Mentoring

I love working with people! Throughout my research career, I've been extremely lucky to have the opportunity to work with SO MANY amazing collaborators ever since my very first project (see the author list of my publications, and there's always new faces)!

Mentoring students is probably what I enjoy the most in my work. I love knowing their needs and motivations, and tailoring the experience for them to achieve where they want to be, not where I or any other people think they should be. I'm always so proud of my students, but what's more rewarding is to see them building confidence and feeling proud of themselves! Now, please allow me to brag about them! :)

I served as General Chair of the ICSE Student Mentoring Workshop (SMeW) in 2023 and 2024, and continue on as a Steering Committee member since 2024.

🎉 Update-2023: Starting from 2023, I'm doing 1-1 mentoring for PhD student in all fields on general topics that may not be project related. I started as a mentor at UMass's Alumni Mentorship Program where I provide 1-1 mentoring sessions for PhD students on a weekly basis. The topics I cover include navigating your dream job, well-being/happiness/stress management, productivity/time management, building your network, self-confidence/imposter syndrome, effective communication, being an international students, and many more! Feel feel to reach out if you're interested in my service (even if you're not associated with UMass). It's free and always will be for PhD students. I have limited availability but I'll reply to you when I have the capacity to take more mentees :)

💖 Update-2026: I was laid off in 2025, and decided to take the opportunity to create a dream life on my own terms. A year in, it became obvious that I no longer have the capacity to offer free mentoring as much as before. I get a lot of requests, but my time is limited right now as I build YRI from scratch, walking the “middle way” between doing what I love and meeting my own needs. So for now, I can only take on one free mentee per month (PhD students have priority, consider it my pro bono practice 😊). Sign up here to join the waitlist. Paid 1:1 services will be launched soon (check back on my website). Wishing you the best on your own journey! ✨

High School Students

• Diana Balderas joined the USC Young Researchers Program in the summer of 2017. Instead of helping out my research projects, Diana already had some wonderful ideas of a food distribution app that she was passionate about! Seeing how motivated she was, I decided to let her lead her own project, and support her ideas by providing guidance on the underlying research and technologies that were needed in the project. Diana had no formal education on programming before, but was able to pull off this complicated project in only 6 weeks! What's more, the resulting project has won 2017 Congressional App Challenge! Diana has continued her passion in tech ever since, and is working at Northrop Grumman as a Software Engineer now!

• Hyojae Park joined an ongoing software testing research project in 2021, and has made significant contributions in the core Machine Learning modules in this project. This is very rare and super impressive for a high-school student to tackle such open-ended research tasks! Hyojae is a quick learner and has a natural talent in doing research. The first fruitful result Avgust was accepted at a top research conference ESEC/FSE 2022! See Avgust: Automating Usage-Based Test Generation from Videos of App Executions. Recently, Hyojae got accepted to the prestigious MIT PRIMES program!

• Leon Yee joined an ongoing software testing research project in 2021, and has made significant contributions in the video processing, and image annotation modules. Leon is able to grasp complicated concepts quickly and deliver working pipelines to tie things together! The first fruitful result Avgust was accepted at a top research conference ESEC/FSE 2022! See Avgust: Automating Usage-Based Test Generation from Videos of App Executions. Currently, Leon is sharpening his skills further at Purdue University!

Undergraduates

• Justin Chen joined the FrUITeR project in 2019. He has made significant contributions in the data processing and test analyzing modules. He has strong programming skills and is able to understand complicated algorithms quickly. The project wouldn't be successful without him! The resulting FrUITeR project was accepted to a top research conference ESEC/FSE 2020! See FrUITeR: A Framework for Evaluating UI Test Reuse. Justin has joined Salesforce as a Software Engineer!

• Paul Wat joined an empirical study research in 2018. He has made significant contributions in the program analysis and statistic analysis modules. He was able to learn complex concepts and research tools quickly, and tailor them to our specific needs! The resulting project was accepted to a top research conference ASE 2018! See Empirically Assessing Opportunities for Prefetching and Caching in Mobile Apps.

