I am an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Khoury College of Computing Sciences, Northeastern University. Prior to this, I was an Assistant Professor of Practice at the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook Univeristy. I teach a number of undergraduate/graduate courses in systems, software engineering, and programming languages. My research interests include mobile application security, empirical software engineering, CS education, and Cheminformatics.

If you are a student at Northeastern University and are interested in collaborating with me, then look at the Projects option in the menu. If something piques your interest or you have an idea on how to extend the project then contact me at j.mitra@northeastern.edu

1. Studying the Impact of Auto-Graders Giving Immediate Feedback in Programming Assignments by Joydeep Mitra.
   Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), 2023.
2. A Security & Privacy Analysis of US-based Contact Tracing Apps by Joydeep Mitra.
   Technical Report, 2022.
3. A user-friendly application for predicting the outcome of co-crystallizations by Nandini Sarkar, Joydeep Mitra, Molly Vittengl, Lexi Brandt and Christer B. Aakeröy.
   CrystEngComm Journal, 2020.
4. BenchPress: Analyzing Android App Vulnerability Benchmark Suites by Joydeep Mitra, Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath, and Aditya Narkar.
   International Workshop on Advances in Mobile App Analysis (A-Mobile), 2019. [Artifacts Repositories: DroidBench Evaluation, Ghera Evaluation, IccBench Evaluation, UBCBench Evaluation, Benchmarks preparation, and Stack Overflow.]
5. Are Free Android App Security Analysis Tools Effective in Detecting Known Vulnerabilities? by Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath and Joydeep Mitra.
   Empirical Software Engineering - An International Journal (EMSE), 2019. [Artifacts Repository: Representativeness Evaluation, Tools Evaluation]
6. SeMA: A Design Methodology for Building Secure Android Apps by Joydeep Mitra and Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath.
   International Workshop on Advances in Mobile App Analysis (A-Mobile), 2019.
7. Ghera: A Repository of Android App Vulnerability Benchmarks by Joydeep Mitra and Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath.
   International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering (PROMISE), 2017. [Artifacts Repository]

Current Areas of Interest

1. Mobile App Security:

   Context: Mobile apps are a critical aspect of our lives. We use them for communication, finance, entertainment, health etc. However, they may have vulnerabilities, which can exploited by attackers to cause harm to the user. Moreover, mobile apps run on personal devices. Hence, they have the ability to violate a user's privacy.

   Research Focus: There are two ways in which we make mobiles apps secure -- (1) We systmaticlly study, analyze, and collect mobile app vulnerabilities and privacy violations, (2) We develop methodologies to help app developers prevent vulnerabilities and privacy violations in mobile apps.

   Sample Project: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world have developed contact tracing apps to track and limit the spread of the pandemic. However, critics have pointed out that the development of such apps have longterm consequences on the security and privacy of users using the apps. In this project, we use security analysis tools to analyze these apps. The first phase of this project (completed) focussed on US-based apps. Read the manuscript for more information. Future work will involve apps from other countries.

2. Computer Science Education:

   Context: Research in Computer Science education involves studying how students learn computing, develop pedagogies to teach effectively at scale, and improve diversity in Computer Science.

   Research Focus: We analyze the effects of pedagogical methods and educational tools on student learning outcomes. To this end, we develop tools to collect data and use quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the collected data.

   Sample Project: Automatic grading tools are convenient as they help course staff grade work in large courses. However, some believe that such tools negatively impact the students' ability to test their code in programming assisgnments. In this project, we validate the claim by measuring students' effectiveness in writing tests in the presence and absence of such tools. Read the manuscript for more information. Future work will involve repeating the experiment with larger sample size and develop methods to evaluate the effectiveness of student-defined test cases.

3. Digital Humanities:

   A Digital Platform for Showcasing Historical Postcards: The goal of this project is to develop a web-based platform to display the stories of people employed in domestic labor in the British Empire through a variety of archival postcards. This project is a collaboration with Prof. Satyasikha Chakraborty, a historian at The College of New Jersey and her students.

Past Projects

1. STARS:This project is about developing a Python-based MIPS assembly simulator called STARS. MIPS is used to teach assembly programming in the systems fundamentals course at Stony Brook Univesity. STARS was conceived and developed by Prof. Kevin McDonnell and his students. Current work in the project involves maintainence and developing new features for the STARS IDE along with a testing framework for developing automated test cases.

2. Ghera: A repository of benchmarks that capture known vulnerabilities in Android apps. (Website)
   Role: Co-Creator and Developer
   Technology: Android, Java
   
3. Rekha: An evaluation of the effectiveness of Android app security analysis tools in detecting known vulnerabilities. (Website, Dashboard)
   Role: Co-Creator and Analyst
   Technology: Android, Groovy, R
4. BenchPress: An empirical evaluation of Android app vulnerability benchmarks.
   Role: Co-Creator, Developer, and Analyst
   Technology: Android, Groovy, GNU Bash
5. SoFAnalyzer: A tool to measure awareness amongst Android app developers about security-related APIs in Android from StackOverflow discussions.
   Role: Co-supervisor, Analyst
   Technology: Groovy, GNU Bash, PowerShell
6. MIT App Inventor: A framework to help novice programmers build Android apps visually through a web interface.
   Role: Contributor
   Technology: Android, Java, Redis
7. CoForm: A tool to predict potential partners for a co-crystal.
   Role: Co-Creator, Analyst
   Technology: Groovy
   Note: Protected by confidentiality agreement. Please contact authors for more information.
8. SeMA: A library to help design secure Android apps.
   Role: Creator
   Technology: Android, Java, Kotlin
   Note: Work in progress.

• Secure-it-i Lab @Kstate
• SAnToS Lab @Kstate
• The Aakeröy Research Laboratory @Kstate

Stony Brook University Faculty Fellowship : Awarded to faculty to develop innovative pedagogical methods

Monetary reward from Android Security Program for reporting vulnerabilities leading to CVE-2018-9548 and CVE-2019-9463.

Ann and Dave Braun Student Inventor Award . Awarded for developing a method to automatically predict cocrystals.