Cindy Rubio González's Home Page

Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of California, Davis

Curriculum Vitae: PDF (last updated on 3/10/2025)
E-mail: crubio AT ucdavis DOT edu

Prospective students: I am looking for highly-motivated Ph.D. students to work on programming languages research problems. If interested, please apply to UC Davis here and include my name in your graduate admission application (you can also send me an e-mail, please include your CV).

Short Biography

Dr. Rubio is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Prior to that position, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dr. Rubio's work spans the areas of Software Engineering, Programming Languages and High-Performance Computing, with a focus on program analysis and testing for automated bug finding and program optimization. She is particularly interested in the reliability and performance of systems software and scientific applications. Dr. Rubio is a recipient of several awards including DOE Early Career Award, NSF CAREER Award, Facebook Testing and Verification Research Award, Facebook Probability and Programming Research Award, Hellman Fellowship, and UC Davis CAMPOS Faculty Award. Dr. Rubio earned her M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and her B.S. in Computer Engineering from Saltillo Institute of Technology (Mexico). She also holds a B.M. in Piano Performance from the Autonomous University of Coahuila (Mexico).

Service

Elected Member of the ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee, 2018-2021 and 2021-2024.

Chair/Co-Chair/Co-Organizer:

Area Chair: ICSE 2026: Testing and Analysis (with Karim Ali, Jonathan Bell and Dan Hao).
PC Chair: ISSTA 2026 (with Marcel Böhme).

PC Member: ICSE 2025, SC 2024, PLDI 2024, ICSE 2024, PLDI 2023, OOPSLA 2023, ISSTA 2022, FSE 2022, PLDI 2021, ICSE 2021, ICSE 2020 (PB Member), PLDI 2019, ICSE 2019, OOPSLA 2018, ISSTA 2018, SC 2017, SC 2017 ECP, ISSTA 2017, CC 2017, PLDI 2016, PLDI 2016 SRC, SC 2016, HotStorage 2016, LAtINiTY 2015.

Panels: AAUW Fellowship and Grants Panel 2018-2020, NSF Panels, DOE Panels, UC Mexus-CONACYT Computer Science and Engineering Panel 2015.

Diversity at UC Davis: UC Davis Promise Engineering Institute.

Teaching

ECS 140A Programming Languages (UG) (Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2018, Winter 2016)
ECS 289C Seminar on Program Analysis (G) (Winter 2025, Winter 2024, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Winter 2017, Winter 2015)
ECS 245: Analysis of Software Artifacts (G) (Winter 2025). ECS 260 Software Engineering (G) (Winter 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2018, Fall 2015, Spring 2015)

Research Group

BugSwarm Team Website

Ph.D. Students

Goodness Ayinmode (9/2023 – Present)
Patrick Chapman (9/2019 – Present)
Nikki Lee (9/2023 – Present)
Dolores Miao (7/2021 – Present)
Md Raian Latif Nabil (9/2023 – Present)
Jackson Vanover (9/2020 – Present)
Yutong Wang (9/2020 – Present)
Hao-Nan Zhu (9/2021 – Present)

Click here for Alumni.

Publications

EXCVATE: Spoofing Exceptions and Solving Constraints to Test Exception Handling in Numerical Libraries
J. Vanover, J. Demmel, X.S. Li, and C. Rubio-González
To appear in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH'25)
El Paso, TX, May 2025.

Interleaving Static Analysis and LLM Prompting with Applications to Error Specification Inference
P.J. Chapman, C. Rubio-González, and A.V. Thakur
International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT)
January 2025.
Available as: PDF

Toward Automated Precision Tuning of Weather and Climate Models: A Case Study
J. Vanover, A. Altuntas, and C. Rubio-González
To appear in Proceedings of the International Workshop on Software Correctness for HPC Applications (CORRECTNESS'24)
Atlanta, GA, November 2024.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, PROSE on GitHub

Towards Verifying Exact Conditions for Implementations of Density Functional Theory Approximations
S. Helal, Z. Tao, C. Rubio-González, F. Gygi, and A.V. Thakur
To appear in Proceedings of the International Workshop on Software Correctness for HPC Applications (CORRECTNESS'24)
Atlanta, GA, November 2024.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Testing the Unknown: A Framework for OpenMP Testing via Random Program Generation
I. Laguna, P.J. Chapman, K. Parasyris, G. Georgakoudis, and C. Rubio-González
To appear in Proceedings of the International Workshop on HPC Testing and Evaluation of Systems, Tools, and Software (HPCTESTS'24)
Atlanta, GA, November 2024.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

