Zheng Wang 
I am (full) Professor of Intelligent Software Technology at the School of Computing at the University of Leeds.
My research agenda is to make software development easier and more accessible so that every programmer can easily write, maintain and optimise software. I maintain a list of must-read research papers for machine learning in compilers.
My research interests include:
- Program optimisation: I am interested in how we can design new algorithms and optimisation techniques at compilers and operating systems to improve application performance and energy efficiency, with the ultimate goal of massively reducing the software development cost; I often use machine learning (including deep learning) as a design methodology.
- Software security: I am currently investigating the use of machine learning and code analysis techniques to detect software bugs and vulnerabilities; Our recent work has identified 200+ bugs and 50+ CVE from real-life projects.
- Accelerate large-scale deep learning models: I work to make the training and use of large-scale deep learning models (with billions or trillions of parameters) accessible to every data scientist and organisation by collaborating with major industrial players including Meta.
- Applied machine learning: Some of my works apply machine learning to emerging applications areas like natural language processing, data mining and wireless sensing; This is conducted as a part of research hobbies by working with collaborators in mobile systems, AI and NLP.
PhD students: Scholarships are available for outstanding candidates. Being an advisor to students is the best part of my job. Have a look at my research interests and recent publications. If any of those grab you, send me an email with a CV and a short text describing your background. I am also open-minded - if you have a great idea you would like to pursue - get in touch! Please read here before applying.
I am a member of the Distributed Systems and Services Group at Leeds, the EPSRC Peer Review College, the UKRI Talent Peer Review College (PRC), and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. I was a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, I am a recipient of the Best Paper Award in ACM PACT 2010 and 2017, ACM CGO 2017 and 2019, Best Presentation Award at PACT 2010 and CGO 2013, 3 HiPEAC paper awards, and Best Paper Nomination/Finalist in ACM CCS 2018 and ACM SenSys 2019. I am in the unofficial CGO hall of fame. I have an Erdős Number of four and a Dijkstra number of four.
We are looking to hire a 2-year research fellow to work on transferring machine learning based code optimisation techniques into industry settings.
