The professor himself very likely did none of it. My guess is that someone like Dr. Su probably wouldn't even have enough time to work on fuzzing LLVM, and would likely be more concerned with writing up the next proposal to fund his lab :P
From what I've seen in academia, the supervisor typically generates ideas, and the grad students and postdocs test them out and see if they have potential. The discussion goes back and forth until a decision is made on whether or not to pursue an idea.
This differs from group to group of course, and is not the case in smaller groups, but it's generally how things work.
I think this can vary across people/projects and perhaps true in a large number of cases (this could also be said for the management in business, and it is debatable whether spending time on the ground doing the actual thing would always be the most leveraged thing one can do). Irrespective of that debate, at least for this particular instance, I can confirm that the professor in question himself [who happens to have been my doctoral advisor :)] went through a whole lot of trouble personally, down to reducing many many individual bugs and you can just look at the bug tracker activity under his name to independently verify. (I have long graduated so this is not a "paid Glassdoor review" either and ran into this as a frequent HN lurker!)
There won't be an academic paper supporting this until a senior academic thinks it's a worthy concept for investigation and follows up by asking his postgrads to work the idea up into a publishable paper. Quite meta really.
Where do you expect someone to find statistics to cite regarding the internal workings of university labs? Or are you looking for someone's blog post, which would ultimately also be anecdotal?
"[Citation needed]" is just noise when there's no reasonable expectation that the desired evidence actually exists. Moreover, we're not writing Wikipedia here, just trying to have a discussion. Take a chill pill.
From what I've seen in academia, the supervisor typically generates ideas, and the grad students and postdocs test them out and see if they have potential. The discussion goes back and forth until a decision is made on whether or not to pursue an idea.
This differs from group to group of course, and is not the case in smaller groups, but it's generally how things work.