An Automated OpenMP Mutation Testing Framework for Performance Optimization
D. Miao, I. Laguna, G. Georgakoudis, K. Parasyris, and C. Rubio-González
Journal of Parallel Computing (PARCO)
August 2024.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Interleaving Static Analysis and LLM Prompting
P.J. Chapman, C. Rubio-González, and A.V. Thakur
Proceedings of the SIGPLAN International Workshop on the State Of the Art in Program Analysis (SOAP'24)
Copenhagen, Denmark, June 2024.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, EESI LLM on GitHub

Input Range Generation for Compiler-Induced Numerical Inconsistencies
D. Miao, I. Laguna, and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS'24)
Kyoto, Japan, June 2024.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, CIGEN on GitHub

Predicting Performance and Accuracy of Mixed-Precision Programs for Precision Tuning
Y. Wang and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'24)
Lisbon, Portugal, April 2024.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, FPLearner on GitHub

MUPPET: Optimizing Performance in OpenMP via Mutation Testing
D. Miao, I. Laguna, G. Georgakoudis, K. Parasyris, and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Programming Models and Applications for Multicores and Manycores (PMAM'24)
Edinburgh, UK, March 2024.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Expression Isolation of Compiler-Induced Numerical Inconsistencies in Heterogeneous Code (Hans Meuer Award for Best Paper)
D. Miao, I. Laguna, and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of ISC High Performance, (ISC'23)
Hamburg, Germany, May 2023.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, Ciel on GitHub

ActionsRemaker: Reproducing GitHub Actions
H. Zhu, K. Guan, R.M. Furth, and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering, Demonstrations Track (ICSE'23-DEMO)
Melbourne, Australia, May 2023.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, ActionsRemaker on GitHub

On the Reproducibility of Software Defect Datasets
H. Zhu and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'23)
Melbourne, Australia, May 2023.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, GitHub Page

Giving Research Software Engineers a Larger Stage Through the Better Scientific Software Fellowship
W.F. Godoy, R. Arora, K. Beattie, D.E. Bernholdt, S.E. Bratt, D.S. Katz, I. Laguna, A. K. Maji, A. Malviya-Thakur, R.M. Mudafort, N. Sukhija, D.W.I. Rouson, C. Rubio-González, and K. Vahi
Computing in Science and Engineering (CSE'22)
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Proposed Consistent Exception Handling for the BLAS and LAPACK
J. Demmel, J. Dongarra, M. Gates, G. Henry, J. Langou, X. Li, P. Luszczek, W. Pereira, J. Riedy, and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Software Correctness for HPC Applications (CORRECTNESS'22)
Dallas, TX, November 2022.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

On the Real-World Effectiveness of Static Bug Detectors at Finding Null Pointer Exceptions
D.A. Tomassi and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'21)
Melbourne, Australia, November 2021.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, Data and Scripts on GitHub

Guarding Numerics Amidst Rising Heterogeneity
G. Gopalakrishnan, I. Laguna, A. Li, P. Panchekha, C. Rubio-González, and Z. Tatlock
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Software Correctness for HPC Applications (CORRECTNESS'21)
St. Louis, MO, November 2021.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Fixing Dependency Errors for Python Build Reproducibility
S. Mukherjee, A. Almanza, and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA'21)
Aarhus, Denmark, July 2021.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, PyDFix on GitHub

pLiner: Isolating Lines of Floating-Point Code for Compiler Induced Variability
H. Guo, I. Laguna, and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC'20)
Atlanta, GA, November 2020.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, pLiner on GitHub

Discovering Discrepancies in Numerical Libraries (Distinguished Artifact Award)
J. Vanover, X. Deng, and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA'20)
Los Angeles, CA, July 2020.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, FPDiff on GitHub

Efficient Generation of Error-Inducing Floating-Point Inputs via Symbolic Execution
H. Guo and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'20)
Seoul, South Korea, May 2020.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, FPGen on GitHub

Detecting and Reproducing Error- Code Propagation Bugs in MPI Implementations
D. DeFreez, A. Bhowmick, I. Laguna, and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP'20)
San Diego, CA, February 2020.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, MPIErrorProp on GitHub

Effective Error-Specification Inference via Domain-Knowledge Expansion
D. DeFreez, H. Baldwin, C. Rubio-González, and A. Thakur
Proceedings of ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE'19)
Tallinn, Estonia, August 2019.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, EESI on GitHub

