Me when I was in Edinburgh

About

I completed the Ph.D in Computer Science (June-2020) at School of Computing & Information Systems (SCIS), Singapore Management University (SMU) (Rank 81 Overrall, Rank 4 in Software Engineering Research on CSRanking).

During my Ph.D, I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Lingxiao Jiang. I also received tremendous guidance from Prof.Yijun Yu from The Open University, UK. I was grateful to receive the Presidential Doctoral Fellowship in Computing and the SMU Dean’s List for outstanding research achievement. I am the first author of a few publications in top-tier academic conferences across different domains in Computer Science, such as software engineering (ICSE , ESEC/FSE, ASE), artificial intelligence (AAAI), natural language processing (EMNLP, ACL), information retrieval (SIGIR).

I’m also an active open-source contributor, with the majority of my work available on my Github. Notable projects include CodeTF (~1500 stars), CodeT5+ (~2400 stars), CodeCapybara, The Vault.

Throughout my research career, I’ve had the honor of working with brilliant minds and talents from SOAR Group - SMU, FSoft AI Center, Huawei Ireland Research Center, Salesforce AI Research.

(Past) Affiliations:

• Research Scientist - Software Engineering Research Group, SMU.
• AI Residency Supervisor/Chief Scientist - FSoft AI Lab.
• Principal Research Scientist - Trustworthy Open-Source Software Engineering Lab, Huawei Ireland Research Center.

Research Interests

My interests lie at the intersection of Software Engineering, Deep Learning, Programming Languages and Natural Language Processing. Specifically, I am interested in the application of AI for Software Development (AI4Code, AI4Software), such as code generation, code search, code summarization, program synthesis, automated bug detection & program repair, code migration, software testing, etc. Towards the goal of automated programming, my primary focus of research is to study large scale source code data (Big Code) that is accessible on Github, Bitbucket, etc., to better understand the behaviors of software systems, and to adapt recent advances in Deep Learning, such as Graph Neural Networks, Large Language Models (GPT, T5, BERT), Causal AI, to mine knowledge from these systems. This is a step forward in reducing software maintenance costs, and help software developers to write and understand source code better.

Highlighted Publications

• CodeT5+: Open Code Large Language Models for Code Understanding and Generation
  [on Marktechpost].
  
• CodeTF: One-Stop Transformer-based Library for CodeLLMs
  [on YCombinator, Syncedreview, Marktechpost].
  
• TreeCaps:Tree-based Capsule Networks for Source Code Processing, AAAI 2021.
  
• InferCode: Self-Supervised Learning of Code Representations by Predicting Subtrees, ICSE 2021.
  
• Self-Supervised Learning for Code Retrieval and Summarization through Semantic-Preserving Program Transformations, SIGIR 2021.
  

Awards

• Dean’s List for Outstanding Research Achievement at SMU Postgraduate Program, 2019
• SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellowship, 2019
• SIGSOFT CAPS Travel Grant Award - ESEC/FSE 2019
• Bronze Medal in the ACM Student Research Competition, ICSE 2019
• SIGSOFT CAPS Travel Grant Award - ICSE 2019
• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award - ICSE 2018