Rate My Professor Hongyu Zhang

Hongyu Zhang is an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer and Information Sciences (Computer Science and Software Engineering) within the College of Engineering, Science and Environment at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore in 2003. His career includes serving as an Associate Professor at Tsinghua University from 2006 to 2014, joining the University of Newcastle as an Associate Professor in 2016, and collaborating with Microsoft Research on projects such as the Bing Developer Assistant, a Visual Studio extension that achieved over 450,000 downloads in 2016. Zhang's research centers on intelligent software engineering, leveraging data mining, machine learning, and information retrieval on vast software data including source code, bugs, logs, and metrics to enhance software quality and developer productivity. Key areas include intelligent programming for code search, summarization, generation, and pattern mining; intelligent quality prediction such as defect-prone module identification, cloud failure prediction, and runtime performance forecasting with tools like DeepPerf; and intelligent fault detection encompassing log-based anomaly detection, crash localization, bug report analysis, and incident management, exemplified by BugLocator.

Zhang has made significant contributions through highly cited publications, including 'A Novel Neural Source Code Representation based on Abstract Syntax Tree' (ICSE 2019, 971 citations), 'Robust log-based anomaly detection on unstable log data' (ESEC/FSE 2019, 917 citations), 'Where should the bugs be fixed? More accurate information retrieval-based bug localization based on bug reports' (ICSE 2012, 874 citations), 'Deep code search' (ICSE 2018, 737 citations), and 'Deep API learning' (FSE 2016, 729 citations). His work has real-world impact through deployments in Microsoft online services. Recognized as one of the world's top 20 most prolific software engineering researchers in the past decade by a 2019 Elsevier Bibliometric Assessment and as the leading researcher in Software Systems in The Australian’s Top Researchers (September 2020), Zhang continues to advance data-driven software engineering practices.