2/19/2025 Bruce Adams
CS professor Lingming Zhang has been inducted into the 2024 class of ACM Distinguished Members.
Written by Bruce Adams
CS professor Lingming Zhang has been inducted into the 2024 class of ACM Distinguished Members. This year, ACM has named 56 Distinguished Members globally for their impact in the field. All of the 2024 inductees are registered members of the prestigious scholarly society and were selected by their peers for significant technical achievements as well as volunteer service to their professional community.
Zhang was named for “contributions to software quality assurance and its synergy with machine learning.” He says, “I feel truly honored and humbled. This would not have been possible without the incredible support of my amazing students, collaborators, and mentors.” Zhang’s research focuses on using LLMs to improve software quality and developers' productivity. He says of LLMs, “As someone who has been working on software engineering research for almost two decades, I never saw such a transformative technology, and believe LLMs have the potential to completely reshape the future of software development and maintenance.” He describes the challenges and future opportunities, saying the “current LLMs are predominantly trained on the final outputs of the software development process, often overlooking the critical intermediate steps involving detailed reasoning and planning. Recognizing this gap, one important path ahead is to develop the next-generation LLMs that can thoroughly comprehend code semantics and the entire software development process, paving the way for future software building and quality assurance.”
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and The Grainger College of Engineering have recognized Zhang for teaching, listing him in the 2024, 2022, and 2021 Teachers Ranked as Excellent rankings. He also received the 2023 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research, a 2022 Google Research Scholar Award, 2021 ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher Award and 2019 NSF CAREER Award.
Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Lingming Zhang is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of computer science.