20092024

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Biography

Dr. Xi Zheng earned his Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. Between 2005 and 2012, he was the Chief Solution Architect for Menulog Australia. Currently, he is an ARC Future Fellow and occupies several leadership roles at Macquarie University, Australia: Director of the Intelligent Systems Research Group (ITSEG.ORG), Director of International Engagement in the School of Computing, Associate Professor and Deputy Program Leader in Software Engineering. His research areas include Cyber-Physical Systems Testing and Verification, Safety Analysis, Distributed Learning, Internet of Things, and the broader spectrum of Software Engineering. Dr. Zheng has successfully secured over $2.4 million in competitive funding from the Australian Research Council (1 Future Fellow, 2 Linkages and 1 Discovery) and Data61 (CRP) projects focused on safety analysis, model testing and verification, and the development of trustworthy AI for autonomous vehicles. He has been recognized with several awards, including the Deakin Industry Researcher Award (2016) and the MQ Early Career Researcher Award (Runner-up 2020). His academic contributions include numerous highly cited papers and best conference paper awards. He has served as a Program Committee member for leading Software and System conferences, such as ICSE (2026), FSE (2022, 2024) and PerCom (2017-2024), and as PC chair for IEEE CPSCom-2021 and IEEE Broadnets-2022. Additionally, he has taken on the role of associate editor for ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies and editor for the Springer Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments. In 2023, Dr. Zheng is a visiting professor at both UCLA and UT Austin and co-founder of the international workshop on trustworthy autonomous cyber-physical systems. 

Dr. Zheng is a leading co-organizer for the Shonan Meeting (Seminar No. 235) on “LLM-Guided Synthesis, Verification, and Testing of Learning-Enabled CPS” in March 2026 and the Dagstuhl Seminar (202501048) on “Advancing Testability and Verifiability of CPS with Neurosymbolic and Large Language Models” in October 2026.

Biography

Research Interests

  • Testing and Verifying Cyber-Physical Systems especially those enabled by machine learning models and complex ultra-large Software Systems. 

  • AI System Safety leveraging Foundation Models and NeuroSymbolic Paradigms.

  • Distributed Learning.

Highlighted Research Projects

  • "Advancing Robust Autonomy in Cyber-Physical Systems", CI, ARC Future Fellow grant FT240100269. Awarded $960,412. 2024-2028.
  • “Robust and Scalable Autonomous Landing for Drones”, CI, ARC Linkage Project grant LP210100337. Awarded $459,593. 2022-2025.

  • “Context-aware Verification and Validation framework for Autonomous Driving”, CI, ARC Discovery Project grant DP210102447. Awarded $448,958. 2021-2024.

  • “A Safety-preserving Ecosystem for Autonomous Driving”, Leader CI, ARC Linkage Project grant LP190100676. Awarded $341,853. 2021-2024.

Academic Service and Awards

  • Associate Editor for ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies (since 2022).
  • Editor for Springer International Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments (since 2024).
  • Program Chair: IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing 2021  and EAI International Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems 2022.
  • Program Committee Member: ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (2022, 2024), International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (since 2017).
  • Co-founder and Steering committee member: International Workshop on Trustworthy Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (since 2024).
  • Industry Researcher Award in Deakin 2016, Excellence in Early Career Research Award (highly recommend) in Macquarie University 2020.
  • Most innovative project award in Alpha innovation contest 2020,
  • Two Vice Chancellor’s Commendation for Thesis Excellence award in Macquare University 2023.
  • Best paper award: Australasian Computing Doctoral Consortium 2017,International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing 2019.

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