Xiangyu Zhang Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Purdue University Phone:765-496-9415 E-mail: xyzhang at cs.purdue.edu

Education

Awards

• 2009 NSF Career Award.
• 2006 ACM SIGPLAN Dissertation Award.

Research Interests

• Debugging
  My primary research interest is on software debugging. More precisely, when a software fault manifests itself as a failure, I want to develop automated techniques to help decide the root cause of the failure. I am interested in automated debugging for general programs, distributed systems, and parallel systems. In the past, I have also done the following work on debugging.
  [ICSM07] Failure Indexing: A Dynamic Slicing Based Approach;
  [PLDI07]Towards Locating Execution Omission Errors;
  [PLDI06]Pruning Dynamic Slices With Confidence;
  [ICSE06]Locating Faults Through Automated Predicate Switching;
  [ASE05]Locating Faulty Code Using Failure-Inducing Chops;
  
  
• Dynamic Program Analysis
  Substantial of my research efforts are spent on developing novel primitives to better analyze program executions. My recent favorite is [PLDI08] Execution Indexing, which is a technique that provides a canonical representation for execution points. It allows aligning corresponding points across multiple executions. A sample application is in concurrent execution, if a breakpoint is set at a particular point, it is unlikely the re-execution will stop at the desired point due to non-determinism. Indexing identifies the corresponding point. Another interesting primitive is [FSE06] Execution Fast Forwarding, which can fast forward the replay of an execution by skipping un-interesting part.
  
  
• Scientific Data Validation
  Recently, I started working on helping scientists validate their data processing results. The motivation is that scientific data processing has uncertainty such as input uncertainty, resulting in unreliable results. Our recent progress is [VLDB07] Lineage Tracing .
  
  
• Others
  I am also doing active research on slicing, security, and testing.

  Publications

  Full list

  Talented Students

  Advising:
  Tao Bao
  Vinai Sundaram(with Prof. Eugster)
  Nick Sumner
  Dasarath Weeratunge(with Prof. Jagannanthan)
  Bin Xin
  Yunhui Zheng
  
  Working with:
  Zhiqiang Lin
  
  Graduated:
  Mingwu Zhang (In Microsoft) (co-advised with Prof. Prabhakar)
  

  Teaching and Reading Group

  CS510 Software Engineering in spring 2010.
  CS590 Advanced Software Testing and Debugging in fall 2009.
  CS352 Compilers: Principles and Practice in spring 2009.
  CS510 Software Engineering in fall 2008.
  Fault Localization and Program Analysis Reading Group (spring 2008).
  CS510 Software Engineering in spring 2008.
  CS590Z Software Defect Analysis in fall 2007.
  CS590F in spring 2007.
  

  Professional Activities

  I serve in the program comittees of ISSTA'10, ISSRE'09, PLDI'09, ISSTA'09, ICST'09, WODA'08, ICST'08.
  I was the web/publication Chair of LCTES'07.

  Personal Interests

  Soccer is my favorite. I used to play in Tucson City League.
  Yes, that is me.
  2006 final
  The happiness.