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About

About

João Saraiva is Professor Auxiliar at the Departmento de Informática, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal, and a researcher member of HASLab/INESC TEC. He obtained a MSc degree from University do Minho in 1993 and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Utrecht University in 1999. His main research contributions have been in the field of program language design and implementation, program analysis and transformation, and functional programming. He supervised 4 (FCT funded) PostDoc projects, 8 PhD projects (5 awarded and 3 running) and over 30 (Pos-Bologna) MSc thesis. He has published over 80 publications (scopus) in conferences and journals. He has served in over 60 program committees of international events, and in the evaluation committees of 5 research agencies: ANII (Uruguay), FRS-FNRS (Belgium), NWO (The Netherlands), FWF (Austria), and FCT (Portugal).

He has experience in participating and coordinating research projects in his research areas, both at national level with projects funded by FCT (projects: PURe, IVY, AMADEUS, CROSS, SSaaPP, AutoSeer, FATBIT, and GreenSwLab) and at international level with projects funded by EPSRC (UK), FLAD/NSF (USA) and by the European Union.

João Saraiva is one of the founders of the successful series of summer schools on Generative and Transformational Techniques in Software Engineering (GTTSE), which he co-organized in 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2015 (volumes 4143, 5235, 6491, and 7680 of LNCS - Tutorial by Springer-Verlag) in Braga. He was the organizing chair of ETAPS'07, The European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, organized in Braga in 2007, and a member of its scientific committee (2007-2012).

Interest
Topics
Details

Details

  • Name

    João Alexandre Saraiva
  • Role

    Research Coordinator
  • Since

    01st November 2011
Publications

2025

Property-based Testing of Attribute Grammars

Authors
Macedo, JN; Viera, M; Saraiva, J;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF SLE 2025 18TH ACM SIGPLAN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE LANGUAGE ENGINEERING, SLE 2025

Abstract
Software testing is an integral part of modern software development. Testing frameworks are part of the toolset of any software language allowing programmers to test their programs in order to detect bugs. Unfortunately, there is no work on testing in attribute grammars. In this paper we combine the powerful property-based testing technique with the attribute grammar formalism. In such property-based attribute grammars, properties are defined on attribute instances. Properties are tested on large sets of randomly generated (abstract syntax) trees by evaluating their attributes. We present an implementation that relies on strategies to express property-based attribute grammars. Strategies are tree-based recursion patterns that are used to encode logic quantifiers defining the properties.

2025

Is There Hypothesis for Attribute Grammars?

Authors
Rodrigues, E; Macedo, JN; Saraiva, J;

Publication
Programming

Abstract

2025

Greening AI-enabled Systems with Software Engineering: A Research Agenda for Environmentally Sustainable AI Practices

Authors
Cruz, L; Fernandes, JP; Kirkeby, MH; Fernández, SM; Sallou, J; Anwar, H; Roque, EB; Bogner, J; Castaño, J; Castor, F; Chasmawala, A; Cunha, S; Feitosa, D; González, A; Jedlitschka, A; Lago, P; Muccini, H; Oprescu, A; Rani, P; Saraiva, J; Sarro, F; Selvan, R; Vaidhyanathan, K; Verdecchia, R; Yamshchikov, IP;

Publication
CoRR

Abstract
The environmental impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled systems is increasing rapidly, and software engineering plays a critical role in developing sustainable solutions. The ''Greening AI with Software Engineering'' workshop,1 funded by the Centre Europ´een de Calcul Atomique et Mol´eculaire (CECAM) and the Lorentz Center, provided an interdisciplinary forum for 29 participants, from practitioners to academics, to share knowledge, ideas, practices, and current results dedicated to advancing green software and AI research. The workshop was held February 3-7, 2025, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Through keynotes, flash talks, and collaborative discussions, participants identified and prioritized key challenges for the field. These included energy assessment and standardization, benchmarking practices, sustainability-aware architectures, runtime adaptation, empirical methodologies, and education. This report presents a research agenda emerging from the workshop, outlining open research directions and practical recommendations to guide the development of environmentally sustainable AI-enabled systems rooted in software engineering principles.

2025

Understanding the adoption of modern Javascript features: An empirical study on open-source systems

Authors
Lucas, W; Nunes, R; Bonifácio, R; Carvalho, F; Lima, R; Silva, M; Torres, A; Accioly, P; Monteiro, E; Saraiva, J;

Publication
EMPIRICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Abstract
JavaScript is a widely used programming language initially designed to make the Web more dynamic in the 1990s. In the last decade, though, its scope has extended far beyond the Web, finding utility in backend development, desktop applications, and even IoT devices. To circumvent the needs of modern programming, JavaScript has undergone a remarkable evolution since its inception, with the groundbreaking release of its sixth version in 2015 (ECMAScript 6 standard). While adopting modern JavaScript features promises several benefits (such as improved code comprehension and maintenance), little is known about which modern features of the language have been used in practice (or even ignored by the community). To fill this gap, in this paper, we report the results of an empirical study that aims to understand the adoption trends of modern JavaScript features, and whether or not developers conduct rejuvenation efforts to replace legacy JavaScript constructs and idioms with modern ones in legacy systems. To this end, we mined the source code history of 158 JavaScript open-source projects, identified contributions to rejuvenate legacy code, and used time series to characterize the adoption trends of modern JavaScript features. The results of our study reveal extensive use of JavaScript modern features which are present in more than 80% of the analyzed projects. Our findings also reveal that (a) the widespread adoption of modern features happened between one and two years after the release of ES6 and, (b) a consistent trend toward increasing the adoption of modern JavaScript language features in open-source projects and (c) large efforts to rejuvenate the source code of their programs.

2025

pyZtrategic

Authors
Rodrigues, E; Macedo, JN; Saraiva, J;

Publication

Abstract