Dr. Tao Zhang is a Full Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST), Macau SAR. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Seoul under the supervision of Prof. Byungjeong Lee. After that, he spent one year at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, as advised by Prof. Xiapu Luo. He received his bachelor’s degree in Automation and master’s degree in Software Engineering from Northeastern University, China.

Tao is a senior member of ACM and IEEE. He serves/served as General or Program Chair for numerous academic conferences, such as APSEC 2025, Internetware 2024, and SANER 2023. He also serves as a PC member for several top-tier SE conferences, including ICSE, FSE, ASE, and ISSTA. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), IEEE Transactions on Reliability (TRel), and the Journal of Systems and Software (JSS). He is also an Editorial Board Member for Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) and Science of Computer Programming (SCP).

His current research interests include AI for Software Engineering, Software Security, and Mining Software Repositories. He published more than 100 high-quality papers in renowned software engineering and security journals and conferences such as ICSE, ESEC/FSE, ASE, TSE, TOSEM, EMSE, TIFS, and TDSC.

Current Research

AI for Software Engineering

“Our group is dedicated to create a series of automated software engineering tools by utilizing AI technologies such as large language models (LLMs) to help software engineers develop high-quality software products.”

1. Do Pretrained Language Models Indeed Understand Software Engineering Tasks? (TSE’23)
2. RepresentThemAll: A Universal Learning Representation of Bug Reports (ICSE’23)

Software Security

“Our group is dedicated to detect malware, vulnerabilities, and privacy leaks from software products such as mobile apps and smart contracts by utilizing static analysis, AI technologies, and formal methods.”

1. Enhancing Android Malware Detection: The Influence of ChatGPT on Decision-centric Task (TOSEM’25)
2. Detecting Reentrancy Vulnerabilities for Solidity Smart Contracts with Contract Standards-Based Rules (TIFS’25)
3. Meta-Learning for Multi-Family Android Malware Classification (TOSEM’24)

Mining Software Repositories

“Our group is dedicated to mine meaningful information from massive software data such as user reviews by utilizing information retrieval and AI technologies to help software developers increase the efficiency of software development, testing, and maintenance.”

1. Towards More Accurate App Review Response Generation with Fine-Grained Filtering (TOSEM’26)
2. STRE: An Automated Approach to Suggesting App Developers When to Stop Reading Reviews (TSE’23)
3. Where2Change: Change Request Localization for App Reviews (TSE’21)

Contact Information

You can find me at A321, Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macau SAR, or send me an email via tazhang[at]must.edu.mo or kerryking.tao[at]gmail.com.