• Siwei Yin joined the HIPHarness empirical study in 2019. This is a remote collaboration across the U.S. and China, but Siwei worked very efficiently to deliver results. He has made significant contributions in the data processing and statistic analysis modules, as well as in the core algorithms. He has good understanding of scientific papers and has strong technical skills. The resulting project was accepted to MOBILESoft 2021! See Assessing the Feasibility of Web-Request Prediction Models on Mobile Platforms.

Graduate Students

• Adriana Sejfia joined both the HIPHarness empirical study and the software testing project FrUITeR. She has made significant contributions in the statistic analysis modules of both projects, and has been an amazing team player. She has strong technical skill and can always contribute brilliant ideas! The resulting projects was accepted to ESEC/FSE 2020 and MOBILESoft 2021! See FrUITeR: A Framework for Evaluating UI Test Reuse, and Assessing the Feasibility of Web-Request Prediction Models on Mobile Platforms. Adriana has won the prestigious Google PhD Fellowship!

• Kesina Baral joined an ongoing software testing research project in 2021 in its early stage, and has shown her ability to solve complex open-ended problems. She has explored different research ideas and is able to pinpoint fruitful solutions! Kesina has made significant contributions in classifying keyboards, reverse-engineering app UIs, and using Machine Learning modules to classify images. The first fruitful result Avgust was accepted at a top research conference ESEC/FSE 2022! See Avgust: Automating Usage-Based Test Generation from Videos of App Executions. This project wouldn't be possible without Kesina!

• Marcelo Laser joined multiple research projects ever since my very first project PALOMA in my PhD. We met at ICSE 2017 in Argentina when he was an undergraduate in Brazil. During such a short time at the ICSE conference, Marcelo (an undergraduate back then!) was able to show deep understanding of several research papers I sent him, and demonstrated his passion towards doing research! After the conference, Marcelo was able to collaborate on the project in Brazil very effectively with me, and brought the PALOMA project to maturity in only a few months! He has made significant contributions in the String Analysis, building micro-benchmarks, and statistic analysis modules. The PALOMA project was accepted to our flagship conference ICSE 2018! See Leveraging Program Analysis to Reduce User-perceived Latency in Mobile Applications. Later on, Marcelo became my PhD labmate at USC and continued to pursue his research passion. The projects he has collaborated with me in his PhD have all yielded fruitful results and were accepted to ASE 2018, ESEC/FSE 2020, and MOBILESoft 2021! See Empirically Assessing Opportunities for Prefetching and Caching in Mobile Apps, FrUITeR: A Framework for Evaluating UI Test Reuse, and Assessing the Feasibility of Web-Request Prediction Models on Mobile Platforms.

• Saghar Talebipour joined an ongoing software testing research project in 2021, and has soon become the core member of the team! She made significant contributions in various core components of the project throughout, including Machine Learning modules, test exploration and generation modules. Saghar has constantly contributed her novel ideas to the project, which directly leads to its success! The first fruitful result Avgust was accepted at a top research conference ESEC/FSE 2022! See Avgust: Automating Usage-Based Test Generation from Videos of App Executions. Given Saghar's huge contribution to the project, she was naturally promoted with no doubt to the co-first author of the paper! She is incredibly smart, organized, and has always been a pleasure to work with!

• Juhyeon Lee is a PhD student at UMass Amherst and is my mentee in the Alumni Mentorship Program. The initial focus was job search, but we have expanded the mentoring topics to so many fun areas, including networking, time management & productivity, self-confidence & imposter syndrome, being an international student, elevator pitch and many more. It was so wonderful to see Juhyeon gaining more and more confidence and killing it in her job search! Juhyeon will be joing Apple in Seattle for a summer internship! Way to go Juhyeon!