Seminars
In February 2019, the Software Institute started its SI Seminar Series. Every Thursday afternoon, a researcher of the Institute will publicly give a short talk on a software engineering argument of her choice. Examples include, but are not limited to, novel interesting papers, seminal papers, personal research overview, discussion of preliminary research ideas, tutorials, and small experiments.
On our YouTube playlist you can watch some of the past seminars. Below you can find more details on the next seminar, the upcoming seminars, and an archive of the past speakers.
Everyone is welcome to attend the seminars organized by the Software Institute.
Next Speaker: Diana Carolina Muñoz Hurtado
Application programming interfaces (APIs) enable Web services to securely interact and exchange information. The growing prevalence of malicious packages in software repositories has heightened efforts to identify malware in software dependencies, posing critical challenges for Web API developers and security teams. In this talk, we explore the dependency landscape of Web Service APIs by examining a curated collection of open-source GitHub repositories across five major programming languages (JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, and Go). We study the historical evolution of dependencies throughout the commit history of each repository, tracking the total number of dependencies as well as the prevalence and persistence of deprecated, unofficial, and vulnerable packages over time. Packages are associated with vulnerabilities according to the Open Source Vulnerabilities (OSV) database. We provide a quantitative assessment of their usage, exploring the relationship between the security components of OpenAPI descriptions.
I am a Ph.D student in the DESIGN (Architecture, Design and Web Information Systems Engineering) research group at the software institute USI, Lugano, supervised by Prof. Dr Cesare Pautasso. In 2022 I receive my Master’s degree in Software Engineering from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana from Colombia. I worked for 4 years as a Technical Consultant in ACI Worldwide. My current research focuses on security practices in web service APIs, applying mining and historical analysis techniques to study the evolution and risks of dependencies (vulnerable, obsolete, and unofficial packages) throughout the entire commit history of GitHub repositories, and how the security schemes documented in OpenAPI specifications correlate with different patterns of dependency usage and exposure to vulnerabilities in real-world APIs.
Program
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Aitor ArrietaDecember 11, 2025