Paolo Tonella
Comment: Need multiple examples of significant coverage about Tonella (not works by him) in published reliable independent secondary sources. Paul W (talk) 10:05, 30 September 2026 (UTC)
Paolo Tonella (born in Treviso, Italy, on March 5, 1968) is an Italian computer scientist conducting research in Software Engineering. Since 2018 he has been with the Faculty of Informatics at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), in Lugano, Switzerland, and since 2025 he has been Director of the Software Institute at the same university. Previously, he was an Honorary Professor at University College London, UK, and Head of Software Engineering at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy.
Tonella held an ERC Advanced Grant as principal investigator of the project PRECRIME (Self-assessment Oracles for Anticipatory Testing). His research contributions to software engineering include work on code analysis and testing. His paper "Analysis and Testing of Web Applications", which received the ICSE Most Influential Paper (MIP) award, contributed to research on testing techniques for web applications. His book Reverse Engineering of Object-Oriented Code addressed reverse engineering of object-oriented systems. His 2004 paper "Evolutionary Testing of Classes", presented at the ISSTA conference, introduced an approach for the automated generation of object-oriented test cases. The Java test case generator EvoSuite can be traced to this work and the associated tool, eToc. In May 2023, Tonella gave a keynote entitled "The Road Toward Dependable AI Based Systems" at the ICSE conference in Melbourne, Australia.
Education
Tonella received his high-school diploma in 1987 from Liceo Scientifico Leonardo da Vinci in Treviso and his laurea cum laude in electronic engineering from the University of Padua in 1992. He obtained a PhD from the same university in 1999.
Early works: code analysis, reverse engineering and web applications (1994-2004)
Tonella started working as a researcher at ITC-irst (Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica) in Trento, Italy, in 1994, with a focus on static code analysis, reverse engineering and web applications. He contributed a flow- and context-insensitive points-to analysis algorithm customized for the computation of program slices.[1]. He wrote a book on reverse engineering of object oriented code[2] and proposed a model-based test generation approach for web applications, in which the model used to drive the generation of test cases was obtained from the code through reverse engineering. The associated paper[3] was presented at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in 2001 and received the ICSE Most Influential Paper (MIP) award 10 years later.
Core contributions: automated test case generation (2004-2019)
In 2003, Tonella became head of the Software Engineering research group at ITC-irst, a role he maintained following the transformation of ITC-irst into Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in 2007. During these years, his research interests shifted to software testing and automated, search-based test case generation. In 2004, he presented a paper entitled "Evolutionary Testing of Classes" at the ISSTA conference[4]. The work introduced a genetic algorithm for the automated generation of unit test cases for Java classes. The algorithm was later developed into a many-objective search algorithm for test generation, called MOSA[5], which treats the coverage of each source-code branch as a separate optimization objective. Both algorithms have been influential in software testing research. EvoSuite implements MOSA among other test-generation algorithms.
Later works: deep learning and AI testing (2019–present)
After joining Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland, in 2018, Tonella started the European Research Council (ERC) project PRECRIME (Self-assessment Oracles for Anticipatory Testing), which explored the emerging area of AI engineering, including problems associated with testing deep learning (DL) models and AI-based systems. PRECRIME produced works and studies concerning DL/AI testing at the intersection of software engineering and machine learning. Among these works, the PRECRIME team constructed a taxonomy of real faults in DL systems[6], developed DeepJanus[7], a test generator that explores the frontier of their behaviours, and DeepCrime[8], a mutation testing tool based on the fault taxonomy. In May 2023, Tonella gave a keynote entitled "The Road Toward Dependable AI Based Systems" at the ICSE conference in Melbourne, Australia[9]
References
- ↑ Tonella, Paolo; Antoniol, Giuliano; Fiutem, Roberto; Merlo, Ettore (1997-05-01). "Flow insensitive C++ pointers and polymorphism analysis and its application to slicing". Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Software engineering. ICSE '97. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 433–443. doi:10.1145/253228.253371. ISBN 978-0-89791-914-2.
- ↑ Reverse Engineering of Object Oriented Code. Monographs in Computer Science. New York, NY: Springer New York. 2005. doi:10.1007/b102522. ISBN 978-0-387-40295-6. Search this book on
- ↑ Ricca, F.; Tonella, P. (2001-05). "Analysis and testing of Web applications". Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2001: 25–34. doi:10.1109/ICSE.2001.919078. ISSN 0270-5257. Check date values in:
|date=(help) - ↑ Tonella, Paolo (2004-07-01). "Evolutionary testing of classes". Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Software testing and analysis. ISSTA '04. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 119–128. doi:10.1145/1007512.1007528. ISBN 978-1-58113-820-7.
- ↑ Panichella, Annibale; Kifetew, Fitsum Meshesha; Tonella, Paolo (2018-02). "Automated Test Case Generation as a Many-Objective Optimisation Problem with Dynamic Selection of the Targets". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 44 (2): 122–158. doi:10.1109/TSE.2017.2663435. ISSN 1939-3520. Check date values in:
|date=(help) - ↑ Humbatova, Nargiz; Jahangirova, Gunel; Bavota, Gabriele; Riccio, Vincenzo; Stocco, Andrea; Tonella, Paolo (2020-10-01). "Taxonomy of real faults in deep learning systems". Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE '20. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 1110–1121. doi:10.1145/3377811.3380395. ISBN 978-1-4503-7121-6.
- ↑ Riccio, Vincenzo; Tonella, Paolo (2020-11-08). "Model-based exploration of the frontier of behaviours for deep learning system testing". Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. ESEC/FSE 2020. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 876–888. doi:10.1145/3368089.3409730. ISBN 978-1-4503-7043-1.
- ↑ Humbatova, Nargiz; Jahangirova, Gunel; Tonella, Paolo (2021-07-11). "DeepCrime: mutation testing of deep learning systems based on real faults". Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. ISSTA 2021. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 67–78. doi:10.1145/3460319.3464825. ISBN 978-1-4503-8459-9.
- ↑ Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2023-11-15). ICSE 2023 - Keynote 3 - Paolo Tonella & AwardsICSE Keynotes / Social Events. Retrieved 2026-09-26 – via YouTube.
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