Research interests
My research focuses on the design and analysis of methods and tools that provide rigorous guarantees of software correctness. I am particularly interested in formal verification techniques, foundations for reasoning about program behavior, and advanced approaches to code analysis.
- Formal verification: foundations and tools for establishing provably correct behavior in complex software systems.
- Program analysis and testing: static, dynamic, and hybrid methods for understanding, validating, and rigorously evaluating code.
- Optimization and efficiency: techniques for improving performance, reducing resource consumption, and identifying near-optimal implementations.
Education
Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
Fall 2025 - Fall 2030 (expected)
B.Sc. in Systems and Computer Engineering
Universidad Nacional de Colombia (ranked #1 in Colombia), Bogota D.C., Colombia
Spring 2018 - Fall 2023
Research experience
Graduate Research Assistant
Purdue University - Advised by James Davis
Aug 2025 - Present
Serving as a researcher on AutoUP, an automatic unit-proof generation system for formal verification, contributing to its design and development.
Undergraduate Visiting Scholar (UREP-C)
Purdue University - Advised by James Davis
Feb 2023 - Jul 2023
Contributed to the design and implementation of EmNetTest, a framework for testing embedded network stacks.
Professional experience
Test Engineer and QA Analyst
Kravata SAS, Bogota, Colombia
Sep 2024 - Jul 2025
Led the testing area, advanced automation across end-to-end, integration, and unit testing, and implemented CI/CD pipelines within a DevOps environment.
Fullstack Software Developer
Fit Ideas SAS, Bogota, Colombia
Aug 2023 - Aug 2024
Led the development team in strategic planning, management, and deployment of mobile and web applications.
Junior Software Developer
Fit Ideas SAS, Bogota, Colombia
Aug 2021 - Jan 2023
Supported the implementation of custom functionality and contributed to the design and management of relational database systems.
Refereed conference publications
- P. Amusuo, D. Liu, R. A. C. Mendez, J. Metzman, O. Chang, and J. C. Davis. Lessons from Mitigating False Positives in Google’s OSS-Fuzz-Gen. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-Industry 2026). 39% acceptance rate (66/171). 5 pages. Presenting author.
- H. Peng, A. Zhong, R. A. C. Mendez, K. G. Kalu, and J. C. Davis. How Do Agents Perform Code Optimization? An Empirical Study. Proceedings of the 23rd International Mining Software Repositories Conference, Mining Challenge track (MSR-Mining 2026). 53% acceptance rate (62/116). 5 pages. Presenting author.
- P. C. Amusuo, R. A. C. Mendez, Z. Xu, A. Machiry, and J. C. Davis. Systematically Detecting Packet Validation Vulnerabilities in Embedded Network Stacks. Proceedings of the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2023). 21% acceptance rate (134/629). 13 pages.
Other works
- P. C. Amusuo, D. Liu, R. A. C. Mendez, J. Metzman, O. Chang, and J. C. Davis. FalseCrashReducer: Mitigating False Positive Crashes in OSS-Fuzz-Gen Using Agentic AI. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.02185, 2025.
Academic service and community
- Student volunteer, ICSE 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
- Reviewer, MSR 2026 Mining Challenge Track.
- Sub-reviewer, USENIX 2026 Cycle 2 and ICSE 2026.
Talks and presentations
- Lessons from Mitigating False Positives in Google’s OSS-Fuzz-Gen. Industry Papers, FSE 2026, Montreal, Canada, July 8, 2026.
- How Do Agents Perform Code Optimization? An Empirical Study. Poster, Mining Challenge Track, MSR 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 14, 2026.
Conference attendance
- ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2026), Montreal, Canada, July 5-9, 2026.
- 39th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2023), Bogota, Colombia, October 2023.
- ACM/IEEE 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 2026.
External grants and scholarships
- Travel Support for the ICSE 2026 Student Mentoring Workshop (SMeW), National Science Foundation (NSF) and ACM SIGSOFT, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 2026.
- Ser Pilo Paga Scholarship, Ministry of Education of Colombia. National merit-based scholarship awarded for top performance on a national standardized high-school examination, with 100% funding for undergraduate tuition and academic expenses.
Certifications
- Ayuda y aprende - Spanish Service Learning, Purdue University, 2023.
- Algorithmic Toolbox, University of California San Diego, 2021.
- Advanced Course on Django, Platzi, 2021.
- Introduction to Git and GitHub, Google, 2020.
- Crash Course on Python, Google, 2020.