Google Scholar, CV

👋 Hi! I’m a 1st 2nd 3nd 4th year computer science PhD student candidate at Northwestern University working with Dr. Andrew Crotty on data management systems with focus on sequence data processing and indexing.

I completed my B.S. in computational statistics and data sciences at the Pennsylvania State University from 2016 to 2020. During my undergraduate studies, I was advised by Dr. Ting Wang for doing researches in security and privacy of deep learning based systems. Previously, I worked as a bioinformatics programmer at the Mahony Lab where I had pleasure working with a group of genius researchers from May till Dec, 2019.

News:

• [2025-08] I’ll be joining Adobe Research as Research Scientist Intern this Fall.
• [2025-05] DeepSketch poster presented at GCASR 2025.
• [2025-04] Paper submitted to VIS 2025 conference.
• [2024-12] Organized the Northwestern Database seminar talk.
• [2024-08] Passed my qualifying exam, I’m officially a Ph.D. candidate.
• [2024-05] Our paper “DeepSketch” got accepted to the VLDB 24 conference, see you at Guangzhou this Aug!
• [2022-10] I am invited to attend 19th International Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems HPTS 2022.
• [2022-01] Our paper “TrojanZoo” got accepted at Euro S&P 2022!
• [2021-04] I will be joining Northwestern Computer Science department as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2021!
• [2021-03] Our paper “Trojanning Language Models for Fun and Profit” got accepted at Euro S&P 2021!

Publications:

In Submission: “DeepSketch: A Query Sketching Tool for Discovering Temporal Relationships in Large Time Series Datasets“. Zheng Zhang, Runzhe Jiang, Andrew Crotty

VLDB 24’ Demo: “DeepSketch: A Query Sketching Interface for Deep Time Series Similarity Search“. Zheng Zhang, Joey Shao, Andrew Crotty

IEEE EuroS&P 22’: “TrojanZoo: Towards Unified, Holistic, and Practical Evaluation of Neural Backdoors“. Ren Pang, Zheng Zhang, Xiangshan Gao, Zhaohan Xi, Shouling Ji, Peng Cheng, Xiaopu Luo and Ting Wang. Paper GitHub

IEEE EuroS&P 21’: “Trojaning Language Models for Fun and Profit“. Xinyang Zhang, Zheng Zhang, Shouling Ji, and Ting Wang. Paper Slide

Education:

Ph.D. in Computer Sciences

2021 - Present, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

B.S. in Statistics and Data Sciences

2016 - 2020, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Internship:

• 2025 Aug-Nov: Research Scientist Intern at Adobe Research

Teaching:

Northwestern:

• COMP_SCI 339 - Intro to Databases (Winter 23, 24, 25)
• COMP_SCI 497 - Advanced Database Systems (Spring 24, 25)

Penn State:

• CMPSC 410 - Programming Models for Big Data (Fall 19,20)
• CMPSC 442 - Artificial Intelligence (Spring 20)

Personal:

During my free time, I ride (motorcycle), draw (mostly sketches), and photoshoot. If you’re interested, you can find my previous drawings and photographs.

Most recent update: Aug, 2025