Interview with IBM
About Ben
Ben Smith is a fifth year PhD candidate in Computer Science at North Carolina State University working as a research assistant with Dr. Laurie Williams. He is a recipient of the IBM PhD Fellowship for 2010 and 2011. He received his Bachelor's in Computer Science in May of 2007, and received his Master's of Science in Computer Science in May of 2009, and he hopes to receive his doctorate some time this spring.
This spring, Ben will finish work on his doctoral dissertation topic, Security Test Patterns, and looks to schedule his defense some time this summer.
Ben has also worked on improving the security evaluation criteria for medical records applications. Ben has authored a paper detailing the security issues with electronic health records certification processes. Ben has also worked with colleagues in the Realsearch software engineering research team to develop a cloud-based solution for electronic health records.
To further expose himself to more literature in the software engineering field, Ben has participated in the NC State Software Engineering Journal Club. Ben has conducted several empirical studies on software security. He also worked as a Testing Manager for the NCSU CSC Senior Design Center, North Carolina State's capstone course for CSC. He has also written an open source plugin, MuClipse which incorporates mutation testing into the popular IDE Eclipse. He has published an extended work on an empirical user study with Mutation Analysis tools to the Journal of Systems and Software. Additionally, he designed and created the website for ESEM 2009, and written and collaborated several tutorials for open source and proprietary software development tools.
Extracurricular
Ben also offers his expertise in data collection and analysis to medical researchers. He participated in a collaborative research project that analyzed the prevalence of sleep apnea in truck drivers. He has also participated in another project that examined the sleep patterns of undergraduate students in a sleeping and wellness course at a major public university.Ben also enjoys playing jazz piano and has participated in many bands over the years, including the NC State Jazz Combo (2003-2011) and NC State Jazz Big Bands (I, II and III, 2003-2005). The NC State Jazz Combo has provided background music for many events, such as the Park Scholar's dinner, and this year's visit by President William Jefferson Clinton. He is the primary musician for the Executive Mansion in North Carolina, providing the right atmosphere for many of the governor's privately-hosted events. He plays many North Carolina State University events, including the Park Scholar's dinner, the Hood award dinner, the Founder's Day Dinner, the Menscer Cup, and the NC State Athletic Convention. Whereas computer science acts as Ben's scientific, mathematical foundation, music offers him a chance to be creative, social and collaborative.
Publications
Book Chapters |
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A. Meneely, B. Smith, L. Williams, "iTrust Electronic Health Care System: A Case Study", Software Systems and Traceability. | ||
Journal Papers |
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A. Meneely, B. Smith, and L. Williams, "Software Metrics Validation Criteria: A Systematic Literature Review." Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), to appear. | ||
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B. Smith and B. Phillips, "Truckers Drive Their Own Assessment for Obstructive Sleep Apnea: A Collaborative Approach to Online Self-Assessment for Obstructive Sleep Apnea", Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 241-245, 2011. | ||
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B. Smith and L. Williams, "On Guiding the Augmentation of an Automated Test Suite via Mutation Analysis", Empirical Software Engineering, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 341-369, 2009. | ||
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B.H. Smith and L. Williams, "Should Software Testers use Mutation Analysis to Augment a Test Set?", Journal of Systems Software, vol. 82, no. 11, pp. 1819-1832, 2009. | ||
Conferences | ||||
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B. Smith, L. Williams, "On the Effective Use of Security Test Patterns", Sixth International Conference on Software Security and Reliability (SERE2012), 2012, to appear . | |||
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A. Massey, B. Smith, P. Otto, A. Antón, "Assessing the Accuracy of Legal Implementation Readiness Decisions," International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2011), Trento, Italy, pp. 207-217, 2011. | |
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B. Smith, L. Williams, "Using SQL Hotspots in a Prioritization Heuristic for Detecting All Types of Web Application Vulnerabilities", Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2011), Berlin, Germany, pp. 220-229, 2011. | |
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B. Smith, G. Hull, B. Stanton, B. Phillips, "Truckers Drive Their Own Assessment for Obstructive Sleep Apnea: A Collaborative Approach to Online Self-Assessment for Obstructive Sleep Apnea", CHEST 2010, vol. 138, no. 4, 2010. | |
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B. Smith, L. Williams, A. Austin, "Idea: Using System Level Testing for Revealing SQL Injection-Related Error Message Information Leaks", Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5965, Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS 2010), pp. 192-200, 2010. | |
Workshops |
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B. Smith, "Testing Electronic Health Records Applications with a Security Test Pattern Catalog Developed Using Empirical Data", Proceedings of the International Health Informatics Symposium Doctoral Consortium (IHI 2012), to appear, 2012. | |
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J. King, B. Smith, L. Williams, "Modifying Without a Trace: General Audit Guidelines are Inadequate for Electronic Health Record Audit Mechanisms", Proceedings of the International Health Informatics Symposium (IHI 2012), to appear, 2012. | |
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B. Smith, "Systematizing Security Test Planning Using Functional Requirements Phrases". Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Software engineering Doctoral Consortium (ICSE '11). Honolulu, HI, pp. 1136-1137, 2011. | |
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B. Smith, A. Austin, M. Brown, J. King, J. Lankford, A. Meneely, L. Williams, "Challenges for Protecting the Privacy of Health Information: Required Certification Can Leave Common Vulnerabilities Undetected", Proceedings of the Security and Privacy in Medical and Home-care Systems (SPIMACS 2010) Workshop, co-located with CCS, Chicago, IL, pp. 1-12, 2010. | |
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A. Austin, B. Smith, and L. Williams, "Towards Improved Security Criteria for Certification of Electronic Health Record Systems". Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Software Engineering in Healthcare (SEHC 2010), co-located with ICSE, Cape Town, South Africa, pp. 68-73, 2010. | |
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B. Smith, "Metrics validation criteria: How do we know when a metric is worthwhile?" Presented at Workshop on Security Predictions, Pisa, Italy, 2010. | ||
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B. Smith, Y. Shin, and L. Williams, "Proposing SQL Statement Coverage Metrics", Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Software Engineering for Secure Systems (SESS 2008), co-located with ICSE, pp. 49-56, 2008. | |
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B. H. Smith and L. Williams, "An Empirical Evaluation of the MuJava Mutation Operators", Mutation 2007, co-located with TAIC-PART, pp. 193-202, 2007. | |
Posters |
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B. Smith, E. Smith, B. Phillips, "Living Well: Do Health Education College Students Sleep Better?", proceedings of SLEEP 2011, Minneapolis, MN, vol. 34, abstract supplement pA264, 2011. | |
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A. Austin, B. Smith, L. Williams, J. Halladay, "How Secure is Your Electronic Health Record System?", presented at North Carolina Academy of Family Physicians Weekend (NCAFPW), Asheville, NC, December 2010. | |||
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B. Smith and L. Williams, "Only Grey Box Testing Can Detect Input Validation and Error Message Information Leakage Vulnerabilities", presented at State of the Art in Testing and Analysis Day (SATA), March 2009. | |||
Technical Reports |
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B. Smith and L. Williams, "Systematizing Security Test Planning Using Functional Requirements Phrases". North Carolina State University, Technical Report #2011-5. | |||
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B. Smith and L. Williams, "A Survey on Code Coverage as a Stopping Criterion for Unit Testing", North Carolina State University, Technical Report #2008-22. | |||
Service
Reviewing Service: Conferences |
Conference Organization
Reviewing Service: Journals |