About Me

A chinese lion statue

I am a full professor and University Leadership Forum Chair, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University. My current research interests are related to Cybersecurity, Software Engineering and Artificial Integllence. I am also the Programme Director for HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corp Lab, Deputy Director of the National Satellite of Excellence of Singapore and Cluster Director in Cybersecurity, Energy Research Institute @NTU.

For model checking algorithms and tools, we are developing a model checker development framework Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT) development, which is a self-contained framework to support composing, simulating and reasoning of various systems (e.g., concurrent and real-time systems, probabilistic systems, web-service, security protocols, sensor networks, software architecture description language and so on).

For cybersecurity, we are working at malware modeling, detection, classification and generation with the focus on Javascript malware (refer to AsiaCCS 2015 and ISSTA 2015 papers), desktop malware and Android malware (AsiaCCS 2016, IJCNN 2016, ISSTA 2016, TSE 2017). We are developing tools for vulnerability modeling and detection using machine learning and (both static and dynamic) program analysis on binary code (FSE 2016, ICSE 2017, S&P 2017, FSE 2017, FSE 2018, CCS 2018, ICSE 20`9, USENIX 2020). In our Securify research project (2015 - 2020), we are performing formal verification on security system from hardware (FM 2016 paper), hypervisor (ISSRE 2015, TACAS 2016, TACAS 2017, TDSC 2017, FM 2018), programs to security protocol (TSE 2017) using different verification approaches. Recently, we embark on the research on Automotive Security and autonomous vehicle Security in their security design, runtime security monitoring and response, and also the security testing and certification.

For software engineering, we are working on the topics related to program specification learning and model learning (ASE 2013 and FSE 2015 papers), performance analysis (ICSE 2016 and ICSE 2018), Android energy analysis (TMC 2016 paper), reliability analysis (ISSTA 2014 paper), code clone analysis (ICSE 2014 FSE 2016, ASE 2017 and ASE 2018 papers), program debugging (ICSE 2017 paper), program testing (FSE 2017 paper), automatic loop analysis (ISSTA 2015, FSE 2016, FSE 2017, ASE 2017 and TSE 2018 papers), testing and validating deep learning algorithms (ASE 2018 and ISSRE 2018) using techniques like model checking, symbolic execution and machine learning. We are building tools related to these aspects.

For Android system, we have been working on security analysis on App malware detection & classification (AsiaCCS 2016, IJCNN 2016, ISSTA 2016, TSE 2017), generation (TIFS 2017) and data analytic, App vulnerability analysis (ICSE 2021), App testing (FSE 2017, ICSE 2018, ASE 2018), Android OS testing and fuzzing, and Automatic UI generation (ICSE 2018).

For artificial integllence, we are working on the topics related to AI's security, robustness, fairness and explanability. Please refer to our Deep-Series work (e.g., DeepMutation, DeepHunter, DeepStellar) and their applications.

For big data, we are promoting the concept called event analytic based on behavior learning and analysis, and their applications in sports and finance systems (refer to our ICTAC 2014 and TASE 2015 invited papers).


Address

Room No: 02C-84, Block N4
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University
50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798

Direction to get to my office

E-mail: yangliu AT ntu.edu.sg
Office Tel: +65-67906706
Fax: +65-67926559

News:

