News

[Note] This is a “non-discriminating” list of news, including the good and the bad. If you're interested, check out my blog post on Why I share my paper rejection.

[Feb 2025] 2 papers accepted at CHASE 2025!! Predicting and Understanding College Student Mental Health with Interpretable Machine Learning 🎉 and AffectEval: A Modular and Customizable Affective Computing Framework 🎊 Stay tuned for the camera ready! 😎

[Jan 2025] Our paper Unlocking Mental Health: Exploring College Students’ Well-being through Smartphone Behaviors is accepted to MOBILESoft 2025! 🥳 See you soon in Ottawa, Canada! 🇨🇦

[Sep 2024] Dreams come true! 🎉 Super excited to join the board of Freedom of Mind with my favorite people! 🥰 Stay tuned for what's to come! ❤️

[Aug 2024] Big milestone at ICSE 2024 accomplished! 🥳 See my blog From Zero to One: Lessons Learned on Bringing African Students to International Conferences for details. Super proud of our team on the Africa Initiative! 🌍

[Jul 2024] I just got back from my 10-day silent meditation retreat at Dhamma Sukha Meditation Center! This is my top 1 priority every year and I always come back as fresh as new! 🥰 I share how I came across this treasure and a few tips on sitting long in a blog post.

[Apr 2024] My two presentations at MOBILESoft 2024 in Lisbon are live! 🎙️ Check them out if you missed it! 😉 CAREForMe: Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit Recommendation Framework for Mental Health and Digital Wellbeing Redefined: Toward User-Centric Approach for Positive Social Media Engagement.

[Apr 2024] The Steering Comittee of ICSE's Student Mentoring Workshop (SMeW) is born!! 🎉 Read more on Twitter/X or LinkedIn.

[Jan 2024] Our paper Digital Wellbeing Redefined: Toward User-Centric Approach for Positive Social Media Engagement is accepted to MOBILESoft 2024 Research Forum track! Can't wait to start a conversation on digital wellbeing in the Software Engineering community! 🥳

[Jan 2024] Our paper CAREForMe: Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit Recommendation Framework for Mental Health is accepted to MOBILESoft 2024 New Idea track! 🎊

[Dec 2023] I'm chairing the Student Mentoring Workshop (SMeW) at ICSE 2024. Apply by Jan 15, 2024 to join us in Portugal! Travel grant is available for those in need. The video recap of SMeW @ICSE 2023 can be found HERE. If you like what we cover, don't miss out the chance to join us at ICSE 2024! 🇵🇹

[Jul 2023] I'm attending OHBM annual meeting in Montreal! Come say hi if you're around! 🇨🇦

[Jul 2023] I just came back from my 10-day silent meditation retreat at Dhamma Sukha Meditation Center (my annual tradition!)🧘‍♀️ For those interested, I wrote about my experience in How I Sit for 8 Hours in Meditation.

[Mar 2023] I'm chairing ICSE 2023‘s Student Mentoring Workshop (SMeW) and we've got huge interests from students! If you're coming to ICSE, consider sign up as a student mentor to make your ICSE trip more fun and rewarding! 🤝

[Jan 2023] Our paper AVGUST: A Tool for Generating Usage-Based Tests from Videos of App Executions is accepted to ICSE 2023 Demo track! Australia here I come! 🇦🇺

[Nov 2022] I will be attending ESEC/FSE 2022 in Singapore and presenting our work FrUITeR and Avgust! 🇸🇬

[Nov 2022] Big announcement!! I just started my new chapter at Information Sciences Institute (ISI) as Research Computer Scientist! I'll start using LinkedIn now haha :)

[Aug 2022] I just had my annual tradition at Dhamma Sukha Meditation Center‘s silent meditation retreat! Always the best 10 days of the year!!

[Jun 2022] Our paper Avgust: Automating Usage-Based Test Generation from Videos of App Executions was accepted to ESEC/FSE 2022! Stay tuned for the camera-ready! ;)

[May 2022] Our patent Latency Minimization in Mobile Applications (US20200311173) is granted!

[Sep 2021] I just went to an amazing silent meditation retreat at Dhamma Sukha Meditation Center! Best decision ever! I happened to break the first-timer's record and made into meditator spotlight :)

[Aug 2021] Our paper UI Test Migration Across Mobile Platforms was accepted to ASE 2021!

[Jun 2021] Our paper Identifying Casualty Changes in Software Patches was accepted to ESEC/FSE 2021!

[May 2021] I've been selected as the finalist for the William F. Ballhaus Jr. Best Dissertation Award (4 finalists in the Viterbi School of Engineering)! I represented Computer Science department at the Best Dissertation Symposium to present my 6-year PhD thesis in 15min! :)

[Mar 2021] Our paper Assessing the Feasibility of Web-Request Prediction Models on Mobile Platforms was accepted to MOBILESoft 2021! With this great news, all the pieces in my Ph.D. Dissertation are published now! YAY :D

[Jan 2021] I have driven across country from Los Angeles to Amherst! I'm starting my new chapter at UMass as a postdoc!

[Dec 2020] Our paper was rejected from ICSE 2021… Heh

[Nov 2020] My PhD dissertation Reducing user-perceived latency in mobile applications via prefetching and caching is published now! If the title doesn't interest you that much, go to the Conclusion section where I also discuss Software Testing and Open Science! Cool stuff :)

[Nov 2020] FrUITeR‘s presentations are available now! I am also serving on the panel at ESEC/FSE 2020. Hit me up!

[Oct 2020] I have successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis! I'm Dr. Zhao now!

[Sep 2020] FrUITeR‘s pre-print and artifacts are available online now. Check it out!

[Jul 2020] Our paper was rejected from ASE 2020… Oh well, onward and upward!

[Jul 2020] I was selected as a Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow)! I will be joining the College of Information & Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst as a Postdoc in Jan 2021, working with Yuriy Brun and Andrew McCallum!

[May 2020] Our paper FrUITeR – A Framework for Evaluating UI Test Reuse was accepted to ESEC/FSE 2020! Stay tuned for the camera-ready and artifacts!