A/Prof. James Xi Zheng

Dr. Xi Zheng earned his Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. Between 2005 and 2012, he was the Chief Solution Architect for Menulog Australia. Currently, he occupies several leadership roles at Macquarie University, Australia: Director of the Intelligent Systems Research Group (ITSEG.ORG), Director of International Engagement in the School of Computing, Senior Lecturer (comparable to an Associate Professor in the US), Deputy Program Leader in Software Engineering.

His research areas include Cyber-Physical Systems Testing and Verification, Safety Analysis, Distributed Learning, Internet of Things, and the broader spectrum of Software Engineering. Dr. Zheng has successfully secured over $1.2 million in competitive funding from the Australian Research Council (2 Linkages and 1 Discovery) and Data61 (CRP) projects focused on safety analysis, model testing and verification, and the development of trustworthy AI for autonomous vehicles. He has been recognized with several awards, including the Deakin Industry Researcher Award (2016) and the MQ Early Career Researcher Award (Runner-up 2020).

His academic contributions include numerous highly cited papers and best conference paper awards. He has served as a Program Committee member for leading Software and System conferences, such as FSE (2022, 2024) and PerCom (2017-2024), and as PC chair for IEEE CPSCom-2021 and IEEE Broadnets-2022. Additionally, he has taken on the role of associate editor for ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies and editor for the Springer Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments. In 2023, Dr. Zheng is a visiting professor at both UCLA and UT Austin and co-founder of the international workshop on trustworthy autonomous cyber-physical systems.

He serves on the Organizing Committee of PerCom’26, and on the Program Committees of FSE’26 and CAV’25.