Zhihao Yao

Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Education
Ph.D.; University of California-Irvine; Computer Science; 2023
M.S.; University of California-Irvine; Computer Science; 2020
B.S.; University of California-Irvine; Computer Science; 2017
Awards & Honors
2026 Best Paper Award, ACM Conference on Reproducibility and Replicability 2026
2025 IEEE Computing’s Top 30 Early Career Professionals , IEEE
2023 Best Artifact Award, ACM MobiSys 2023
Website
https://web.njit.edu/~zy8/
2026 Fall Courses
CS 701B - MASTER'S THESIS
CS 700B - MASTER'S PROJECT
CS 489 - COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH PROJ
CS 791 - DOCTORAL SEMINAR
CS 792 - PRE-DOCTORAL RESEARCH
CS 488 - INDEPENDENT STUDY IN CS
CS 725 - INDEPENDENT STUDY I
CS 790A - DOCT DISSERTATION & RES
CS 726 - INDEPENDENT STUDY II
Past Courses
CS 332: PRINCIPLES OF OPER SYS - HONORS
CS 332: PRINCIPLES OF OPERATING SYSTEMS
CS 332: PRINCIPLES OF OPERATING SYSTEMS - HONORS
CS 485: ST: TRUSTED COMPUTING AND SECURITY ARCHITECTURE
CS 630: OPERATING SYSTEM DESIGN
CS 785: ST: TRUSTED COMPUTING & ARCHITECTURE
CS 791: GRADUATE SEMINAR
Conference Proceeding
"Failure Modes of Standalone LLM-Based Test Generation"
2026 20th IIAI International Congress on Advanced Applied Informatics (IIAI-AAI), July (3rd Quarter/Summer), 2026.
"Measuring Reproducibility in LLM Research: A Rubric and Cross-Topic Corpus Study"
ACM Conference for Reproducibility and Replicability (REP) 2026.
"Record and Replay Methods for Software Engineering Reproducibility: A Cross-Layer Survey and Taxonomy"
ACM Conference for Reproducibility and Replicability (REP) 2026.
"Can LLMs be Effective Code Contributors? A Study on Open-source Projects"
International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) 2026.
"PACE: Policy Adaptation for Cybersecurity Events through Formal Verification of LLM-Generated Firewall Policies"
IEEE BigData 2025, December, 2025.
"PyPitfall: Dependency Chaos and Software Supply Chain Vulnerabilities in Python"
IEEE BigData 2025, December, 2025.
Conference Abstract
"(Poster) StreamGuard: Enabling Secure and Uncensored Video Calls on Mobile Devices"
ACM MobiSys 2024, June, 2024.
Journal Article
Xinlin Wang, Zhihao Yao, Marios Papaefthymiou. 2022. "A real-time electrical load forecasting and unsupervised anomaly detection framework." Applied Energy, vol. 330, no. A, pp. 120279.