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
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Bio
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 or 
.
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 worked with my advisor -- Professor Christian Kästner and 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 7, 2026
Jiessie Tie's paper -- "Should I Give Up Now?" Investigating LLM Pitfalls in Software Engineering -- co-authored with Bingsheng Yao, Tianshi Li, Hongbo Fang, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Dakuo Wang has been accpeted to the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)!
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Jan 15, 2026
Felix Deng's two papers "Untangling the Timeline: Challenges and Opportunities in Supporting Version Control in Modern Computer-Aided Design" and "CADModelScope: Revealing the Dependency Structure Behind Parametric Computer-Aided Design Models" , co-authored with Sally Zhang, Shutong Zhang, Kathy Cheng, and Prof. Alison Olechowski. has been accpeted to the CHI 2026 !
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Dec 4, 2025
Our paper "The Shared Language of Crowds: A Crowd sourced Approach to Mapping Research Software Engineering and Software Engineering Research Terminology", co-authored with Prof. Timo Kehrer, Robert Haines, Dr. Guido Juckeland, and Dr. David E Bernholdt has been accpeted to the 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering and Research Software (SERS 2026)!
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Oct 16, 2025
Jiayi Sun's paper "Beyond Adoption: Examining the Evolution and Impact of Codes of Conduct on Open-Source Communities, co-authored with Dr. Hongbo Fang, Ruitao Lai, Junming Zhang, Jiakai Shi, Richard Littauer, and Anita Ihuman. has been accpeted to the 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)!
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Talks&Media&Actitivies
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."
Oct 4, 2024
I organized 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.
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]
