Chris Mills

I received my Ph. D. in Computer Science from Florida State University. Since 2011 I have also worked full-time in industry, first as a software engineer at Aderant and the Florida Department of Education, and most recently as the Chief Research Officer of i2x Solutions. My doctoral advisor was Sonia Haiduc, the director of the Serene lab. My primary research areas are software engineering, artificial intelligence, and large scale data analytics.

Downloadable CV

[1] C. Mills, J. Pantiuchina, E. Parra, G. Bavota, and S. Haiduc “Are Bug Reports Enough for Text Retrieval-based Bug Localization?” Proceedings of the 34th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2018), pp. 381-392.

[2] C. Mills, J. Escobar-Avila, and S. Haiduc. “Automatic Traceability Maintenance via Machine Learning Classification.” Proceedings of the 34th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2018), pp. 369-380.

[3] C. Mills, “Towards the Automatic Classification of Traceability Links”. Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2017), pp. 1018-1021.

[4] C. Mills, “Automating Traceability Link Recovery through Classification”. ACM Student Research Competition,  Proceedings of the 11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2017), pp.1068-1070.

[5] C. Mills, G. Bavota, S. Haiduc, R. Oliveto, A. Marcus, and A. De Lucia, “Predicting Query Quality for Applications of Text Retrieval to Software Engineering Tasks”. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 2017, 26(1), pp. 3:1-45.

[6] C. Mills and S. Haiduc, “A Machine Learning Approach for Determining the Validity of Traceability Links,” in Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE Posters 2017), pp.121-123.

[7] C. Mills and S. Haiduc, “The Impact of Retrieval Direction on IR-based Traceability Link Recovery,” Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-NIER 2017), pp. 51-54. 16.5% Acceptance Rate.

[8] H. Y. Tian, and C. Mills, “Method of approximate fundamental solutions for ill-posed elliptic boundary value problems”, Proceedings of Neural, Parallel and Scientific Computations, volume 4, 2010, pp. 373-378.

[9] Y. Ling, C. Mills, R. Weber, L. Zhang, Y.  Zhang, “NMR, IR/Raman, and Structural Properties in HO and RNO (R= Alkyl and Aryl) Metalloporphyrins with Implication for the HNOMyoglobin Complex”, The Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 132, no. 5, 2010, pp. 1583-1591.

The Inexact Graph Matching Problem Two Spectral Methods for Constructing Correspondences Between Vertex Sets of Graphs
Master’s Certification Exam, Dept. Mathematics, Florida State University, 2011

Computational Analysis of Metalo-Organic Compounds
University of Southern Mississippi Undergraduate Research Symposium, 2009

A Meshless Method with Regularization for Non‐Homogenous Cauchy Problems of Elliptic Operators
Undergraduate Thesis, Dept. Mathematics, University of Southern Mississippi, 2009

Use of Heme Protein Models in Computational Analysis of Biological Pathways
University of Southern Mississippi Undergraduate Research Symposium, 2008

Classroom-based Instruction
MAC 1105 College Algebra (Florida State University)
MAC 1140 Precalculus Algebra (Florida State University) Instructor of Record
CHE 106L General Chemistry I Lab (University of Southern Mississippi)

I was born and raised in the Hattiesburg, Mississippi area. Early in high school I developed an interest scientific research, completing a study on the impact of insulin pump therapy on academic achievement for students with juvenile diabetes. I was selected to present the results of this study at the National Science Fair in San Diego, California.

I attended both the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) and Mississippi State University (MSU) before graduating summa cum laude with my B.S. in Mathematics and a minor in Chemistry from USM. During my undergraduate experience, I worked on projects spanning from the social sciences to computational chemistry, earning second authorship status on two academic journal articles.  While participating in these projects, I developed an interest in computational science and simulation.  Under the direction of Dr. Haiyan Tian, I completed my undergraduate thesis “Meshless Method with Regularization for Non‐Homogenous Cauchy Problems of Elliptic Operators,” which focused on solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with ill-posed, or noisy, boundaries.

I entered the Applied and Computational Mathematics program at Florida State University (FSU) immediately following my graduation from USM. Through my master’s program, I worked with Dr. Kyle Gallivan on large-scale matrix factorization and numerical linear algebra. This research culminated in my master’s project, “The Inexact Graph Matching Problem Two Spectral Methods for Constructing Correspondences Between Vertex Sets of Graphs.”

Immediately following the completion of my master’s degree in 2011, I began working as a technical consultant in professional services at Aderant Holdings, Inc., a legal software company. Through this role, I travelled to dozens of large law firms across North America and Europe, helping clients implement and customize large, distributed financial software. In 2014, I moved to Aderant’s software development team as a software engineer working on the Expert Time and Collections products. Through this role I became familiar with web service and database architecture and became interested in not only the practice of software, but also the many challenges faced by practitioners.

This interest in Software Engineering ultimately led me to enter the FSU Computer Science Ph.D. program in 2013.  In 2014 I began working with Dr. Sonia Haiduc on code search and query optimization for use in simplifying the process of concept location. Today, I maintain a full-time engineering position with the Florida Department of Education as a technical team lead for the Bureau of Exceptional Education and Student Services (BEESS) while also working in the Serene Lab completing my dissertation research on machine learning applications for improving traceability link recovery. I live in Tallahassee, FL with my wife (Samantha), son (Cassian), and dog (Eevee).