Kostadin Damevski

Kostadin Damevski, Ph.D.

Professor and Graduate Program Director | Computer Science

Builds machine learning and AI systems that study and support how software developers communicate, reason about code, and handle security.

Email: kdamevski@vcu.edu

Areas of Expertise

Software Maintenance and Evolution, Empirical Software Engineering, Mining Software Repositories, Developer–AI InteractionAgentic AI Safety, Software Security and Vulnerability Analysis, AI-Assisted Software Engineering, Large Language Models for Software Engineering

Links

Biography

Kostadin Damevski is Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Computer Science at the VCU College of Engineering, and Co-Director of the Software Engineering Center at VCU. He builds machine learning and AI systems that study and support how software developers communicate, reason about code, and handle security. His group's current work spans three areas: (1) developer and human–AI conversations, including detecting derailment and emotion in pull requests, issue threads, and pair-programming sessions; (2) security of AI-assisted software engineering, including vulnerability data curation, agentic exploit modeling, and the security behavior of LLM coding assistants; and (3) fine-grained, changeset-centric software analytics for bug localization, defect prediction, and risk assessment of AI-generated code.
Damevski was named a VCU Nationally and Internationally Recognized Scholar (NIRA) in 2025. His research has been supported by NSF, DARPA, DOE, DHS, and industry partners including Google and ABB. He serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Software, and is Co-General Chair of SANER 2027, which his group is hosting in Richmond.

Education

University of Utah

Ph.D.
Computer Science
2007