BugSwarm: Mining and Continuously Growing a Dataset of Reproducible Failures and Fixes
D.A. Tomassi, N. Dmeiri, Y. Wang, A. Bhowmick, Y. Liu, P. Devanbu, B. Vasilescu, and C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'19)
Montreal, Canada, May 2019.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, BugSwarm Website, Dataset in DockerHub, BugSwarm API, BugSwarm on GitHub

Path-Based Function Embedding and its Application to Error-Handling Specification Mining
D. DeFreez, A. Thakur, C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE'18)
Lake Buena Vista, Florida, November 2018.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, Func2vec on GitHub

Exploiting Community Structure for Floating-Point Precision Tuning
H. Guo, C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA'18)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 2018.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, HiFPTuner on GitHub

Poster: Path-Based Function Embeddings (Short Paper)
D. DeFreez, A. Thakur, C. Rubio-González
Proceedings of International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'18)
Gothenburg, Sweden, May 2018.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, Func2vec on GitHub

A Comprehensive Study of Real-World Numerical Bug Characteristics
A. Di Franco, H. Guo, C. Rubio-González
International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'17)
Urbana-Champaign, IL, October 2017.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, Data

Timezone and Time-of-Day Variance in GitHub Teams: An Empirical Method and Study
P. Devanbu, P. Kudigrama, C. Rubio-González, B. Vasilescu
International Workshop on Software Analytics (SWAN'17)
Paderborn, Germany, September 2017.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

GitcProc: A Tool for Processing and Classifying GitHub Commits
C. Casalnuovo, Y. Suchak, B. Ray, C. Rubio-González
International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA'17-DEMOS)
Santa Barbara, California, July 2017.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, GitcProc on GitHub

Floating-Point Precision Tuning Using Blame Analysis
C. Rubio-González, C. Nguyen, B. Mehne, K. Sen, J. Demmel, W. Kahan, C. Iancu, W. Lavrijsen, D. H. Bailey, D. Hough
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'16)
Austin, Texas, May 2016.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, Blame Analysis on GitHub

Database-Backed Program Analysis for Scalable Error Propagation
C. Weiss, C. Rubio-González, B. Liblit
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'15)
Florence, Italy, May 2015.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Research.js: Evaluating Research Tool Usability on the Web
J. Galenson, C. Rubio-González, S. Chasins, L. Gong
Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU'14)
Portland, OR, October 2014.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

The Gradual Verifier
S. Arlt, C. Rubio-González, P. Rümmer, M. Schäf, N. Shankar
NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM'14)
Houston, TX, April 2014.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Precimonious: Tuning Assistant for Floating-Point Precision
C. Rubio-González, C. Nguyen, H. D. Nguyen, J. Demmel, W. Kahan, K. Sen, D. H. Bailey, C. Iancu, D. Hough
International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC'13)
Denver, Colorado, November 2013.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX, Precimonious on GitHub

Finding Error-Propagation Bugs in Large Software Systems Using Static Analysis
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, August 2012.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Finding Error-Handling Bugs in Systems Code Using Static Analysis
C. Rubio-González, B. Liblit
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, PhD Forum (GHC'11)
Portland, Oregon, November 2011.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX
Second place in PLDI 2011 Student Research Competition, San Jose, CA, June 2011.

Statically Validating Must Summaries for Incremental Compositional Dynamic Test Generation
P. Godefroid, S.K. Lahiri, C. Rubio-González
International Static Analysis Symposium (SAS'11)
Venice, Italy, September 2011.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Defective Error/Pointer Interactions in the Linux Kernel
C. Rubio-González, B. Liblit
International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA'11)
Toronto, Canada, July 2011.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Expect the Unexpected: Error Code Mismatches Between Documentation and the Real World
C. Rubio-González, B. Liblit
Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE'10)
Toronto, Canada, June 2010.
Available as: Postscript, PDF, BibTeX

Error Propagation Analysis for File Systems
C. Rubio-González, H. Gunawi, B. Liblit, R. Arpaci-Dusseau, A. Arpaci-Dusseau
Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'09)
Dublin, Ireland, June 2009.
Available as: Postscript, PDF, BibTeX

EIO: Error Handling is Occasionally Correct
H. Gunawi, C. Rubio-González, A. Arpaci-Dusseau, R. Arpaci-Dusseau, B. Liblit
Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'08)
San Jose, CA, February 2008.
Available as: Postscript, PDF, BibTeX

Class Invariant Shape Analysis
Master's thesis, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, December 2004.
Available as: PDF, BibTeX

Last modified: Mon Mar 10 16:09:44 PDT 2025