Undergraduate Research

We are always looking for motivated undergraduate students interested in doing research, for example, as part of Final-Year Projects (FYPs) or the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) at NUS. Undergraduate students working on a research project are treated as full members of the lab. Different from course projects, research projects will involve ambiguity; rather than providing step-by-step instructions to solve a problem, you will drive your own research project, while we will help you narrow down a problem and co-design a solution with you. It can be very satisfying to know that you developed a new solution to an open problem in science! I typically recommend students to watch “Relevance, Simplicity, and Innovation: Stories and Takeaways from Software Engineering Research” by Andreas Zeller and “Measure, Then Build” by Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, which provide two insightful perspectives on research.

Undergraduate research projects provide a good opportunity for pursuing further research, for example, as part of a PhD. Besides the research experience itself, I am happy to support students who have shown promise in research with recommendation letters both abroad and within Singapore. Undergraduate students who have joined our lab as part of FYPs, UROPs, or internships have obtained PhD positions at various institutions, such as Imperial College London (Tongjun Zhang), Peking University (Haoxiang Jia), the University of California, Berkeley (Qiuyang Mang), the University of Waterloo (Qingshuo Guo), and Virginia Tech (Kabilan Mahathevan). I typically recommend students interested in a PhD in related areas to watch talks from the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW), which are readily available on YouTube (e.g., see Managing Your Research, Your Advisor, Your PhD).

Depending on the outcomes of the project, we might be able to submit a paper to a conference; however, this is not guaranteed and depends on many factors (including luck!). Previous undergraduate students published papers at ICSE (e.g., “Finding XPath Bugs in XML Document Processors via Differential Testing”), ISSTA (e.g., “Inconsistencies in TeX-produced Documents”), and SIGMOD (e.g., “Finding Logic Bugs in Graph-processing Systems via Graph-cutting”). Undergraduate students in our lab have also received awards, including the NUS-wide Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Prize (received by Emily Ong and Ken Jin) and a Gold Medal in the undergraduate category of the SPLASH ACM Student Research Competition (received by Emily Ong).

If you are interested in a research opportunity, it would be best to directly reach out to me (rigger@nus.edu.sg). We do not maintain a list of open projects or problems that we are interested in. To get an impression of the kind of research you are interested in, you can check out our publications page.

– Manuel RIGGER (rigger@nus.edu.sg)

Last updated: 2026-08-15