Ira Ceka

IC

I'm a Computer Science PhD student at Columbia University, advised by Prof. Baishakhi Ray and Prof. Gail Kaiser. I'm broadly interested in AI applications for code. Throughout my PhD, I've worked on AI for security applications, such as vulnerability detection. I've also explored code reasoning for code-related tasks—specifically, investigating the techniques that underlie the ability of large language models to perform well on tasks like bug repair. I've also explored similar ideas in the context of software engineering agents, aiming to identify which components are critical for their performance and where future research should focus to improve agent capabilities. I am a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP).

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Research

project thumbnail Understanding APR Agents Through the Lens of Traceability
I Ceka*, H Mitchell*, S Pujar, L Buratti, S Ramji, J Yang, G Kaiser, B Ray
arXiv 2025
project thumbnail Code Reasoning for Software Engineering Tasks: A Survey and A Call to Action
S Pujar, I Ceka, I Manotas, G Kaiser, B Ray, S Ramji
arXiv 2025
project thumbnail Can LLM Prompting Serve as a Proxy for Static Analysis in Vulnerability Detection
I Ceka, F Qiao*, A Dey*, A Valecha, G Kaiser, B Ray
arXiv 2024
project thumbnail Towards causal deep learning for vulnerability detection
MM Rahman, I Ceka, C Mao, S Chakraborty, B Ray, W Le
ICSE 2024

Honors & Awards

  • Amazon Trusted AI Challenge Selected Participant (2024)
  • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP)

Teaching

  • Programming Languages and Translators
    TA, Columbia University
    Fall 2023
  • Advanced Software Engineering
    TA, Columbia University
    Fall 2022
  • Data Visualization using Python
    Program Instructor, MIT
    Fall 2021