Tao Xie's Homepage

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Ph.D. U. Washington 2005
M.S. U. Washington 2002
M.S. Peking U. 2000
B.S. Fudan U. 1997

[中文简介]

Tao Xie
Hsieh /shear/
Foreign Member of Academia Europaea
Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, CCF
Peking University Chair Professor
Chair of Department of Software Science and Engineering
School of Computer Science
Peking University
Email: taoxie<AT>pku.edu.cn

Deputy Director of the Key Lab of High Confidence Software Technologies (PKU), Ministry of Education, China

Research Focus

Software Engineering and Systems Software: Software Testing, Software Analytics, Software Security, and Intelligent Software Engineering, Trustworthy AI

Publications, Google scholar citations

ASE Group Students

High-Impact Collaborations

Impact Highlights

AI Dependability

An approach (in collaboration with Tencent, Ltd.) for precisely detecting issues in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) without requiring oracle translations has been deployed in both the development and the production environments at WeChat, a popular messenger app with over 1 billion monthly active users (as of March 2018). The translation service in WeChat provides tens of millions of unique translations for users of the messenger app [ICSE'19 Poster, DSN'19 Industry].
An approach (in collaboration with Microsoft Research Asia) for translating natural language sentences to regular expressions has been proposed to make the translation more robust and effective in real-world settings [EMNLP'18, NL4SE'18].

Microservice Dependability

TrainTicket (in collaboration with Fudan University), a medium-size open source benchmark microservice system, has been released to be leveraged by both industry and academia to carry out research around microservice systems. The system includes 70+ microservices (41 business microservices), including 30,000+ lines of code, along with 22 fault cases reproduced from real industry cases. Upon this system, our new techniques on debugging microservice systems have been proposed [ICSE'18 Poster, ASE'18 Short, TSE'19, TSC'19].

A blog post and follow-up blog post by Fudan CodeWidsom (in Chinese).

Software Testing

VTest (in collaboration with Alibaba), adopted and deployed both internally in Alibaba (for everyday testing of a dozen popular industrial apps, such as Taobao and Alipay with over one billion users) and externally in the Software Green Alliance to provide services for top smartphone vendors and app vendors in China [ICSE'22 SEIP].

VTest (aka MonkeyBot) was highlighted in a blog post by Alibaba (in Chinese).

WCTester (in collaboration with Tencent, Ltd.), an Android testing tool, has been deployed in daily operations for improving the quality of WeChat, a popular messenger app with over 1 billion monthly active users (as of March 2018) [FSE'16 Industry, ICSE'17 SEIP, ESEC/FSE'17 Industry, ASE'18].
Pex (in collaboration with Microsoft Research Redmond), an automated testing tool based on dynamic symbolic execution for .NET, has been shipped as part of Visual Studio 2015/2017 Enterprise Edition as IntelliTest, since April 2015. Since Sept 2008, Pex (subsequently IntelliTest) has included my contributed Fitnex path exploration technique and implementation, as one of its key underlying concepts/technologies. Pex has had high download counts in industry and academia, e.g., more than 30,000 during a 20-month period of Feb. 2008-Oct. 2009. [DSN 2009, ASE'14 Experience]
Implementation of a test prioritization technique (resulted from our collaboration with Salesforce) has been in pilot use at Salesforce. [FSE'16 Industry]
Rostra, a redundant-test detection technique, detected a high percentage (about 90%) of redundant tests among tests generated by Parasoft Jtest 4.5, a popular award-winning commercial testing tool in industry. Parasoft adopted the Rostra technique for improving Jtest’s later releases. [ASE'04]
Symstra, a technique for efficient method-sequence generation in symbolic execution, was adapted and incorporated in NASA’s Java Pathfinder testing tool and Microsoft Research’s XRT testing tool. [TACAS'05]

Software Analytics

The new field of software analytics (established in collaboration with Microsoft Research Asia) has gained increasing popularity and importance in the research community. [MALETS '11, IEEE Soft'13]. The 2022 MSR Foundational Contribution Award was given to Dongmei Zhang and Tao Xie for "for the fundamental contributions in opening new areas of software analytics research with pioneering results and techniques that have had high industrial impact."
Multiple high-impact systems of software analytics (in collaboration with Microsoft Research Asia) have been successfully deployed in daily operations of Microsoft product groups or shipped with Visual Studio, e.g., StackMine [ICSE'12, IEEE Soft'13], XIAO [ACSAC'12, ICSE'17 SEIP], SAS [DSN'14, SRDS'12, ASE'13 Experience, ICSE'14 SEIP].

In 2018, ICSE 2012 Paper on StackMine selected as the single representative paper in year 2012, and among the 20 representative papers (one paper a year) selected from over 5,000 research papers published by Microsoft Research Asia during its 20 years.
In 2015, ICSE 2012 Paper on StackMine rated among the most practically relevant software engineering research (ranked the second place) of the last five years in an industrial relevance study published in ESEC/FSE 2015.

