Short Bio
Dr. Yutian Tang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, where he leads research on trustworthy AI generated software and supervises PhD students. His research sits at the intersection of AI coding agents, large language models for software engineering, software security, mobile ecosystems, and benchmark driven evaluation. [CV]. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, supervised by Prof. Xiapu Luo and Dr. Hareton Leung. In 2025, he visited Lund University as a visiting scholar hosted by Prof. Per Runeson.
He has published 50+ top tier papers at premier software engineering and computer science venues, including ICSE, ESEC/FSE, OOPSLA, CCS, WWW, ASE, ISSTA, IEEE TSE, and ACM TOSEM. His work has received the Best Industry Paper Award at ISSRE and the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE. Three of his works reported defects in the Android OS that were confirmed by the Google Security Team. His current research agenda develops evidence based methods for evaluating, testing, and governing AI generated software. The central question is practical: when should AI generated software be trusted, when must it be tested, and when should it be rejected? This agenda connects software reliability, security, accountability, and public trust in everyday digital systems increasingly built or modified by AI.
Dr. Tang is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of ACM, CCF, European Alliance for Innovation (EAI), and EuroSys. He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, a technical committee member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Software Engineering, and a contributor to the IEEE Standards Association P1633 Working Group on software reliability. His broader professional activities include roles with Informatics Europe working groups and Alan Turing Institute interest groups related to trustworthy digital identity, interpretation, verification, and modelling. He serves as a program chair or co chair for EASE, APSEC, and Internetware, and has served as a program committee member for more than 20 international conferences, including PLDI, ICSE, ESEC/FSE, ASE, TheWebConf, ICPC, SANER, CAiSE, EASE, SEKE, MSR, APSEC, MobileSoft, and VaMoS, with 50+ total service instances. His research has been partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality, OpenAI, Google, and Lund University.
Collaborative distances: Dijkstra number of 4. Erdős number of 4.
- Fully-funded/Self-funded Ph.D. opportunities: I selectively consider PhD applicants with strong evidence of research potential and a clear fit with my group’s research agenda in Agentic AI, LLM driven software engineering, AI security, AI alignment, AI copyright and watermarking, and trustworthy AI systems. Contact [ me] with your CV, academic transcript, research proposal, and publications (if any). Your proposal must explain how your background and proposed topic fit my research agenda (find it here), ideally by referring to one or more recent papers from my group.
- Competitive profile for fully funded international PhD applicants: Fully funded international PhD positions are highly competitive. Applicants are normally expected to show strong evidence in both academic background and research output. Competitive indicators include: (1) QS Top 100/US Top 100/985 Uni/Leading 211 Uni/Top Uni. in your country/region; (2) 2+ published first-author papers on top venues: ICSE/FSE/ASE/ISSTA/TSE/TOSEM/ICML/ICLR/NeurIPS/CCS/IEEE SP/Security/NDSS ...; (3) A clear research fit with my group's reseach agenda ; (4) Strong implementation and system building ability
- Applicants who do not meet these indicators are unlikely to be competitive for fully funded international routes and may wish to consider self funded study, external scholarships, or other funding schemes.
- Home fee applicants and applicants eligible for specific funding schemes will be assessed on a case by case basis according to the relevant funding route, research fit, and evidence of research potential.
- Remote Research Assistant and Intern opportunities: I selectively consider remote research assistants and interns who can contribute to focused projects in LLM driven software engineering, agentic AI security, mobile security, and empirical software engineering. Remote research opportunities are not automatically available. They are considered only when there is a clear project need, a strong research fit, and a suitable supervision arrangement.
- Export Control: All remote research arrangements are subject to university policy, right to work requirements, data protection requirements, export control rules, sanctions compliance, confidentiality requirements, and any required institutional approval.
- Competitive applicants are normally expected to have:: QS Top 100/US Top 100/Top 5 in your country + 1 published first-author paper on top venue: ICSE/FSE/ASE/ISSTA/TSE/TOSEM/ICML/ICLR/NeurIPS/CCS/IEEE SP/Security/NDSS ...
- Strong candidates should send a CV, transcript, published papers and project portfolio if available, and a short note explaining which recent paper or project from my group they want to build on. Prior research experience, strong implementation skills, or evidence of publishable work will be prioritised.
News (all/26/25/24)
- [04/2026] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of ASE 2026 NIER Track.
- [04/2026] Dr. Tang was invited to join the Organizing Committee of APSEC 2026 as Early Research Achievements (ERA) Co-chair
- [04/2026] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of APSEC 2026.
- [04/2026] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of FSE 2027.
- [03/2026] Our paper received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award @ ICSE 2026
- [02/2026] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of ICSE 2027.
- [12/2025] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of ASE 2026.
- [12/2025] Our paper titled "Beyond Coverage: Automatic Test Suite Augmentation for Enhanced Effectiveness Using Large Language Models " has been accepted to OOPSLA 2026
- [12/2025] Our paper titled "An Empirical Study on Low Code Programming using Traditional vs Large Language Model Support" has been accepted to Journal of Systems and Software
- [10/2025] Our paper titled "WhisperCatcher: Demystifying Unauthorized and Encrypted Private Data Transmission in Android Applications" has been accepted to ICSE'26
- [09/2025] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of WWW 2026.
- [08/2025] Dr. Tang received an OpenAI Cybersecurity Grant.
- [07/2025] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of ICPC 2026.
- [06/2025] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of MSR 2026.
- [06/2025] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of FSE 2026.
- [05/2025] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of ASE 2025.
- [05/2025] Our paper titled "Feedback analysis in software product line forked developments" has been accepted to SPLC 2025
- [04/2025] Our proposal with Prof. Per (Lund University) has been accepted! Looking forward to visiting colleagues in Lund University soon!
- [04/2025] Our paper titled "LLM-CompDroid: Repairing Configuration Compatibility Bugs in Android Apps with Pre-trained Large Language Models" has been accepted by TOSEM
- [03/2025] Our paper titled "A Systematic Study on Real-world Android App Bundles" has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering! My 10th TSE paper!
- [03/2025] Our paper titled "KEENHash: Hashing Programs into Function-aware Embeddings for Large-scale Binary Code Similarity Analysis" has been accepted by ISSTA'25
- [03/2025] Reach 1,000+ citations!
- [03/2025] Our paper titled "Characterising Bugs in Jupyter Platform" has been accepted by EASE'25
- [03/2025] Dr. Tang joined the Program Committee of APSEC 2025.
- [02/2025] Our paper titled "Artemis: Toward Accurate Detection of Server-Side Request Forgeries through LLM-Assisted Inter-Procedural Path-Sensitive Taint Analysis" has been accepted by OOPSLA'25
- [01/2025] Our paper titled "SmartOracle: Generating Smart Contract Oracle via Fine-Grained Invariant Detection" has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering