Recent SMU PhD Graduates

Shaoying CAI
PhD in Information Systems

Shaoying recently joined the Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore as a Scientist. Shaoying conducts research on information security and computer security. In particular, she is interested in formal models, protocol design and analysis, web security, and browser security. Before joining SMU, Shaoying graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Information Security from Hunan University, and a Master’s degree in Computer Software and Theory from Fudan University in China. Supported by SMU’s Living Analytics Research Centre, she visited Carnegie Mellon University CyLab for 10 months between 2012 and 2013. She enjoys reading, playing the violin, and doing sports in her leisure time.

Ye CHEN
PhD in Economics

Ye Chen obtained her PhD in Economics in June 2014 from the SMU School of Economics (SOE). Prior to this, she received her Bachelor’s degree in Finance from Shandong University in China. Upon graduation, she joined SOE as a post-doctoral research fellow. Her research areas include financial econometrics, econometric theory and Bayesian econometrics, with a focus on estimation and inference for non-stationary process (i.e., unit root, local to unity, and moderately integrated process).

She is also studying restricted maximum likelihood estimation and restricted maximum likelihood-based likelihood ratio test in predictive regression. These methods accommodate the feature of non-stationarity found in economic and financial time series. She has presented her work in conferences such as the New Zealand Econometrics Study Group, International Symposium on Econometric Theory and Applications, SMU-NTU-HUE-HU International Conference on Economics and Econometrics, and Tsinghua International Conference in Econometrics.

Lucia
PhD in Information Systems

Lucia joined the SMU PhD in Information Systems programme in 2009. Prior to that, she had been working as a lecturer at Bina Nusantara University (BNU), Indonesia. In 2005, she received her Master’s degree in Information and Communication Technology from University of Wollongong, Australia, under a scholarship that was awarded by BNU and funded by Asian Development Bank. Her research interest is in software testing, especially automatic debugging techniques that permit the location of source codes responsible for programme failures (also known as fault localisation techniques), and defects detection techniques that enable the detection of possible source codes that could cause programme failures.

In 2012, she was selected as a committee member of the Mining Software Repository Conference- Challenge track, which is one of the leading conferences for software mining. Lucia is also interested in data mining and analysis. During her visit to Carnegie Mellon University as part of an overseas training residency in SMU, she worked on predicting foodborne outbreaks in the United States.

Jilian ZHANG
PhD in Information Systems

Jilian recently graduated with a PhD in Information Systems from SMU School of Information Systems. He received his Diploma from Northwestern Polytechnical University and his Master's degree from Guangxi Normal University, China. During his PhD studies in 2011, Jilian visited Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, and worked on a research project related to social network mining. His research interests include data management, top-k query processing, query authentication for outsourced databases, and spatial databases.

During his PhD studies, Jilian presented and published several research papers in top conferences and journals including ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), and Information Systems. He has also served as an external reviewer for ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, TKDE, The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases (VLDBJ); IEEE Transactions on Computers; and Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS).

Back to Research@SMU Issue 17 (Aug 2014)