About me

My first name “Yu” can be confused as “You” sometimes. So people around me may also call me “HuangYu” together :)

I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. I am also affliated with the Institute for Software Integrate Systems, the Frist Austism Center, and the LIVE Initiative at Vanderbilt. My research mainly focuses on understanding and leveraging developers’ cognition and behaviors to improve the effectiveness and efficiency in the software development process. Occasionaly I also work on other fun projects with my students.

I received my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Michigan in 2021. My advisor was Prof. Westley Weimer. I received my MS in Computer Engineering at University of Virginia in 2015 and my BS in Aerospace Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology in China in 2011.

Research

My group focuses on human aspects in software engineering and human-centered AI for software engineering, including user cognition, sustainability for open source software, AI for software engineering, and computer science education. Our work aims to bridge the divide between human cognition and automated models for programming. Our work spans software, hardware, AI, medical imaging (fMRI and fNIRS), eye tracking, and mobile sensing, collaborating with researchers from Security, Education, Psychology and Neuroscience. We also work on social aspects in the software engineering community.

All (not limited to) the following questions are of interest in my group and I look forward to hearing crazy ideas from students!

• How do programming experts become experts?
• How do programmers comprehend and write code? How do they really think in programming tasks?
• How and why do programmers make mistakes in programming?
• How can we help novice programmers become better?
• How can we learn from programmers and improve automated models in programming?
• How can we improve participation and diversity in programming?

If you are interested in joining my lab, please check the information on Advising & Research Opportunities.

News

• Mar 2024 Our work is featured on Vanderbilt School of Engineering news!

• Feb 2024 Congratulations to Yimeng for her paper receiving the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 24!

• Dec 2023 Congratulations to Yifan for his paper accepted to FSE 2024!

• Dec 2023 Congratulations to Zihan for receiving the Richard Bennett/Dorothy Danforth Compton Prize scholarship!!

• Dec 2023 We received the Provost’s Faculty Immersion Vanderbilt Grant to support our research on Human Attention Centered AI for Computer Programming Learning! Thank you, Vanderbilt Immersion!

• Dec 2023 Congratulations to Garrett and Hanlin for their paper accepted to ICSE-SEET 2024!

• Nov 2023 Congratulations to Zihan for her paper receiving the SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FSE 2023!