used in various domains, including agriculture, search and rescue operations, and especially modern warfare. UAVs rely on flight control software to manage their flying behavior in real-time. PID is a critical parameter of flight control software, and improper configuration can easily lead to misbehavior or the crash of UAVs. To discover these misconfigured PID parameters, we introduce a novel search technique combining coordinate search and the classic Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion from the control theory domain. RouthSearch can effectively detect three-dimensional misconfigured PID parameters and enhance the safety and reliability of UAVs.

Details

Dr. SHE stated, "It's very exciting to receive the distinguished paper award from the premier software engineering conference ISSTA. It encourages us to keep exploring impactful cybersecurity problems from a theoretical and algorithmic perspective."

Congratulations to Dr. SHE on this remarkable accomplishment!

Dr. Dongdong SHE

Dr. Dongdong SHE awarded the Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis 2025.