  • May 2021: Students achievements: David won Singapore Data Science Consortium research award 2020 and first place for ICSE 2021 student competition, Tianlin won AISG PhD Fellowship
  • May 2021: Journal paper accepted by TOSEM: "SPI: Automated Identification of Security Patches via Commits"
  • May 2021: One paper accepted by USENIX 2021: "APICraft: Fuzz Driver Generation for Closed-source SDK Libraries"
  • May 2021: Two papers accepted by IJCAI 2021: "Fine-tuning Is Not Enough: A Simple yet Effective Watermark Removal Attack for DNN Models" and "AVA: Adversarial Vignetting Attack against Visual Recognition"
  • May 2021: One paper accepted by ICML 2021: "Automatic RNN Repair via Model-based Analysis"
  • April 2021: ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2021: "ATVHunter: Reliable Version Detection of Third-Party Libraries for Vulnerability Identification in Android Apps"
  • Feb 2021: One paper accepted by ICRA 2021: "Route Coverage Testing For Autonomous Vehicles Via Map Modeling."
  • Feb 2021: Two papers accepted by CVPR 2021: "Auto-Exposure Fusion for Single-Image Shadow Removal" and "Privacy preserving Collaborative Learning with Automatic Transformation Search" (Oral)
  • Jan 2021: One spotlight paper accepted by ICLR 2021: "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Code Summarization via Hybrid GNN"
  • Dec 2020: Two papers accepted by ICSE 2021: "ATVHunter: Reliable Version Detection of Third-Party Libraries for Vulnerability Identification in Android Apps" and "Automatic Web Testing using Curiosity-Driven Reinforcement Learning"
  • Dec 2020: Full paper accepted by AAMAS 2021: "Temporal Watermarks for Deep Reinforcement Learning Models"
  • Dec 2020: Two papers accepted by AAAI 2021: "EfficientDeRain: Learning Pixel-wise Dilation Filtering for High-Efficiency Single-Image Deraining" and "Decision-Guided Weighted Automata Extraction from Recurrent Neural Networks"
  • Dec 2020: Journal paper accepted by TIP: "Exploring the Effects of Blur and Deblurring to Visual Object Tracking"
  • Nov 2020: Journal paper accepted by TOPLAS: "CSim2: Compositional Top-down Verification of Concurrent Systems using Rely-Guarantee"
  • Nov 2020: Journal paper accepted by TSE: "ATOM: Commit Message Generation Based on Abstract Syntax Tree and Hybrid Ranking"
  • Nov 2020: Journal paper accepted by TDSC: "Oracle-Supported Dynamic Exploit Generation for Smart Contracts"
  • Sep 2020: Full paper accepted by NeurIPS 2020: "Watch out! Motion is Blurring the Vision of Your Deep Neural Networks" (Acceptance rate: 1900/9545=20%)
  • Sep 2020: IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award at ICSME 2020: "An Empirical Study of Usages, Updates and Risks of Third-Party Libraries in Java Projects."
  • Sep 2020: Journal paper accepted by TOSEM: "Why an Android App is Classified as Malware? Towards Malware Classification Interpretation"
  • Sep 2020: Journal paper accepted by TIFS: "A Performance-Sensitive Malware Detection System Using Deep Learning on Mobile Devices"
  • Aug 2020: Journal paper accepted by TIFS: "Can We Trust Your Explanations? Sanity Checks for Interpreters in Android Malware Analysis"
  • Aug 2020: Journal paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Computers: "Guardauto: A Decentralized Runtime Protection System for Autonomous Driving"
  • July 2020: Five full papers accepted by ASE 2020 on research track.
  • July 2020: Four full papers accepted by MM 2020: DeepRhythm, Amora (Oral), FakePolisher and DeepSonar.
  • July 2020: Journal paper accepted by TSE: "Why My App Crashes? Understanding and Benchmarking Framework-specific Exceptions of Android apps"
  • July 2020: Full paper accepted by ECCV 2020: "SPARK: Spatial-aware Online Incremental Attack Against Visual Tracking."
  • April 2020: two full papers accepted by IJCAI 2020: "Generating Behavior-Diverse Game AIs with Evolutionary Multi-Objectives Deep Reinforcement Learning" and "FakeSpotter: A Simple yet Robust Baseline for Spotting AI-Synthesized Fake Faces." (Acceptance rate: 592/4717 = 12.6%)
  • April 2020: two full papers accepted by ISSTA 2020: "An Empirical Study on ARM Disassembly Tools" and "Patch Based Vulnerability Matching for Binary Programs." (Acceptance rate: 43/162 = 26.5%)
  • April 2020: full paper accepted by S&P 2021: "Who is Real Bob? Adversarial Attacks on Speaker Recognition Systems."
