Linhai Song's Home Page

Linhai Song

Associate Professor
songlh AT ist DOT psu DOT edu
College of Information Sciences and Technology
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania 16802
CV: [pdf]

About Me

I am an Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology College at the Pennsylvania State University.
My research interests span the areas of systems, security and software engineering. The goal of my research is to
help developers build more efficient, reliable and secure software systems.

I received my PhD from Wisconsin-Madison working with Prof. Shan Lu in 2015, my master in Institute of Computing
Technology at Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2010, and my bachelor in School of Software Engineering at Huazhong
University of Science and Technology in 2007. Before joining PSU in August 2017, I spent 1.5 years at FireEye, Inc.

Students

I am very lucky to work with outstanding students:

Current Students:

Shihao Xia, PhD PSU (co-advised with Hong Hu)
Mengting He, PhD PSU

Alumni

Shuofei Zhu (2018-2024) >> Dr. Peng Liu's group
Ziheng Liu (2019-2021) >> PhD at UCSD
Boqin Qin (Visiting PhD from BUPT) (2018-2019)
Ziyi Zhang (Visiting Undergraduate from USTC, Undergraduate Silver Medalist in SRC@SOSP'2019) (2019) >> PhD at UW-Madison
Jianjun Shi (Visiting PhD from BIT) (2018-2019)
Zeming Yu (2018-2019)
Yongheng Chen (Visiting Undergraduate from NJU) (2019) >> PhD at Gatech
Tengfei Tu (Visiting PhD from BUPT) (2017-2018) >> Faculty at BUPT

Advertisement for Recruiting

Multiple RA and TA positions for Ph.D. and Master students starting Fall’21.
Looking for visiting scholars, visiting students, postdocs, and undergraduates at any time.

Picture Gallery

Publications

S: students are advised or mentored by me at Pennsylvania State University.

Understanding and Detecting Real-World Safety Issues in Rust [preprint] [code]
Boqin Qin^S, Yilun Chen, Haopeng Liu, Hua Zhang, Qiaoyan Wen, Linhai Song and Yiying Zhang. TSE'2024

Rust-lancet: Automated Ownership-Rule-Violation Fixing with Behavior Preservation [preprint]
Wenzhang Yang, Linhai Song and Yinxing Xue. ICSE'2024

Generic Go to Go: Dictionary-Passing, Monomorphisation, and Hybrid [preprint]
Stephen Ellis*, Shuofei Zhu*^S, Nobuko Yoshida and Linhai Song. OOPSLA'2022
* both are leading authors.

Beyond Bot Detection: Combating Fraudulent Online Survey Takers [preprint]
Ziyi Zhang^S, Shuofei Zhu^S, Jaron Mink, Aiping Xiong, Linhai Song and Gang Wang. WWW'2022

Learning and Programming Challenges of Rust: A Mixed-Methods Study [preprint] [code]
Shuofei Zhu*^S, Ziyi Zhang*^S, Boqin Qin^S, Aiping Xiong and Linhai Song. ICSE'2022
* both are leading authors.

Who Goes First? Detecting Go Concurrency Bugs via Message Reordering [preprint] [code]
Ziheng Liu*^S, Shihao Xia*^S, Yu Liang, Linhai Song and Hong Hu. ASPLOS'2022
* both are leading authors.

Algorithmic Profiling for Real-World Complexity Problems [preprint] [code]
Boqin Qin^S, Tengfei Tu^S, Ziheng Liu^S, Tingting Yu and Linhai Song. TSE'2021
(accepted as a journal-first paper by ICSE'2022)

Automatically Detecting and Fixing Concurrency Bugs in Go Software Systems [preprint] [code]
Ziheng Liu^S, Shuofei Zhu^S, Boqin Qin^S, Hao Chen and Linhai Song. ASPLOS'2021

VRLifeTime: An IDE Tool to Avoid Concurrency and Memory Bugs in Rust [preprint]
Ziyi Zhang^S, Boqin Qin^S, Yilun Chen, Linhai Song and Yiying Zhang. Demo@CCS'2020

Benchmarking Label Dynamics of VirusTotal Engines [preprint]
Shuofei Zhu^S, Ziyi Zhang^S, Limin Yang, Linhai Song and Gang Wang. Demo@CCS'2020

Understanding Memory and Thread Safety Practices and Issues in Real-World Rust Programs [preprint]
Boqin Qin*^S, Yilun Chen*, Zeming Yu^S, Linhai Song and Yiying Zhang. PLDI'2020
* both are leading authors.

