Youcheng Sun
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Research interests
Professor Sun pioneers safety and security techniques in AI-powered software systems. His research has been recognised and funded by leading companies such as Google, the Ethereum Foundation, and the British aerospace industry. Additionally, he has received grants from the Alan Turing Institute through the UK-Italy Trustworthy AI Visiting Researcher Programme. Email
Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Sun held faculty positions at The University of Manchester and Queen's University Belfast in the UK. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford.
Professor Sun previously led source code testing and verification for two UK domestic airborne software projects, SECT-AIR and AUTOSAC. He was also a member of the EU H2020 project SAFURE, which focused on safety and security assurance in the design of mixed-critical cyber-physical systems. Professor Sun has an strong publication record in top-tier academic conferences and journals. He serves as an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) and is the Guest Editor for the journal's special issue on Software Engineering and AI.
- Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy – 2015
- M.Sc. in Computer Science, 110 cum laude, University of Trento, Italy – 2012
- B.Sc. in Computer Science, Jilin University, China – 2010
- Google ASPIRE Research Award 2022
- Distinguished Reviewer for ACM TOSEM 2023, 2020
- Norbert Tihanyi, Ridhi Jain, Yiannis Charalambous, Mohamed Amine Ferrag, Youcheng Sun, and Lucas C. Cordeiro: "A New Era in Software Security: Towards Self-Healing Software via Large Language Models and Formal Verification." arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.14752
- Jialuo Chen, Jingyi Wang, Youcheng Sun, Peng Cheng, and Jiming Chen: "Isolation-based Debugging for Neural Networks." The ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), 2024.
- Iqra Zahid, Tharindu Madusanka, Riza Batista-Navarro, and Youcheng Sun: "Probing the Uniquely Identifiable Linguistic Patterns of Conversational AI Agents." The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024.
- Haonan Zhang, Dongxia Wang, Zhu Sun, Yanhui Li, Youcheng Sun, Huizhi Liang, and Wenhai Wang: "KG4RecEval: Does Knowledge Graph Really Matter for Recommender Systems?" ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 2024.
- Xiangshan Gao, Xingjun Ma, Jingyi Wang, Youcheng Sun, Bo Li, Shouling Ji, Peng Cheng, and Jiming Chen: "Verifi: Towards Verifiable Federated Unlearning." IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2024.