  • April 2020: full paper accepted by USENIX Security 2020: "MUZZ: Thread-aware Grey-box Fuzzing for Effective Bug Hunting in Multithreaded Programs"
  • March 2020: Recieved NRF Investigatorship (Class 2020)
  • March 2020: Became ACM’s Distinguished Speaker
  • 21 Feb 2020: full paper accepted by USENIX Security 2020: "MVP: Detecting Vulnerabilities using Patch-Enhanced Vulnerability Signatures"
  • 8 Feb 2020: full paper accepted by S&P 2020: "Semantic Understanding of Smart Contracts: Executable Operational Semantics of Solidity"
  • Jan 2020: Multiple Postdoc Positions on Testing, Verification and Security Analysis for Hypervisor, Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Learning Algorithms and Block Chain and AI Chips
  • Dec 2019: Joined PC member of ASE 2020, submit your paper.
  • Dec 2019: 4 papers are accepted by ICSE 2020: "Towards Characterizing Adversarial Defects of Deep Learning Software from the Lens of Uncertainty", "Typestate-Guided Fuzzer for Discovering Use-after-Free Vulnerabilities", "MemLock: Memory Usage Guided Fuzzing", and "An Empirical Assessment of Security Risks of Global Android Banking Apps"
  • Dec 2019: Journal paper accepted by TSE: "Machine Learning Testing: Survey, Landscapes and Horizons"
  • 15 Nov 2019: Three papers accepted by AAAI 2020
  • 10 Nov 2019: Journal paper accepted by TDSC: "GUI-Squatting Attack: Automated Generation of Android Phishing Apps"
  • 26 Oct 2019: Joined PC member of ICSE 2021, submit your paper.
  • 17 Oct 2019: Orgnize NTU-BGU AI Security Workshop
  • Oct 2019: Journal paper accepted by Automatica: "A Distributed Method to Avoid Higher-Order Deadlocks in Multi-Robot Systems"
  • Oct 2019: Journal paper accepted by TSE: "Explaining Regressions via Alignment Slicing and Mending"
  • Oct 2019: ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at ASE 2019: "Wuji: Automatic Online Combat Game Testing Using Evolutionary Deep Reinforcement Learning"
  • 19 Sep 2019: Recieved Nanyang Research Award (Young Investigator)
  • Sep 2019: Joined PC member of DAC 2020, submit your paper.
  • Sep 2019: Joined PC member of CAV 2020, submit your paper.
  • 4 Sep 2019: full paper accepted by NeurIPS 2019: "Devign: Effective Vulnerability Identification by Learning Comprehensive Program Semantics via Graph Neural Networks" (Acceptance rate: 1428/6743=21.2%)
  • 26 Aug 2019: full paper accepted by USENIX Security 2020: "Automatic Hot Patch Generation for Android Kernels"
  • 12 Aug 2019: 3 tool demo papers accepted by ASE 2019: Deephunter, DeepStellar and DeepMutator++
  • 6 Aug 2019: 2 full papers accepted by ASE 2019: "An Empirical Study towards Characterizing Deep Learning Development and Deployment across Different Frameworks and Platforms" and "Wuji: Automatic Online Combat Game Testing Using Evolutionary Deep Reinforcement Learning"
  • 2 Jul 2019: Journal paper accepted by TIFS: "Information Theoretical Analysis of Unfair Rating Attacks under Subjectivity"
  • 12 June 2019: Full paper accepted by FM 2019: "A Parametric Rely-guarantee Reasoning Framework for Concurrent Reactive Systems"
  • 25 May 2019: 3 full papers accepted by FSE 2019: "DeepStellar: Model-Based Quantitative Analysis of Stateful Deep Learning Systems", "Locating Vulnerabilities in Binaries via Memory Layout Recovering" and "Cerebro: Context-aware Adaptive Fuzzing for EffectiveVulnerability Detection" (Acceptance rate: 74/303=24%)
  • 25 May 2019: Journal paper accepted by TSDC: "Trace-Length Independent Runtime Monitoring of Quantitative Policies."
  • 10 May 2019: 1 full paper accepted by IJCAI 2019: "Deetector: Detecting Disagreements for Deep Neural Network" (Acceptance rate: 850/4752 =17.9%)
  • 1 May 2019: 1 full paper accepted by ISSTA 2019: "DeepHunter: A Coverage-Guided Fuzz Testing Framework for Deep Neural Networks" (Acceptance rate: 32/134=23.8%)
  • 1 April 2019: Received Named Professorship 2019 University Leadership Forum Chair
  • 2 Feb 2019: Journal paper accepted by TSDC: "On Evaluating Fault Resilient Encoding Schemes in Software."
  • Jan 2019: Journal paper accepted by TSE: "Mining Likely Analogical APIs across Third-Party Libraries via Large-Scale Unsupervised API Semantics Embedding"
  • 12 Dec 2018: 4 full papers accepted by ICSE 2019 (Acceptance rate: 21% = 109/521), 1 paper is accepted by ICSE 2019 NIER Track, and 1 paper is accepted by ICSE 2019 SEIP Track.
