Registered user since Wed 14 Apr 2021
Zhou Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and an Amii Fellow. He completed his Ph.D. at SMU, after earning an MSc from UCL. He is recognized for establishing scientific and practical foundations of trustworthy codeLLMs, integrating robustness, security, privacy, and ecosystem insights to drive safer AI adoption in software engineering. Zhou has won with multiple awards, including 2026 MSR Outstanding Doctoral Research Award, 2025 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2024 IEEE Computer Society Best Paper Award, ACM Distinguished Paper Awards at ASE 2025 and ISSTA 2024, ACSAC Honorable Mention Award, and the Gold Medal in the ACM SRC at ICSE 2024. He serves on program and organizing committees for top software engineering conferences, collaborates with researchers across multiple continents, and is actively building a research group focused on large language models for code, AI security and privacy, and sustainable AI systems.
Contributions
2026
ESEC/FSE
EASE
ICSE
- Author of Training on Clean Data but Getting Backdoored Models! A Poisoning Attack on Code Encoders within the Research Track-track
- Author of Efficient and Green Large Language Models for Software Engineering: Literature Review, Vision, and the Road Ahead within the Journal-first Papers-track
- Committee Member in Program Committee within the Research Track-track
- Author of Scrub It Out! Erasing Sensitive Memorization in Code Language Models via Machine Unlearning within the Research Track-track
Mining Software Repositories
2025
ASE
- Author of Token Sugar: Making Source Code Sweeter for LLMs through Token-Efficient Shorthand within the Research Papers-track
- Author of Finding Safety Violations of AI-Enabled Control Systems through the Lens of Synthesized Proxy Programs within the Journal-First-track
- Author of "My productivity is boosted, but ..." Demystifying Users’ Perception on AI Coding Assistants within the Research Papers-track
- Author of Backdoors in Code Summarizers: How Bad Is It? within the Research Papers-track
- PC Member in Research Papers within the Research Papers-track
- Author of Stealthy Backdoor Attack for Code Models within the Journal-First-track
- Session Chair of SE4AI & AI4SE 1 (part of Research Papers)
AIware
- Author of How Quantization Impacts Privacy Risk on LLMs for Code? within the Main Track-track
- Session Chair of Evaluation Frameworks, and Quantitative Assessment of LLMs (Part 1) (part of Main Track)
- Session Chair of Evaluation Frameworks, and Quantitative Assessment of LLMs (Part 2) (part of Main Track)
ESEC/FSE
2024
APSEC
ICSE
- Author of Curiosity-Driven Testing for Sequential Decision-Making Process within the Research Track-track
- Author of Greening Large Language Models of Code within the Software Engineering in Society-track
- Author of Unveiling Memorization in Code Models within the Research Track-track
- Author of Classifying Source Code: How Far Can Compressor-based Classifiers Go? within the SRC - ACM Student Research Competition-track
- Author of Assessing AI Detectors in Identifying AI-Generated Code: Implications for Education within the Software Engineering Education and Training-track
- Author of Artifact for Assessing AI Detectors in Identifying AI-Generated Code: Implications for Education within the Artifact Evaluation-track
- Author of Representation Learning for Stack Overflow Posts: How Far are We? within the Journal-first Papers-track