James Xi Zheng

ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor at the School of Computing, Macquarie University, Australia

Research

In the past 7 years, A/Prof Zheng initiated and have been successful as CI in obtaining over 12 competitive research grants (~AU$2.4 million) that were supported by external and internal grants, which included support from ARC Future Fellow Program, ARC Discovery Program, ARC Linkage Program, Data61 CRP, Industry funding, and MQ ECR grant.

  • 2024: "Advancing Robust Autonomy in Cyber-Physical Systems", CI, ARC Future Fellow grant FT240100269. Awarded $960,412. 2024-2028.
  • 2023: “Vulnerability Detection in Complex Software Systems using Deep Learning Models and Software Testing", Ant Group Research Project. Lead CI. Awarded $30,705.
  • 2022: “Robust and Scalable Autonomous Landing for Drones", ARC Linkage Project grant LP210100337. CI. Awarded $459,593.
  • 2022: “Explainable AI for Complex Heterogeneous Systems", Australian Data61 Top Up Grant. Lead CI. Awarded $33,805.
  • 2021: “Context-aware verification and validation framework for autonomous driving”, ARC Discovery Project grant DP21010247. CI. Awarded $448,958.
  • 2021: “A safety-preserving ecosystem for autonomous driving”, ARC Linkage Project grant LP190100676. Lead CI. Awarded $341,853.

His research has garnered over 5,902 citations with an H-index of 42, i10-index of 112 (14th Feb 2025), and he continues to push academic boundaries with his students' work gaining significant recognition, including recent acceptance for drone testing at the ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’25), the first industry-scale extensive study on autonomous driving testing at the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE’22), and multiple best paper awards, including the recent best paper award at the 21st IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS).

A/Prof. Zheng's leadership extends to serving as multiple TPC and General Chairs for ACM/IEEE/Springer/CCF conferences. He has also served on the Program Committees for leading conferences, such as ICSE (2026), CAV (2025), FSE (2022, 2024) and PerCom (2017-2025). He is an associate editor for ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies and an editor for Springer’s Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments.

In 2023, A/Prof. Zheng served as a visiting professor at both UCLA and UT Austin, and he co-founded the International Workshop on Trustworthy Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (TACPS.org), further contributing to his reputation as a global leader in the field. His numerous recognitions include the Deakin Industry Researcher Award (2016) and the MQ Early Career Researcher Award (Runner-up, 2020). A/Prof. Zheng is a leading co-organizer for the Shonan Meeting (Seminar No. 235) on “LLM-Guided Synthesis, Verification, and Testing of Learning-Enabled CPS” in March 2026 and the Dagstuhl Seminar (202501048) on “Advancing Testability and Verifiability of CPS with Neurosymbolic and Large Language Models” in October 2026.