  • 7 Dec 2018: Journal paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (TIFS): "Securing Android App Markets via Modelling and Predicting Malware Spread between Markets."
  • 15 Nov 2018: The 20 Year ICFEM Most Influential System Award for Developing the PAT Verification System.
  • 16 Sep 2018: Keynote in Internetware 2018: Cyber-security: the Journey from Formal Methods, Program Analysis, Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence to BlockChain
  • 24 Aug 2018: Two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at ASE 2018: "CLDIFF: Generating Concise Linked Code Differences" and "DeepGauge: Multi-Granularity Testing Criteria for Deep Learning Systems"
  • 10 Aug 2018: 1 full paper accepted by ISSRE 2018: "DeepMutation: Mutation Testing of Deep Learning Systems" (Acceptance rate: 123/96 = 0.24%)
  • Aug 2018: Joined PC member of FSE 2019, submit your paper.
  • Aug 2018: Joined PC member of FM 2019, submit your paper.
  • 25 July 2018: 1 full paper accepted by CCS 2018: "Hawkeye: Towards a Desired Directed Grey-box Fuzzer" (Acceptance rate: 134/809 = 16.6%)
  • 4 July 2018: 4 full papers accepted by ASE 2018: "CLDIFF: Generating Concise Linked Code Differences", "DeepGauge: Multi-Granularity Testing Criteria for Deep Learning Systems", "Tell Them Apart: Distilling Technology Differences from Crowd-Scale Comparison Discussions" and "Efficiently Manifesting Asynchronous Programming Errors in Android Apps". (Acceptance rate: 24% = 83 /346)
  • 23 June 2018: Journal paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (TIFS): "Layered Object Oriented Programming: Advanced VTable Reuse Attacks on Binary-Level Defense."
  • 15 May 2018: Full paper accepted by Automatica: "A Distributed Approach to Robust Control of Multi-Robot Systems"
  • 24 April 2018: ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at ICSE 2018: "Large-Scale Analysis of Framework-Specific Exceptions in Android Apps"
  • 9 April 2018: Full paper accepted by FM 2018: "Compositional Reasoning for Shared-variable Concurrent Programs"
  • 1 April 2018: Full paper accepted by CSF 2018: "A Permission-Dependent Type System for Secure Information Flow Analysis"
  • 17 Feb 2018: Full paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE): "Accurate and Scalable Cross-Architecture Cross-OS Binary Code Search with Emulation"
  • Feb 2018: Joined PC member of CCS 2018, submit your paper.
  • Feb 2018: Joined PC member of ICSME 2018, submit your paper.
  • Jan 2018: Slides of How to find a faculty position and survive as an assistant professor
  • Jan 2018: Joined PC member of ASE 2018, submit your paper.
  • Jan 2018: Joined PC member of ATVA 2018, submit your paper.
  • 15 Dec 2017: Three full paper accepted by ICSE 2018: "Large-Scale Analysis of Framework-Specific Exceptions in Android Apps", "From UI Design Image to GUI Skeleton: A Neural Machine Translator to Bootstrap Mobile GUI Implementation" and "Speedoo: Prioritizing Performance Optimization Opportunities" (Acceptance rate: 20.9% = 105/502)
  • 8 Dec 2017: Full paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE): "Automatic Loop Summarization via Path Dependency Analysis"
  • 26 Oct 2017: Full paper accepted by CSCW 2018: "By the Community & For the Community: A Deep Learning Approach to Assist Collaborative Editing in Q&A Sites"
  • 20 Sep 2017:ACM Distinguished Paper Award at ASE 2017: "FiB: Squeezing Loop Invariants by Interpolation between Forward/Backward Predicate Transformers"
  • 4 Aug 2017: Journal paper accepted by Empirical Software Engineering: "A Multi-view Context-aware Approach to Android Malware Detection and Malicious Code Localization"
  • 18 July 2017: Two full paper accepted by ASE 2017: "Mining Implicit Design Templates for Actionable Code Reuse" and "FiB: Squeezing Loop Invariants by Interpolation between Forward/Backward Predicate Transformers" (Acceptance rate: 20.7% = 65/314)
  • 2 June 2017: Three full paper accepted by ESEC-FSE 2017: "Guided, Stochastic Model-Based GUI Testing of Android Apps", "Steelix: Program-State Based Binary Fuzzing", and "Loopster: Static Loop Termination Analysis" (Acceptance rate: 24%=72/295)
  • 29 May 2017: Journal paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE): "A Formal Specification and Verification Framework for Timed Security Protocols"
  • 11 May 2017: Joined PC member of ISSTA 2018, submit your paper.
