Shurui Zhou
[pronunciation: Shoo-ray Joe]周抒睿
Assistant Professor
University of Toronto
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Department of Computer Science (Cross-Appointment)
Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (Cross-Appointment)
Schwartz Reisman Institute (Affiliated)
Data Sciences Institute (Member)
shurui (dot) zhou (at) utoronto (dot) ca
Office: [D. L. Pratt Building (6 King's College Road)] PT484D
Phone: 416-978-4628
Bio
Follow @shuishuiblue
I direct the FORCOLAB at the University of Toronto. We are focusing on helping distributed and interdisciplinary software teams to collaborate more efficiently and build high-quality software systems, especially in the context of modern open-source collaboration forms, fork-based development, and interdisciplinary teams when building AI-enabled systems or scientific software. We also apply software engineering best practices to facilitate better collaborative Computer-Aided Design (CAD). Please find our publications here.
I received my Ph.D.'s degree in May. 2020 from the Institute for Software Research, now called Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D), School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. I am very fortunate to unofficial advisor and collaborator Professor Bogdan Vasilescu. I received my Master's degree from Peking University, and my Bachelor's degree from Xi'an Jiaotong University.
Prospective Students
I am actively looking for talented, motivated colleagues at different levels to join us. See here for detail.
Ph.D. Thesis 
Title: Improving Collaboration Efficiency in Fork-based Development
[slides] Committee Members: Christian Kästner, James D. Herbsleb, Laura A. Dabbish, Andrzej Wąsowski.
News
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Mar 26, 2025
Jiayi Sun's paper "Advancing Sustainable Communities in Scientific OSS: A Replication Study with Astropy", co-authored with Youhai Li, Dr. Aarya Patil, and Prof. Jin Guo has been accpeted to the The 28th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW)!
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Mar 24, 2025
Our paper "Do Research Software Engineers and Software Engineering Researchers Speak the Same Language?", co-authored with Prof. Timo Kehrer, Robert Haines, Dr. Guido Juckeland, and Dr. David E Bernholdt has been accpeted to the Computing in Science and Engineering!
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Feb 4, 2025
Our grant "Novel Statistical and Machine Learning Algorithms for Analysis of Canadian Political Donations and Lobbying Data", led by Prof. Rohan Alexander has been awared by the NSERC Alliance – Mitacs Accelerate Grant!
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Jan 21, 2025
Kimberly Hau's paper "LLMs in Mobile Apps: Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities", co-authored with Prof. Safwat Hassan has been accpeted to the International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering (MOBILESoft 2025)!
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Jan 9, 2025
Jiayi Sun's paper "Advancing Sustainable Communities in Scientific OSS: A Replication Study with Astropy", co-authored with Youhai Li, Dr. Aarya Patil, and Prof. Jin Guo has been accpeted to the International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE2025)!
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Oct 4-5, 2024
I am organizing the two-day Hackathon&Symposium on "Responsible LLM-Human Collaboration", co-PIed with Prof. Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Prof. Shion Guha, Prof. Lisa Austin, and Prof. Anastasia Kuzminykh, sponsored by the Data Sciences Institute (DSI) Emergent Data Sciences Program at UofT. Join us at this dynamic two-day event on responsible LLM_human collaboration!
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Sep 20, 2024
Our paper "Who to Blame: A Comprehensive Review of Challenges and Opportunities in Designer-Developer Collaboration", co-authored with Shutong Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, and Prof. Jinghui Cheng. has been accpeted to the CSCW2025!
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July 3, 2024
Our paper "The Product Beyond the Model -- An Empirical Study of Repositories of Open-Source ML Products", co-authored with Nadia Nahar, Haoran Zhang, Grace Lewis, and Christian Kästner. has been accpeted to the ICSE2025!
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Talks&Media
Oct 11, 2024
Conference Talk at ICSEM 2024 at Flagstaff (USA) about "Can We Do Better with What We Have Done? Unveiling the Potential of ML Pipeline in Notebooks."
Jun 6, 2024
Invited Talk at WiCI Seminars at Iowa State University about "Exploring the Practices and Challenges of Collaboration in Developing Scientific Open-Source Software".
Apr 26, 2022
Invited Talk at It Will Never Work in Theory about "Understanding the sustainability challenges for building open-source scientific software".
Sep 25, 2022
Invited Talk at NumFOCUS Project Summit about "Towards sustainable OSS communities".
April. 5, 2022
Invited Talk at SMILE (Statistics and MachIne LEarning Journal Club, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto) -- Improving Collaboration Efficiency for Building AI-based Software.
Oct 20. 2021
Invited Talk at Perceive'21 -- Improving Collaboration Efficiency for Building AI-based Software. [Recording]
Nov 14. 2020
Invited Talk at CSER'20 -- Improving Collaboration Efficiency for Distributed and Interdisciplinary Software Teams.
Sep. 11 2020
Talked about Forking in Open Source at Sustain Open Source Podcast
May. 5 2019
Dagstuhl Seminar 19191
-- Software Evolution in Time and Space: Unifying Version and Variability Management. [Seminar abstract] [lighting talk - Version Control For AI]
Teaching
I received the Gordon Slemon Teaching of Design Award in 2022 at UofT ECE for revamping of ECE444.
ECE444 - Software Engineering 2024-2020 Fall
ECE345 - Algorithms and Data Structures / ECE358 - Foundations of Computing 2021-2023 Fall
ECE1785/ CSC2130 - Empirical Software Engineering 2023-2025 Winter 2023 Winter 2022 Winter 2021 Winter
Service
Prior Projects
Identifying Redundant PRs on GitHub
forks-insight.com
[Team]
