Saima Afrin

PhD Candidate
Department of Computer Science
William & Mary
251 Jamestown Rd., Williamsburg
Virginia, USA
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at William & Mary, where my research centers on leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support and enhance Software Engineering (SE) practices. My current work explores how deep learning models—especially large language models—can be optimized and adapted for code-related tasks such as code summarization, generation, and quality assessment. I am particularly interested in improving the efficiency, robustness, and interpretability of these models in real-world development workflows.

I am currently working under the supervision of Dr. Antonio Mastropaolo as a member of the AURA Lab, where I contribute to research on AI4SE with a focus on optimizing the performance and adaptability of code-focused AI models.

Before starting my Ph.D., I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from Daffodil International University, graduating in the top tier of my class. My early research explored supervised and deep learning techniques across a variety of real-world problems, contributing to several peer-reviewed publications.

Alongside my academic journey, I also served as a full-time Lecturer at Daffodil International University, where I mentored undergraduate students and contributed to a collaborative teaching and research environment. I am passionate about impactful, collaborative research and regularly engage in conferences, seminars, and innovation events to exchange ideas with the broader scientific community.

news

Sept 2025

Served as a reviewer at "Journal of Systems and Software" (JSS) .

Sept 2025

Presented our paper "Is Quantization a Deal‑breaker: Empirical Insights from Large Code Models" at ICSME 2025 Conference .

Sept 2025

I got the opportunity to serve as a student volunteer at the ICSME 2025 Conference, took place in Auckland, NewZealand .

August 2025

Pleased to share that I served as a PC member at the "International Workshop on Analytics for Software Product and Process Improvement 2025" (A-SPPI 2025), co-located with PROFES 2025 .

August 2025
June 2025

Our paper "Is Quantization a Deal‑breaker: Empirical Insights from Large Code Models" was accepted as a Full Paper at ICSME 2025 .

June 2025

Our study on Code LLMs and Quantization "Quantizing large language models for code generation: A differentiated replication" is available on arXiv:2503.07103.

May 2025

Submitted our systematic literature review "Parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning for large code models" to ACM TOSEM (under review). Preprint: arXiv:2504.21569.

April 2025

Presented our paper "Resource‑efficient & effective code summarization" at at Forge (AI Foundation Models & Software Engineering) 2025 conference, co-located with ICSE 2025 (Ottawa, Canada).

March 2025

Our paper "Single-GPU GNN systems: Traps and Pitfalls" has been accepted at USENIX 2024.

Jan 2025

Our paper "Resource‑efficient & effective code summarization" was accepted at Forge (AI Foundation Models & Software Engineering) 2025.

© Copyright 2024 Saima Afrin.