Rate My Professor Xiaoning Du

Dr. Xiaoning Du is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer (equivalent to U.S. Associate Professor) in the Department of Software Systems and Cybersecurity, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University. She joined Monash University in February 2021 as a Lecturer and was promoted to Senior Lecturer effective 1 July 2025. She serves as Course Director for the Bachelor of Engineering (Software Engineering). Du earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanyang Technological University in 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Yang Liu and her Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Fudan University in 2014. Her career is marked by rapid advancement and recognition in software engineering research.

Du’s research primarily focuses on the security and quality assurance of intelligent software systems, with particular emphasis on intelligent software engineering tools. She is best known for contributions to Devign: effective vulnerability identification by learning comprehensive program semantics via graph neural networks (NeurIPS 2019), DeepStellar: model-based quantitative analysis of stateful deep learning systems (ACM 2019), BigCodeBench: benchmarking code generation with diverse function calls and complex instructions (ICLR 2025, Oral presentation), MARBLE: model-based robustness analysis of stateful deep learning systems (2020), LEOPARD: identifying vulnerable code for vulnerability assessment through program metrics (2019), and SimPy (ACM 2024). Recent works include “AI Coders Are Among Us: Rethinking Programming Language Grammar Towards Efficient Code Generation” (ISSTA 2024) and “The Hidden Cost of Readability: How Code Formatting Silently Consumes Your LLM Budget” (ICSE 2026). Her publications have over 3,800 citations on Google Scholar. Awards include the 2024 Google Research Scholar Award in Software Engineering, ARC DECRA Fellowship for “Energy-Efficient Models for Sustainable Intelligent Software Engineering” (funded November 2025), multiple ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards, ICLR Oral, 2024 FIT Dean’s Early Career Researcher of the Year Award, and 2025 SSC Research Supervisor Award. She serves as Associate Editor for TOSEM since July 2025 and on program committees for ICSE 2025, ISSTA 2025, ASE 2024, FSE 2023, among others, and as Proceedings Co-Chair for FSE 2026.