معرفی
Xiaoning Du is a Senior Lecturer (equivalent to U.S. Associate Professor) at the Department of Software Systems and Cybersecurity within the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, Australia. She was promoted to this position effective July 1, 2025, having previously served as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) since joining Monash in February 2021. Her research bridges the gap between theory and practical applications of program analysis and formal methods in evaluating traditional and AI-assisted software systems.
Dr. Du's educational background includes:
- PhD from Nanyang Technological University (2020)
- Bachelor's degree from Fudan University (2014)
Dr. Du specializes in software engineering, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity, with particular focus on SE4AI (Software Engineering for AI), software analysis and testing. Her research has made significant contributions to the security and quality assurance of intelligent software systems, especially intelligent software engineering tools. She is best known for her work on Devign, BigCodeBench, DeepStellar, and SimPy, which have advanced the fields of code generation, program analysis, and AI security. Her approach consistently bridges theoretical foundations with practical applications to improve software quality and security.
Dr. Du's recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on the intersection of software engineering and AI, particularly examining how large language models interact with source code. Her work addresses critical challenges in code generation efficiency, security vulnerabilities in AI-assisted development, and fairness in AI systems. She has made significant contributions to benchmarking frameworks like BigCodeBench and has pioneered research on watermarking techniques to protect code datasets from misuse by neural code completion models.
Dr. Du has received numerous prestigious awards and recognitions:
- 2024 Google Research Scholar Award in Software Engineering
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award (ISSTA'24)
- ICLR Oral presentation (2025)
- 2024 FIT Dean's Early Career Researcher of the Year Award
- Multiple FIT ECR Seed Grants (2021-2023)
Dr. Du actively mentors PhD students, with notable successes including Terry (2024-2025 IBM PhD Fellowship Award recipient) and Zhensu (2024 Bytedance Scholarship Award recipient). She is currently seeking self-motivated PhD students with strong programming skills and relevant research experience, offering full scholarship support. Her research has been supported by multiple grants including the Google Research Scholar Program award and several FIT ECR Seed Grants that have enabled her team to pursue innovative research in software security and AI-assisted development.
Dr. Du leads a research group focused on intelligent software systems security and quality assurance. Her team has developed several influential tools and benchmarks including Devign, BigCodeBench, DeepStellar, and SimPy. These resources have become important assets for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of software engineering and artificial intelligence, particularly in the areas of code generation, program analysis, and security testing of AI systems.