  • 19 March 2017: Full paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE): "Towards Model Checking Android Applications"
  • 26 Feb 2017: Full paper accepted by DAC 2017: "No-Jump-into-Basic-Block: Enforce Basic Block CFI on the Fly for Real-world Binaries"
  • 25 Feb 2017: Journal paper accepted by IEEE Transactions On Systems, Man, And Cybernetics: Systems (TSMC): "Collision and Deadlock Avoidance in Multirobot Systems: A Distributed Approach"
  • 16 Feb 2017: Journal paper accepted by Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC): "Refinement-based Specification and Security Analysis of Separation Kernels"
  • 10 Feb 2017: Full paper accepted by Security and Privacy (Oakland 2017): "Skyfire: Data-Driven Seed Generation for Fuzzing"
  • 16 Jan 2017: Journal paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (TIFS): "Auditing Anti-Malware Tools by Evolving Android Malware and Dynamic Loading Technique."
  • 23 Dec 2016: Full paper accepted by TACAS 2017: "CSimpl: a Framework for the Verification of Concurrent Programs using Rely-Guarantee."
  • 13 Dec 2016: Two full papers accepted by ICSE 2017: "Feedback-Based Debugging" and "SPAIN: Security Patch Analysis for Binaries - Towards Understanding the Pain and Pills."
  • 03 Dec 2016: Joined PC member of TACAS 2018, submit your paper.
  • 21 Oct 2016: FSE 2016 SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award: "Proteus: Computing Disjunctive Loop Summary via Path Dependency Analysis"
  • 3 Oct 2016: Journal paper accepted by Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR): "MOCA: Modeling and Analysis of Agent Behaviors in Commitment Protocols"
  • 8 Aug 2016: Full paper accepted by FM 2016: "An Executable Formalisation of the SPARCv8 Instruction Set Architecture: A Case Study for The LEON3 Processor"
  • 1 Aug 2016: Best Paper Award at 10th IFIP WG 11.11 International Conference on Trust Management (IFIPTM) 2016: "How to Use Information Theory to Mitigate Unfair Rating Attacks"
  • 1 Aug 2016: Tim Muller joins University of Oxford as a Lecturer. Congratulations!
  • 25 July 2016: Full paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing: "Battery-Aware Mobile Data Service"
  • 13 July 2016: Full paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Services Computing: "Architecture-Based Behavioral Adaptation with Generated Alternatives and Relaxed Constraints"
  • 28 May 2016: Two full papers accepted by FSE 2016: "Proteus: Computing Disjunctive Loop Summary via Path Dependency Analysis" and "BinGo: Cross-Architecture Cross-OS Binary Search"
  • 19 April 2016: Full paper accepted by ISSTA 2016: "Semantic Modelling of Android Malware for Effective Malware Comprehension, Detection and Classification".
  • 15 March 2016: Journal paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems: "A Fine-Grained Control Flow Integrity Approach Against Runtime Memory Attacks Using Hardware-Enhanced Architecture for Embedded Systems".
  • 5 Feb 2016: Full paper accepted by AsiaCCS 2016: "Mystique: Evolving Android Malware for Auditing Anti-Malware Tools". (Acceptance rate: 73/350=20.9)
  • 18 Dec 2015: Full paper accepted by TACAS 2016: "Reasoning About Information Flow Security of Separation Kernels with Channel-based Communication"
  • 16 Dec 2015: Two full papers accepted by ICSE 2016: "Generating Performance Distributions via Probabilistic Symbolic Execution" and "Optimizing Selection of Competing Services with Probabilistic Hierarchical Refinement."
  • 13 Nov 2015: Full paper accepted by AAAI 2015: "Is it Harmful when Advisors only Pretend to be Honest? "
  • 3 Oct 2015: 2015 Best Paper Award for Journal of Software and Systems Modeling: "Formalizing and Verifying Stochastic System Architectures Using Monterey Phoenix", award letter
  • 5 Aug 2015: Journal paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (TIFS): "Semantics-based Online Malware Detection: Towards Efficient Real-time Protection Against Malware"
  • 25 July 2015: Joined PC member of ASE 2016, submit your paper and visit Singapore in September 3-7, 2016.
  • 18 July 2015: Full paper accepted by ASE 2015: "Interpolation Guided Compositional Verification"
  • 27 May 2015: Full paper accepted by FSE 2015: "TLV: Abstraction through Testing, Learning and Validation"
  • 1 May 2015: Journal paper accepted by ACM Computing Surveys: "Collaborative Security: A Survey and Taxonomy" PDF Download
