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Dr. David O'Brien

Applied Scientist II in the Next-Gen Developer Experience org at AWS. I defended my Ph.D. entitled "Data-Driven Techniques for Identifying and Automatically Repaying Technical Debt" at Iowa State University under the advisement of Dr. Hridesh Rajan.

I am passionate about building intelligent developer tools and advancing the science of software engineering. My expertise spans agentic AI, static analysis, code generation, and large-scale pattern mining. I have contributed to research and product development at AWS and Apple, with a focus on leveraging machine learning and program analysis to automate and improve the software development lifecycle. My work is published at top-tier software engineering conferences and aims to bridge the gap between research and impactful developer experiences.

Research Interests

Software Engineering

Machine Learning

Program Analysis

Big Data Mining

Publications

Fraol Batole, David OBrien, Tien Nguyen N., Robert Dyer, Hridesh Rajan. An LLM-Based Agent-Oriented Approach for Automated Code Design Issue Localization. In 2025 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2025.
David OBrien, Sumon Biswas, Sayem Imtiaz, Rabe Abdalkareem, Emad Shihab, Hridesh Rajan. Are Prompt Engineering and TODO Comments Friends or Foes? An Evaluation on GitHub Copilot. In 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2024.
David OBrien, Robert Dyer, Tien Nguyen, Hridesh Rajan. Data-Driven Evidence-Based Syntactic Sugar Design. In 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2024.
David OBrien, Sumon Biswas, Sayem Imtiaz, Rabe Abdalkareem, Emad Shihab, Hridesh Rajan. 23 Shades of Self-Admitted Technical Debt: An Empirical Study on Machine Learning Software. In 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), 2022.

Professional Experience

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Oct 2024 - Present
Applied Scientist II, Next-Gen Developer Experience
Laboratory for Software Design Summer 2020 - Fall 2024
Researcher
Apple Summer 2023
ML Engineer Intern
Collins Aerospace Summer 2022
AI Engineer Intern