The LENS Lab (Lens for Empirical Navigation in Software Lab) is led by Dr. Mia Mohammad Imran, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Missouri University of Science and Technology. The lab studies the human side of software engineering — how developers communicate, how GenAI reshapes code quality, and how emotion and toxicity shape open-source communities — using empirical analysis, NLP, and LLMs.

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Research

GenAI & Code Quality

How AI tools reshape development practice, introduce technical debt, and affect code quality in the wild.

Toxicity & Community Health

Understanding and predicting toxic conversations and derailment in open-source developer communities.

Emotion in Software Engineering

Using emotion as a lens to study developer communication and the struggles of novice programmers.

Bug Reports & Developer Tools

Improving software quality through better bug reporting, LLM-based input generation, and developer tooling.

View research overviews →   View all publications →

News

Highlights
March 2026 Long Paper accepted at EASE 2026 (Core A): Improving Code Comprehension through Cognitive-Load Aware Automated Refactoring for Novice Programmers
Dec 2025 Paper accepted at ICSE 2026 (Core A*): Toxicity Ahead: Forecasting Conversational Derailment on GitHub
Dec 2025 Paper accepted at ICSE-SEET 2026 (Core A*): Learning Programming in Informal Spaces: Using Emotion as a Lens to Understand Novice Struggles on r/learnprogramming
Summer 2025 Best Reviewer Award at EASE 2025
Other News
March 2026 Paper accepted at FSE 2026 — Ideas, Visions and Reflections Track: DePro: Understanding the Role of LLMs in Debugging Competitive Programming Code
March 2026 Paper accepted at LLMSC Workshop 2026 (FSE Companion): LLM-Enabled Open-Source Systems in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Vulnerabilities in GitHub Security Advisories
Jan 2026 Short paper accepted at TechDebt 2026: "TODO: Fix the Mess Gemini Created" — GenAI-Induced Self-Admitted Technical Debt. First paper of Mujahid — congrats!
Jan 2026 Paper accepted at MSR 2026 Mining Challenge: Where Do AI Coding Agents Fail? An Empirical Study of Failed Agentic Pull Requests in GitHub
Dec 2025 Extended abstract accepted at WSESE Workshop 2026 (ICSE Companion): OLAF: Towards Robust LLM-Based Annotation Framework in Empirical Software Engineering
March 2025 Paper accepted at FSE-IVR 2025: "Silent Is Not Actually Silent" — Toxicity on Bug Report Discussion
March 2025 Paper accepted at LLanMER 2025 (FSE Companion): LLPut: Investigating Large Language Models for Bug Report-Based Input Generation
2025 2025 Peer Reviewer Certificate — IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE)
2025 Certificate of Reviewing — Information and Software Technology (Elsevier)
2024 2024 Peer Reviewer Certificate — IEEE Software

Students

LENS Lab Members

Current
  • Abdullah Al Mujahid PhD · 2025–
  • Fariha Tanjim Shifat PhD · 2025–
Undergraduate
  • Hariswar Baburaj 2026 (CEC URS)
  • Carson Kempf 2025
  • Piper Jeffries 2025 (OURE)
Others
  • Subarna Saha (Jahangirnagar University) 2024-(Collaborator)
  • Alif Al Hasan (Jahangirnagar University) - now in Case Western Reserve University 2024-2025

The LENS Lab is currently seeking collaborations with industry partners and enthusiastic undergraduate students. Get in touch if interested. Note: not currently hiring PhD or Master’s students.

Reviewing and Community Services

Conference Committee:

Journals: Reviewer at journals such as IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, Information and Software Technology, Automated Software Engineering.