Prism Research Group
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
HKUST

[ Members | Projects | Publications | Fun Activities ]


News

  • Congratulations to Andy and Peng that both their papers are accepted by ICSE2012!
  • The recruiting season of 2011 has started. We want new members to join our exciting research group. Please forward your CV and transcript to charlesz AT cse.ust.hk
  • Members

  • Charles Zhang (Assistant Professor)    (PhD. Toronto)
  • Andy Zhou     (Ph.D student, B.S. Peking U)
  • Jeff Huang     (Ph.D student, B.S. NUDT))
  • Peng Liu     (Ph.D student, B.S. USTC)
  • Richard Xiao     (Ph.D student, B.S. UESTC)
  • Vincent Gao     (Ph.D student, B.S. Tsinghua U))
  • Yiqing Zhu (Visiting Master student from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2011)
  • Wei Li (Visiting PhD student from the Chinese Academy of Science, 2009-2010)
  • Research

    Our general research goal is to use software engineering techniques to improve the ways we design, implement, and deploy complex software systems. We currently focus on using program analysis techniques, both static and dynamic, to assist programmers in writing concurrent software systems with good productivity and quality. We are working on the following areas (not in the order of preference).:

    Defect analysis for concurrent software. Concurrent programs are hard to get right. We are working on the persuasive prediction of access anomaly bugs in concurrent programs and have built a tool called PECAN. Please read our ISSTA2011 paper and our TOSEM paper for details. We also work on the LEAP deterministic replayer, which record and faithfully replay concurrent program executions on multi-processors. Please read our FSE2010 paper for details.

    Program analysis techniques. We develop fundamental program analysis techniques as corner stones of software engineering techniques in general. The geometric encoding is a new way of accelerating the context and the heap-sensitive pointer analysis. Please read our ISSTA 2010 paper for details. PERT is a framework that provides the tailored object persistence behavior according to the program execution context. Please read our TSE paper for details.

    Mining software artifacts. Mining techniques are also useful in revealing insights about the intentions of programmers and in helping writing good quality programs. The G-Finder tool combines the source code structure with the hidden social network information inside programming forums to locate question-specific experts. Please read our OOPSLA2010 paper for details. Our TSE paper (journal version of the AOSD07 paper) describes a mining technique for automatically finding program features that are not modularized.

    Recent Publications
      2011

    1. Jeff Huang, Jinguo Zhou and Charles Zhang Scaling Predictive Analysis of Concurrent Programs by Removing Trace Redundancy In TOSEM: The ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. (To appear)
    2. Peng Liu and Charles Zhang. PERT: The Application Specific Tailoring of Object Persistence. In TSE: The IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. (To appear)
    3. Jeff Huang and Charles Zhang. An Efficient Static Trace Simplification Technique for Debugging Concurrent Programs. In SAS 2011: The 18th International Static Analysis Symposium, Venice, Italy, 2011 (To appear)
    4. Shaoming Huang and Charles Zhang. Persuasive Prediction of Concurrency Access Anomalies . In ISSTA 2011: International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Toronto, Canada, 2011 (To appear)
    5. Xiao Xiao and Charles Zhang. Geometric Encoding: Forging high performance context sensitive points-to analysis for Java . In ISSTA 2011: International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Toronto, Canada, 2011 (To appear)
    6. Xiao Xiao, Jinguo Zhou and Charles Zhang. Tracking Data Structures for Postmortem Analysis. In ICSE 2011 NIER Track: the 33rd Interntional Conference on Software Engineering, Hawaii, USA, May, 2011

      2010

    7. Wei Li, Charles Zhang and Songlin Hu. G-Finder: Routing programming questions closer to experts. In OOPSLA 2010: the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications. Reno, USA, October 2010
    8. Shaoming Huang, Peng Liu and Charles Zhang. LEAP: Lightweight deterministic multiprocessor replay for concurrent Java programs. In FSE 2010: 18th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. Santa Fe, USA, November 2010
    9. Wei Jiang, Charles Zhang, Zhenqiu Huang, Mingwen Chen and Songlin Hu. QSynth: A Tool for QoS-Aware Automatic Service Composition . In ICWS 2010: the 8th IEEE International Conference on Web Services. Miami, Florida, USA, July 2010

      2009

    10. Charles Zhang. FlexSync: An aspect-oriented approach to synchronization. In ICSE 2009: the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering, Vancouver, Canada, May 2009

      2008

    11. Charles Zhang and Hans-Arno Jacobsen. Externalizing Java server concurrency with CAL, In ECOOP 2008: 22nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Paphos, Cyprus, July, 2008

    Fun Activities

    1. Group hiking of HKUST hills pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4 pic5
    2. Group Photos at HKUST or anywhere else pic1
    3. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA (FSE 2010) pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4 pic5
    4. Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (ICSE 2011) pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4 pic5 pic6 pic7 pic8
    5. Toronto, Ontario, Canada (ISSTA 2011) pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4 pic5 pic6 pic7
    6. Venice, Italy, (SAS 2011) pic1 pic2 pic3 pic4 pic5