Measuring and Modeling the Label Dynamics of Online Anti-Malware Engines [preprint] [Artifact Evaluated]
Shuofei Zhu^S, Jianjun Shi^S, Limin Yang, Boqin Qin^S, Ziyi Zhang^S, Linhai Song and Gang Wang. USENIX Security'2020

NFReducer: Redundant Logic Elimination in Network Functions
Bangwen Deng, Wenfei Wu and Linhai Song. SOSR'2020

Automated Finite State Machine Extraction [preprint]
Yongheng Chen^S, Linhai Song, Xinyu Xing, Fengyuan Xu and Wenfei Wu. FEAST workshop@CCS'2019

Opening the Blackbox of VirusTotal: Analyzing Online Phishing Scan Engines [preprint]
Peng Peng, Limin Yang, Linhai Song and Gang Wang. IMC'2019

Understanding Real-World Concurrency Bugs in Go [preprint] [Morning Paper] [Hacker News] [Jexia]
Tengfei Tu^S, Xiaoyu Liu, Linhai Song and Yiying Zhang. ASPLOS'2019
(the second-most visited URL related to Golang in 2019)

Fine-Grained Library Customization [preprint]
Linhai Song and Xinyu Xing. SALAD workshop@ECOOP'2018

Performance Diagnosis for Inefficient Loops
Linhai Song and Shan Lu. ICSE'2017
(A previous version appears as UChicago CS Technical Report TR-2016-06)

Learning from Big Malware
Linhai Song, Heqing Huang, Wu Zhou, Wenfei Wu, and Yiying Zhang. APSYS'2016

What Change History Tells Us About Thread Synchronization
Rui Gu, Guoliang Jin, Linhai Song, Linjie Zhu, and Shan Lu. FSE'2015

COMP: Compiler Optimizations for Manycore Processors
Linhai Song, Min Feng, Nishkam Ravi, Yi Yang, and Srimat Chakradhar. MICRO'2014
Best Paper Nomination
(Linhai did this work during his 2013 summer intern in NEC Laboratories America)

Statistical Debugging for Real-World Performance Problems
Linhai Song and Shan Lu. OOPSLA'2014
(A previous version appears as UW-Madison CS Technical Report 1803)

Toddler: Detecting Performance Problems via Similar Memory-Access Patterns
Adrian Nistor, Linhai Song, Darko Marinov, and Shan Lu. ICSE'2013

Understanding and Detecting Real-World Performance Bugs
Guoliang Jin*, Linhai Song*, Xiaoming Shi, Joel Scherpelz, and Shan Lu. PLDI'2012
* both are leading authors.

Automated Atomicity-Violation Fixing
Guoliang Jin, Linhai Song, Wei Zhang, Shan Lu, and Ben Liblit. PLDI'2011

ECON: An Approach to Extract Content from Web News Page
Yan Guo, Huifang Tang, Linhai Song, Yu Wang, and Guodong Ding. APWEB'2010

Simultaneous Product Attribute Name and Value Extraction from Web Pages
Bo Wu, Xueqi Cheng, Yu Wang, Yan Guo, and Linhai Song. WI/IAT Workshops'2009

Blog Post Extraction Using Title Finding
Linhai Song, Xueqi Cheng, Yan Guo, Bo Wu, and Yu Wang. CCIR'2009

ContentEx: A Framework for Automatic Content Extraction Programs
Linhai Song, Xueqi Cheng, Yan Guo, Yue Liu, and Guodong Ding. ISI'2009

Projects

Talks

Understanding Real-World Concurrency Bugs in Go [slides] [pdf]
In ASPLOS'2019 on Apr 17, 2019

Fine-Grained Library Customization [slides]
In SALAD'2018 on Jul 19, 2018

Performance Diagnosis for Inefficient Loops [slides]
In ICSE'2017 on MAY 25, 2017

Learning from Big Malware [slides]
In APSys'2016 on AUG 05, 2016

Statistical Debugging for Real-World Performance Problems [slides]
In OOPSLA'2014 on OCT 23, 2014

Statistical Debugging for Performance Problems [slides]
In WISDOM Workshop II on May 6, 2014

Understanding and Detecting Real-World Performance Bugs [slides]
In PLDI'2012 on July 11, 2012

Services

2024: EuroSys'24, PPoPP'24, ATC'24, CGO'24 (ERC)

2023: PLOS'23, APSys'23

2022: ASPLOS'22

2021: ASPLOS'21 (ERC), PLOS'21

2020: ICSE'20 (Poster), ASPLOS'20 (ERC), CCS'20 (Poster and Demo)

2019: ASPLOS'19 (ERC and Program Co-Chair of SRC), ICSE'19 (SEIP), APSys'19

2018: ISSTA'18 (ERC), ASPLOS'18 (SRC), APSys'18, FSE'18 (SRC), CCS'18 (ERC)

2017: CCS'17 (ERC), USENIX ATC'17 (ERC)

2015: PLDI'15 (Artifacts)

2014: ISSTA'14 (Artifacts)

Awards

NSF CAREER Award, 2022

Mozilla Research Award, 2019

MICRO 2014 Best Paper Runner Up
One of five papers selected from 273 MICRO 2014 submissions

SIGPLAN Research Highlights Award for our AFix paper
One of eight papers selected from all papers published in 13 ACM SIGPLAN conferences in 2011