A Two-Fold Adventure

My adventure in computer science has been defined by both research and full-stack development.
Research
Machine Learning

NLP, Graph ML, AI for Programming Languages (LLM4Code), Human-Centered AI

Software Engineering

Binary Code Analysis, Program Analysis, Code Comprehension, CS Education

Software Development
Full-Stack Web Development

React.js, Next.js, Node.js, REST API, Flask, Spring, Firebase, SQL, AWS, Git/GitHub

Android Development

Android Studio

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Wave Dynamics Inc.
Software Engineer Intern
Wave Dynamics Inc.
May 2024 – Present Nashvile, TN

Design and develop the Wave Dashboard:

  • Develop a full-stack ticket sales management dashboard generating $120,000+ monthly revenue using Next.js and Node.js.
  • Leverage Firebase to for scalable data storage and Google/Firebase authentication for secure data retrieval.
  • More details coming up soon.
 
 
 
 
 
Vanderbilt University
Undergraduate Researcher
Vanderbilt University
May 2022 – Present Nashville, TN

Supervised by Prof. Yu Huang and Prof. Kevin Leach:

  • Reinforcement Learning for LLMs for Code: Generating negative code samples using RL with compiler-in-the-loop. More details coming up soon.
  • Few-shot Malware Classification: Designed a semi-supervised malware classifier, pioneering efficient & semantics-aware malware data augmentation through information retrieval, invariance learning, and alignment techniques. The classifier achieved SOTA results with 5.60% improvement in few-shot settings and 11.44% improvement under concept-drift.
  • Merging Human & Transformer Attention: Implemented a Transformer-based NLP model whose self-attention weights are refined using human attention data captured through eye-tracking. The model is applied to neural code summarization tasks with a 29.91% performance improvement, showcasing the potential of integrating human attention into neural models.
  • LLM Feature Attribution Analysis: Comprehensively evaluated feature attribution in six LLMs (GPT, Llama 2, StarCoder, etc.) in code summarization through Shapley-value analysis; compared against human eye-tracking attention patterns.
 
 
 
 
 
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Summer Research Intern
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
May 2023 – September 2023 Champaign, IL

Supervised by Prof. Lingming Zhang:

  • Designed a universal LLM-based fuzzer targeting compilers of any programming language, with LLM-mutated code inputs integrated in the fuzzing loop; tested on 7 languages with significantly improved coverage and uncovered 76 new bugs.
  • Specialized in JIT vulnerabilities within the V8 JavaScript engine; refined fuzz testing algorithms for targeted exploitation; offered expertise in instrumentation, auto-prompting, and compiler and systems programming for vulnerability pinpointing.
 
 
 
 
 
Centurium Capital
Software Engineer Intern
Centurium Capital
June 2021 – July 2021 Beijing, CN

Post-Investment Management Team:

  • Worked on the post-investment team to eliminate future manual processing of three portfolio companies’ operational data.
  • Implemented a full-stack web service in React JS, Flask, and MySQL for robust client data catalog collection and storage.
  • Automated the conversion of raw operational data into financial statements using OpenPyXL, Pandas, NumPy, and Seaborn.
  • Built an interactive sales performance visualization interface using D3 for real-time strategic insights.

Publications

(2025). VulRAG: Code Vulnerability Repair by Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Under review by the 47th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2025.

(2025). MalMixer: Few-Shot Malware Classification with Retrieval-Augmented Semi-Supervised Learning. Under review by the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, 2025.

(2025). A Comparative Study on ChatGPT and Checklist as Support Tools for Unit Testing Education. Under review by the Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS), 2025.

(2024). EyeTrans: Merging Human and Machine Attention for Neural Code Summarization. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 2024.

PDF Cite Code

(2024). Do Machines and Humans Focus on Similar Code? Exploring Explainability of Large Language Models in Code Summarization. In Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), 2024.

PDF Cite Slides

Projects

.js-id-machine-learning
SIREN for Medical Imaging
Sinusoidal Representation Networks for EEG-fMRI Translation.
SIREN for Medical Imaging
News Summarization with Continual Learning
Combatting concept drift in news articles via continual learning.
News Summarization with Continual Learning
A Starlink Satellite Trajectory Visualization Web App
A visualization dashboard tracking the real-time geo-locations of hte selected Starlink satellites. Implemented with ReactJS, D3, and AWS. See more at the ‘GitHub’ repo.
A Starlink Satellite Trajectory Visualization Web App
An Online Food Ordering Web App
A web app allowing for user registration, menu serach, ordering, and checkout at a variety of resturants. Implemented with ReactJS, Spring MVC, Hibernate ORM, and AWS. See more at the GitHub repo.
An Online Food Ordering Web App
A Cloud- and ReactJS-based Social Network
A social network web app allowing users to create posts and search nearby activities. Implemented with ReactJS, Golang, Google Cloud, and ElasticSearch. See more at the GitHub repo.
A Cloud- and ReactJS-based Social Network
Peronsonalized News Recommendation with Android
An Android App that recommends recent news articles to users, enabling swipe gestures and liking/disliking. Implemented with Google Component Architectural MVVM, RecyclerView, LiveData, and ViewModel.
Peronsonalized News Recommendation with Android

Teaching

Vanderbilt University
Principles of Software Engineering (CS4278)
Teaching Assistant | Spring 2023 | Instructor: Prof. Yu Huang.
Vanderbilt University
Programming and Problem Solving (CS1101)
Teaching Assistant | Fall 2022, Spring 2023, and Fall 2023 | Instructors: Prof. Robert Tairas, Prof. Gina Bai, and Prof. Csaba Biegl.

Contact

  • ericlij [-at-] stanford [-dot-] edu