Patanamon Thongtanunam

Patanamon develops evidence-based methods to help developers focus code inspections and improve review feedback. LINE-DP was evaluated on open-source software, while research on review-comment generation showed how reviewer experience can improve automated suggestions. These contributions address practical quality-assurance tasks for developers and reviewers, alongside recognised leadership in software engineering education.

Patanamon Thongtanunam is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, studying how developers review code and identify software defects. Using empirical evidence from software repositories, Patanamon analyses engineering practices to build automated tools for development teams. Academic honours include a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellowship and an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.

In research on defect prediction, Patanamon co-developed LINE-DP, a method that identifies individual lines of code likely to contain defects to help focus inspection effort. An evaluation across 32 releases of nine open-source Java systems demonstrated improvements over six alternative approaches. Complementary studies on automated review comments explore how feedback from experienced reviewers can train AI systems to produce more accurate and informative suggestions.

Alongside research, Patanamon co-leads the Responsible AI Software Engineering programme, collaborating with nine industry partners to train graduates. Service as coordinator of Melbourne’s Master of Software Engineering programme also earned a 2023 CIS Excellence in Teaching & Education award for leadership and educational contributions.