  • 29 April 2015: Full paper accepted by IJCAI 2015: "Quantifying Robustness of Trust Systems Against Collusive Unfair Rating Attacks Using Information Theory"
  • 1 April 2015: Four full papers accepted by ISSTA 2015
  • 24 March 2015: Two full papers accepted by FM 2015
  • 28 Jan 2015: Two full Papers accepted by AAMAS 2015
  • 22 Dec 2014: Full Paper accepted by AsiaCCS 2015 "JSDC: A Hybrid Approach for JavaScript Malware Detection and Classification" (?/269 submission)
  • 9 Nov 2014: Full Paper accepted by AAAI 2015 "Automated Analysis of Commitment Protocols using Probabilistic Model Checking"
  • 18 Sep 2014: Paper accepted by TSE "A Systematic Study on Explicit-state Non-Zenoness Checking for Timed Automata"
  • 23 June 2014: Full paper accepted by ICSME 2014 "Clonepedia: Summarizing Code Clones by Common Syntactic Context for Software Maintenance" (40/210=19% acceptance rate)
  • 20 June 2014: Four papers accepted by ICFEM 2014 (30% acceptance rate)
  • 19 April 2014: Full paper accepted by CAV 2014 "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend: Partial Order Reduction for Timed Automata With Abstractions"
  • 17 Feb 2014: Full paper accepted by FM 2014 Industry Track "MDP-based Reliability Analysis of an Ambient Assisted Living System"
  • 17 Feb 2014: Demo paper accepted by ICSE 2014 "VeriWS: A Tool for Verification of Combined Functional and Non-functional Requirements of Web Service Composition" (15/41=36.5% acceptance rate)
  • 14 Feb 2014: Demo paper accepted by AAMAS 2014 "An Extensive Model Checking Framework for Multi-agent Systems"
  • 1 Feb 2014: Two papers accepted by FM 2014 "Formal Verification of Operational Transformation" and "TrustFound: Towards a Formal Foundation for Model Checking Trusted Computing Platforms" (38/135=28% acceptance rate)
  • 16 Jan 2014: Paper accepted by ICSE 2014 "Detecting and Summarizing Differences across Multiple Instances of Code Clones" (99/495=20% acceptance rate)
  • 28 Dec 2013: Paper accepted by WWW 2014 "Automated Runtime Recovery for QoS-based Service Composition" (84/650=12.9% acceptance rate)
  • 21 Dec 2013: Paper accepted by TACAS 2014 "Language Inclusion Checking for Timed Automata" (26 out of 117 research papers: 22.2%)
  • 29 Nov 2013: Paper accepted by TSE "Learning Assumptions for Compositional Verification of Timed Systems"
  • 28 Nov 2013: tier 1 grant received "Bring the Advanced Model Checking Techniques to Real-world Problems"
  • 4 Sep 2013: Paper accepted by APSEC 2013 "Multi-core Algorithms for LTL Verification"
  • 19 Aug 2013: I am looking for both master and ph.d. students. Scholarship will be provided for ph.d. candidates only.
  • 18 Aug 2013: we are orgnizing FM 2014 in Singapore. The CFP is ready now.
  • 25 July 2013: three papers accepted by ASE 2013 (accept rate 43/317=13.6%)
  • 21 June 2013: Tool paper accepted by FSE 2013 "USMMC: A Self-Contained Model Checker for UML State Machines"
  • 19 June 2013: Four papers accepted by ICFEM 2013
  • 5 June 2013: Tool Paper accepted by ATVA 2013 "CELL: A Compositional Verification Framework"
  • 1 May 2013: Paper accepted by ISSTA 2013 "Combining Model Checking and Testing with an Application to Reliability Prediction and Distribution"
  • 19 April 2013: Paper accepted by SPIN 2013 "Verifying a Quantitative Relaxation of Linearizability via Refinement"
  • 4 April 2013: two paper accepted by iFM 2013 "Speed Up Verification in DTMC via Divide and Conquer" and "A Formal Semantics for the Complete Syntax of UML State Machines with Communications"
  • 7 March 2013: Paper accepted by CAV 2013 "PSyHCoS: Parameter Synthesis for Hierarchical Concurrent Real-Time Systems"
  • 26 Feb 2013: Awarded Nanyang Assistant Professor.
  • 22 Jan 2013: PAT Tutorial "Build Your Own Model Checker in One Month" is accepted by ICSE 2013.
  • 20 Nov 2012: I am looking for self-motivated Ph.D. students and research assistants on the area of formal methods, security, program analysis and software engineering.
    Please email me with your CV if interested.
  • 20 Nov 2012: Postdoc Research Fellow Positions on Model Checking and/or Security are Available!
    I am currently looking for postdoc research fellow on model checking on security verification. All interested candidates are welcomed to apply. Kindly send your CV to me via email. The compensation package is highly competitive internationally. Details about the positions can be found HERE.

