Welcome to the SANAD Lab at New York University Abu Dhabi!

SANAD stands for Software Analysis and Developer Support, and that’s what we’re all about! Our mission is to enhance how software engineers develop and maintain software systems by providing them with the tools and insights that they need. In Arabic, SANAD (سند) means support. As software systems grow more intricate, we aim to simplify life for developers through support tools that enhance their efficiency and effectiveness.

Our expertise lies in program analysis and software analytics. We work on improving the precision and scalability of static analyses and on uncovering insights from software repositories (e.g., version control systems, issue trackers etc).

Examples of our current research projects include:

See our past and current research projects for more details.

Selected Publications

Below are selected publications that showcase our recent research:

CHASE
Fast and Fleeting: Evaluating ChatGPT's Impact on Students' Computational Thinking Skills
May Mahmoud, Eric Asare, Nisa Shahid, Nourhan Sakr, and Sarah Nadi
International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), 2026
ICSE
On LLMs' Internal Representation of Code Correctness
Francisco Ribeiro, Claudio Spiess, Prem Devanbu, and Sarah Nadi
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2026
MSR
Where Do Smart Contract Security Analyzers Fall Short?
Tamer Abdelaziz, Salma Alsaghir, and Karim Ali
International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2026
ASE
An Empirical Study of Python Library Migration Using Large Language Models
Mohayeminul Islam, Ajay Kumar Jha, May Mahmoud, Ildar Akhmetov, and Sarah Nadi
Proceedings of the 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2025) (ASE), 2025
TSE
CrySL: An Extensible Approach to Validating the Correct Usage of Cryptographic APIs
Stefan Krüger, Johannes Späth, Karim Ali, Eric Bodden, and Mira Mezini
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 2021
POPL
ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award
Context-, Flow-, and Field-Sensitive Data-Flow Analysis Using Synchronized Pushdown Systems
Johannes Späth, Karim Ali, and Eric Bodden
ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), 2019

See the full list of our publications.