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Dr. Zhenchang Xing is an Associate Professor in the Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, from 2012-2016. Before joining NTU, Dr. Xing was a Lee Kuan Yew Research Fellow in the School of Computing, National University of Singapore from 2009-2012. Dr. Xing obtained his Master of Engineering from Nankai University, Tianjin, China in 2001, and his PhD degree from the University of Alberta, Canada in 2008.
Dr. Xing’s main research area is software engineering, applied data analytics, and human-computer interaction. He has published expertise in traditional areas of software engineering such as software differencing, clone analysis and feature location. In his most recent work, Dr. Xing has focused on designing domain-specific data-mining techniques and recommendation systems for the timely and serendipitous discovery of software engineering information on the internet.
Dr. Xing has over 80 publications in refereed journals and conference proceedings. His research work has been published in top software engineering venues such as ICSE, FSE, ASE, ICSME, SANER, MSR, TSE, EMSE. Four of his research papers have won Best Paper awards in ICSM2006, ICSM2011, SANER2016, ASE2016 ToolDemo. Three others have won nominations for Best Paper awards in ASE2005, ICSM2014, and SANER2015. Dr. Xing regularly referees papers and serves on the program committees of the top software engineering conferences (e.g., ICSE, ASE, ICSME). He has won AUD$1,000,000 in industry and government funding and has industrial collaborations with Rolls-Royce, Insigma Hengtian, and Bangsun Technology.
Dr. Xing has graduated six phd students, two of which are now faculty members in universities, two are postdoctural fellow, one in MSRA Suzhou, and one in Tencent AI lab. He currently supervise 3 PhD students, 7 Master students and several undergraduate Honours projects. Dr. Xing and his research team has been actively working on the following research projects:
- Software Engineering: Semantic clone analysis, Software graph embedding and reasoning, Code search and generation
- Human-Computer Interaction: Policy assurance bot, UI design critics and generation, Domain-specific dialogue systems
- Knowledge Graph: Entity and relation extraction in software text, Software weaknesses and vulnerabilities representation learning
- Deep Learning in SE: Question answering and chatbot, Software development knowledge and behavior tracing, Multi-modal (e.g, code, text, image) embedding and retrieval
My research is centered around software engineering, which I believe is a unique perspective of computing research. This perspective represents the quest to answer "how can we build complex systems simply?". My current research focus is to exploit data science to improve software development productivity.
My research combines software analytics, behavioral research methods, data mining and deep learning techniques, and interaction design to solve the information problems in software engineering. The long-term vision is to incorporate the innovations in these four areas into an intelligent working environment for software engineering.
My research work can be clustered into three areas on different types of software engineering data:
- Software artifacts: Investigate static and dynamic program analysis techniques for program comprehension, software maintenance, and system security
- Interaction data with the working environment: Understand how developers work, and then design innovative tools to improve their work or new metrics to assess their work
- Crowdsourced software content: Mining a knowledge base about software-specific entities and relationships to improve developers’ life on the Internet
The center theme of my work is to exploit the three pillars - knowledge graph, machine learning and behavior analytics to solve challenging software engineering problems.
Refer to DBLP for the updated publication list.
Selected recent publications
Software artefacts
Y. Lin^, X. Peng, Z. Xing, D. Zheng, and W. Zhao. Clone-based and Interactive Recommendation for Modifying Pasted Code. Proc. 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering(ESEC/FSE), 2015.
Q. Jiang, X. Peng, H. Wang, Z. Xing, and W. Zhao. Summarizing Evolutionary Trajectory by Grouping and Aggregating Relevant Code Changes. Proc. 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, 2015.
Y. Lin^, Z. Xing, X. Peng, Y. Liu, J. Sun, W. Zhao, J.S. Dong. Clonepedia: Summarizing Code Clones by Common Syntactic Context for Software Maintenance. Proc. 31st International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, 2014.
Y. Lin^, Z. Xing, Y. Xue, Y. Liu, X. Peng, and W. Zhao. Detecting Differences across Multiple Instances of Code Clones. Proc. 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2014.
Behavior data
L. Bao^, J. Li*, Z. Xing, X. Wang, and B. Zhou. Extracting and Analyzing Time-Series HCI Data from Screen-Captured Task Videos. Empirical Software Engineering, 2016.
J. Li*, L. Bao^, and Z. Xing. BPMiner: Mining Developers’ Behavior Patterns from Screen-Captured Task Videos. Proc. 31st ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), 2016.
L. Bao^, Z. Xing, X. Wang, and B. Zhou. Tracking and Analyzing Cross-Cutting Activities in Developers’ Daily Work. The 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), New Ideas Track, 2015.
L. Bao^, D. Ye*, Z. Xing, X. Xia, and X. Wang. ActivitySpace: A Remembrance Framework to Support Interapplication Information Needs. The 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Tool Demonstration Track.
L. Bao^, J. Li*, Z. Xing, X. Wang, and B. Zhou. Reverse Engineering Time-Series Interaction Data from Screen-Captured Videos. Proc. 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, 2015.
Crowsourced data
D. Ye*, Z.Xing, and N. Kapre. The Structure and Dynamics of Knowledge Network in Programming-Specific Q&A Sites: A Case Study of Stack Overflow. Empirical Software Engineering, 2016.
B. Xu*, D. Ye*, Z. Xing, X. Xia, G. Chen^, and S. Li. Predicting Semantically Linkable Knowledge in Development Online Forums via Convolutional Neural Network. Proc. 31nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2016.
G. Chen^, C. Chen*, Z.Xing, and B. Xu*. Learning a Dual-Language Vector Space for Domain-Specific Cross-Lingual Question Retrieval. Proc. 31nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2016.
C. Chen*, Z. Xing, and L. Han^. TechLand: Assisting Technology Landscape Inquires with Insights from Stack Overflow. Proc. 32nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, 2016.
D. Ye*, Z. Xing, C.Y. Foo#, J. Li*, and N, Kapre. Learning to Extract API Mentions from Informal Natural Language Discussions. Proc. 32nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, 2016.
C. Chen*, S. Gao*, and Z. Xing. What is Spain’s Paris? Mining Analogical Libraries in Q&A Discussions. Proc. 23nd IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, 2016.
Education
Ph.D., University of Alberta, Canada, 2008
M.Eng., Nankai University, China, 2000
B.S., Nankai University, China, 1997
Working Experience
October 2016 – present, Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University
October 2012 – October 2016, Assistant Professor, School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
January 2009 – October 2012, Lee Kuan Yew Research Fellow, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore
July 1998 – December 2001, Software Engineer, China