Education

  • July 2005 - May 2010, National University of Singapore, Singapore
    Ph.D. (CAP 4.56/5)
    Thesis: Model Checking Concurrent and Real-time Systems: the PAT Approach
    Supervisors: Dr. Dong JinSong and Dr. Rudy Setiono.
    Nominated for best thesis.
  • July 2001 - Jun 2005, National University of Singapore, Singapore
    Bachelor of Computing Science with Honour First Class. (CAP 4.83/5)
    Mathematics Minor
  • Dec 2000 - Jun 2001, National Institute of Education, Singapore
    Intensive English training course.
  • Sep 2000 - Nov 2000, Zhe Jiang University, China
    Electrical Engineering in an accelerated class. Received scholarship from Ministry of Education, Singapore after two months.

Awards and Scholarship

  • Nanyang Assistant Professor 2013
  • Best Paper Award: Yan Liu, Xian Zhang, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong, Jit Biswas and Mounir Mokhtari. Formal Analysis of Pervasive Computing Systems. The 17th IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS 2012), Paris, France, July 18 - 20, 2012
  • Best Paper Award: The 4th IEEE International Conference on Secure Software Integration and Reliability Improvement (SSIRI 2010), 2010.
  • Nominated for President's Science Award 2010 together with Dr JinSong Dong and Dr Jun Sun.
  • Nominated for Best Ph.D. Thesis, NUS 2010.
  • Dean's Graduate Research Excellence Award 2009/2010
  • Research Achievement Award 2008/2009
  • Microsoft Asia Research Fellowship 2007
    The annual Microsoft Fellowship Program is designed to support talented PhD students who have the potential to become future research leaders. Over the past seven years, 159 recipients have participated in the program. Fellowships have been awarded to outstanding students from more than 30 universities and research institutes throughout the Asia-pacific Region since 1999.
  • Graduate Scholarship in National University of Singapore, 2005 - 2009.
  • Tata Consultancy Services Asia Pacific Medal and Prize
    The second best graduate throughout the course of study for the Bachelor of Computing (Honours) in the School of Computing, NUS. (2nd of 800+ students with CAP 4.83/5).
  • No. 4 in Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition, Singapore, 2005 May
    We are a gang of four: Guo Liang, Huang Wenfan, Liu Yang (team leader) and Ng Junping. We developed the eWorld System, which is a sign language capturing and interpretation system, supervised by Dr Huang Zhiyong.
  • Place on Dean's List in academic season 2004/2005
  • Place on Dean's List in academic season 2003/2004
  • Place on Dean's List in academic season 2002/2003
  • Place on Dean's List in academic season 2001/2002.
  • Undergraduate Scholarship for PRC Students from MOE, 2000 - 2005.