About

drawing

Google Scholar, CV


👋 Hi! I’m a 1st 2nd 3nd 4th 5th 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:

  • 2026-06 · internship I’ll be joining Adobe Research as intern this summer in San Jose!
  • 2026-03 · milestone Passed my thesis prospectus!
  • 2026-02 · accepted Our paper “DeepSketch 2.0: Discovering Temporal Relationships in Large Time Series Datasets” got accepted to the “ICDE 26” conference, see you in Montréal, Canada this Spring!
  • 2025-08 · internship Joined Adobe Research as Research Scientist Intern.
  • 2025-05 · conference DeepSketch poster presented at GCASR 2025.
  • 2024-12 · talk Organized the Northwestern Database seminar talk.
  • 2024-08 · milestone Passed my qualifying exam, I’m officially a Ph.D. candidate.
  • 2024-05 · accepted Our paper “DeepSketch” got accepted to the VLDB 24 conference, see you at Guangzhou this Aug!
  • 2022-10 · conference I am invited to attend 19th International Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems HPTS 2022.
  • 2022-01 · accepted Our paper “TrojanZoo” got accepted at Euro S&P 2022!
  • 2021-04 · milestone I will be joining Northwestern Computer Science department as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2021!
  • 2021-03 · accepted Our paper “Trojanning Language Models for Fun and Profit” got accepted at Euro S&P 2021!

Publications:

ICDE ‘26: DeepSketch: A Query Sketching Tool for Discovering Temporal Relationships in Large Time Series Datasets. Zheng Zhang, Runzhe Jiang, Andrew Crotty

VLDB ‘24: 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:

Teaching:

Northwestern:

  • COMP_SCI 339 - Intro to Databases (Winter 23, 24, 25)
  • COMP_SCI 497 - Advanced Database Systems (Spring 24, 25; Winter 26)

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