CarStream (in collaboration with Beihang U. and CAR Inc.), a scalable, high-performance Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) system, has been deployed to offer chauffeured car services for over 30,000 vehicles at CAR Inc. [VLDB'17 Industry, TII'17, PerCom'18] .
Mobile anlytics solutions (in collaboration with Peking U, U. Michigan, and Wandoujia Lab, a top Android App Store in China) have characterized diverse app-usage patterns by learning the behavioral data from over 17 million users, and optimizing development and release planning. [IMC'15, ICSE'16, TSE'17].

Software Security

WHYPER (in collaboration with NC State U.), the first system of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for mobile app security, has opened up the new field of text analytics for mobile security. Google has awarded a Google Faculty Research Award to support the follow-up work of WHYPER, which inspired and influenced internal related efforts inside Google. [USENIX Security'13]
ACPT (Access Control Policy Tool) (in collaboration with NIST) is available as a beta release. ACPT was covered by IEEE Intelligent System magazine, Industry Cortex, ScienceDaily, Center for Internet Security (CIS), etc. From its initial release in 2011 till May 2017, ACPT attracted 460 acquisitions from major industrial, academic, and government organizations. and this number is continuously increasing. Example early adopters of ACPT include NSA, MITRE, DISA, NOAA, SAIC, DNI, Pacific Northwest National Lab, Fermi Lab, BAE system, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, SMI, VA government, John Hopkins University. InfoBeyond Technology LLC has developed Security Policy Tool as a full deployable ACPT version with advanced functions and has officially released Security Policy Tool since July 1, 2017. On October 14, 2017, InfoBeyond Technology was awarded the Innovative Security Solution Award for their demonstration of Security Policy Tool at the 2017 IEEE Big Data and SDN/NFV Summit. See the Mentionable Milestones of Security Policy Tool for our ACPT research's impact. [TSP'08, POLICY'10 Demo]

Educational Software Engineering

Code Hunt (in collaboration with Microsoft Research Redmond), an educational gaming platform, has already had close to 6 million (5,981,893) users (including registered users playing on www.codehunt.com, anonymous users and accounts that access api.codehunt.com directly via the documented REST APIs) since its release in Spring 2014 till July 24 2017, for about three years. See the statistics of Code Hunt services here (a snapshot cached on July 24, 2017). The 2015 Microsoft Imagine Cup included a Code Hunt Challenge. The 2014 Microsoft Beauty of Programming Contest used Code Hunt in early rounds. The game type in Code Hunt is Coding Duel games invented by me. [ICSE'15 JSEET]
Pex4Fun (in collaboration with Microsoft Research Redmond), an educational gaming platform as precusor of Code Hunt, had gained over 1 million game-play interactions made by players around the world, since its release in Summer 2010 till Oct. 2012, for only about two years. The game type in Pex4Fun is Coding Duel games invented by me. [ICSE'13 SEE, GAS'13]

Diversity in Computing

During 2018 Fall - 2019 Spring, I served as the founding Chair of the Diversity Committee of the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In 2007-2018, I served as the General Chair and Program Chair of 2018 and 2017 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference (Tapia), respectively.
During 2018-2019, I served as the Initiative Mentor for the ACM SIGSOFT Initiative on Diversity and Inclusion.
During 2017 Fall - 2019 Spring, I served as a Faculty Advocate at Illinois for the FLIP (Diversifying Future Leadership in the Professoriate) Alliance, an NSF INCLUDES demonstration project with the vision to increase faculty diversity in computing at research universities by increasing the diversity of PhD graduates from the top producers of computing faculty. FLIP targets the following groups: African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and People with Disabilities.
During 2017 Fall - 2019 Spring, I served as one of 7 mentors for the Illinois Academic Redshirt in Science and Engineering (ARISE) Program Sponsored by NSF
I have been mentoring formally and informally hundreds of minority students around the world via MentorNet (the E-Mentoring Network for Diversity in Engineering and Science), social media, and diversity related venues. He has established and maintained a student mentoring mailing list for minority students in computing primarily from USA, including more than 800 members as of Fall 2019.
I have supervised undergraduate/graduate research of 26 minority students during my Illinois faculty career and 19 minority students during my NC State faculty career.

Community Recognitions

I have been elevated to be an ACM Fellow (class of 2021), IEEE Fellow (class of 2018), and AAAS Fellow (class of 2019) "for contributions to software testing and analytics"

Our collaborations with Microsoft Research being highlighted in

2016 IEEE Software Blog post on "the Value of Applied Research in Software Engineering" (related Reddit discussion)
Citation for my 2016 Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award (one of 32 Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborators from academia over the past 25 years) and related 2016 Illinois CS News
2016 ACM SIGSOFT Webinar on "Transferring Software Testing Tools to Practice" (listed on the ACM Learning Webinar web)
2016 Microsoft Research Blog post on "Microsoft Research receives IEEE Council honor"

2015 Illinois CS Click! Magazine article on "Xie’s Collaboration on Pex Benefits Microsoft and CS Education"

See earlier impact highlights

Research communities and resources