Awarded an Amazon Research Award on Automated Reasoning!

I’ve received an Amazon Research Award on Automated Reasoning for my proposal ‘Polyglot Automated Program Repair for Infrastructure as Code’.

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ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award

🏆 Our ICSE 2025 paper Rango: Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Proving for Automated Software Verification has won an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award! 🏆

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InfraFix: Technology-Agnostic Repair of Infrastructure as Code

See our new ISSTA 2025 tool demonstration paper on automated repair of Infrastructure as Code!

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Do Experts Agree About Smelly Infrastructure?

Check out our new study published at IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2025)

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New papers on SmartBugs 2.0

Two new papers on SmartBugs 2.0 published at ASE 2023 and EMSE 2024.

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Research Opportunities

I am always looking for new talented research students and post-doc researchers. Join me in beautiful Lisbon!

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João F. Ferreira

Computer Scientist

About

João F. Ferreira is an associate professor at IST, University of Lisbon, and a researcher at INESC-ID. He co-leads the Software Reliability Lab. He coordinates the Automated Reasoning and Software Reliability area at INESC-ID. His work spans from empirical software engineering methods that can inform practitioners and direct future research, to formal methods that can verify the absence of certain types of bugs. For more details, see selected publications.

Featured Publications

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Robert Thompson, Nuno Saavedra, Pedro Carrott, Kevin Fisher, Alex Sanchez-Stern, Yuriy Brun, João F. Ferreira, Sorin Lerner, Emily First (2025). Rango: Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Proving for Automated Software Verification. In ICSE 2025. CORE A* conference.
🏆 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award.

PDF Code Dataset

Nuno Saavedra, João F. Ferreira, Alexandra Mendes (2025). InfraFix: Technology-Agnostic Repair of Infrastructure as Code. In ISSTA 2025, Tool Demonstrations Track. CORE A conference.

PDF Code Project Video

Sogol Masoumzadeh, Nuno Saavedra, Rungroj Maipradit, Lili Wei, João F. Ferreira, Dániel Varró, Shane McIntosh (2025). Do Experts Agree About Smelly Infrastructure?. In TSE 2025. Q1 journal.

PDF Project

David Ferreira, Alexandra Mendes, João F. Ferreira, Carolina Carreira (2025). Contract Usage and Evolution in Android Mobile Applications. In ECOOP 2025. CORE A conference.

PDF Code

Pedro Carrott, Nuno Saavedra, Robert Thompson, Sorin Lerner, João F. Ferreira, Emily First (2024). CoqPyt: Proof Navigation in Python in the Era of LLMs. In FSE 2024, Demonstrations Track. CORE A* conference.

PDF Code Video

Monika di Angelo, Thomas Durieux, João F. Ferreira, Gernot Salzer (2024). Evolution of automated weakness detection in Ethereum bytecode: a comprehensive study. In EMSE, 29(2), pp. 1-44. Q1 Journal.

PDF Code Project DOI

Nuno Saavedra, João Gonçalves, Miguel Henriques, João F. Ferreira, Alexandra Mendes (2023). Polyglot Code Smell Detection for Infrastructure as Code with GLITCH. In ASE 2023, Tool Demo Track. CORE A* conference.

PDF Code Project

Monika di Angelo, Thomas Durieux, João F. Ferreira, Gernot Salzer (2023). SmartBugs 2.0: An Execution Framework for Weakness Detection in Ethereum Smart Contracts. In ASE 2023, Tool Demo Track. CORE A* conference.

PDF Code Project

Henrique Botelho Guerra, João F. Ferreira, João Costa Seco (2023). Hoogle⋆: Constants and λ-abstractions in Petri-net-based Synthesis using Symbolic Execution. In ECOOP 2023. CORE A conference.
🏆 Awarded: Artifact Evaluation Award (Available and Reusable).

PDF Code Source Document

Nuno Saavedra, João F. Ferreira (2022). GLITCH: Automated Polyglot Security Smell Detection in Infrastructure as Code. In ASE 2022. CORE A* conference.
🏆 Awarded: Artifact Evaluation Award (Reusable).

PDF Dataset Project

João F. Ferreira, Pedro Cruz, Thomas Durieux, Rui Abreu (2020). SmartBugs: A Framework to Analyze Solidity Smart Contracts. In ASE 2020, Tool Demo Track. CORE A* conference.

PDF Code Dataset Project

Thomas Durieux, João F. Ferreira, Rui Abreu, Pedro Cruz (2020). Empirical Review of Automated Analysis Tools on 47,587 Ethereum Smart Contracts. In ICSE 2020. CORE A* conference.
🏆 Awarded: Artifact Evaluation Award (Available, Reusable). Most cited paper from ICSE 2020 (Google Scholar Metrics).

PDF Code Dataset Project

Julie Porteous, João F. Ferreira, Alan Lindsay, Marc Cavazza (2020). Extending Narrative Planning Domains with Linguistic Resources. In AAMAS 2020. CORE A* conference.
🏆 Invited to journal publication by Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS) (see JAAMAS 2021 extended paper).

PDF Project

Thomas Hayton, Julie Porteous, João F. Ferreira, Alan Lindsay (2020). Narrative Planning Model Acquisition from Text Summaries and Descriptions. In AAAI 2020. CORE A* conference.

PDF Project

Tony Hoare, Alexandra Mendes, João F. Ferreira (2019). Logic, Algebra, and Geometry at the Foundation of Computer Science. In FMTea 2019.

PDF Project

Featured Posts

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ICSE 2020 paper is the most cited according to 2025 Scholar Metrics

I’m happy to share that, according to the 2025 Scholar Metrics:

Our paper “Empirical Review of Automated Analysis Tools on 47,587 Ethereum Smart Contracts” (T. Durieux, J.F. Ferreira, R. Abreu, P. Cruz – ICSE 2020) is the most cited paper from ICSE!
And our paper “SmartBugs: A Framework to Analyze Solidity Smart Contracts” (J.F. Ferreira, P. Cruz, T. Durieux, R. Abreu – ASE 2020) is the fourth most cited paper from ASE!

João F. Ferreira

Jul 25, 2025 2 min read News