Shungeng Zhang

To prospective students: I'm always looking for students who have a solid background in computer systems and share my research interests. If you are interested, please e-mail me with your CV and transcripts.

About Me

I am an assistant professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer and Cyber Sciences at Augusta University. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Louisiana State University in 2021. Before that, I received my B.E. degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2014.

Research Interests

My research spans two complementary areas: (1) distributed systems and cloud computing, with a focus on performance and scalability measurement for large-scale web applications and IoT stream processing; and (2) adversarial robustness and trustworthy AI, with an emphasis on defenses against adversarial attacks, neural network benchmarking and verification, and applications in medical imaging and cybersecurity.

A central theme of my systems research is understanding and mitigating transient bottlenecks in cloud-based, web-facing applications. These bottlenecks, even those lasting as briefly as 50 milliseconds, can cause significant performance degradation through propagation and amplification effects along the complex dependency chains that characterize modern distributed systems. My approach leverages fine-grained monitoring data and sophisticated timeline analysis to detect these short-lived events and correlate them with key system performance metrics such as throughput and load. By identifying and eliminating the root causes of transient bottlenecks, my work enables improved scalability, elasticity, and tail-latency performance for web applications deployed in the cloud.

Publications

Conference Papers ( * students under my supervision )

• Jing Zou*, Shungeng Zhang, Meikang Qiu. "HAD: Hybrid Adversarial Distillation Against Adversarial Attacks", in the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2026), Barcelona, Spain, May 4–8, 2026.
• Jing Zou*, Shungeng Zhang, Meikang Qiu. "DARD: Dice Adversarial Robustness Distillation Against Adversarial Attacks", in the 21st EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2025), Xiangtan, China, July 4–6, 2025. (Best Student Paper)
• Jing Zou*, Shungeng Zhang, Meikang Qiu. "Different Attack and Defense Types for AI Cybersecurity", in the 17th International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM 2024), Birmingham, UK, August 16–18, 2024.
• Jing Zou*, Shungeng Zhang, Meikang Qiu. "Adversarial Attacks on Large Language Models", in the 17th International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM 2024), Birmingham, UK, August 16–18, 2024.
• Jianshu Liu, Shungeng Zhang, Qingyang Wang. "μConAdapter: Reinforcement Learning-based Fast Concurrency Adaptation for Microservices in Cloud", in the Proceedings of the 14th edition of the annual ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC 2023), Santa Cruz, CA, USA, October 30–November 1, 2023.
• Jianshu Liu, Qingyang Wang, Shungeng Zhang, Liting Hu, Dilma Da Silva. "Sora: A Latency Sensitive Approach for Microservice Soft Resource Adaptation", in the Proceedings of the 24th ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2023), Bologna, Italy, December 11, 2023.
• Shungeng Zhang, Qingyang Wang, Yasuhiko Kanemasa, Julius Michaelis, Jianshu Liu, and Calton Pu. "ShadowSync: Latency Long Tail caused by Hidden Synchronization in Real-time LSM-tree based Stream Processing Systems." In 23rd ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware'22), November 7-11, 2022, Quebec, QC, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3528535.3565251.
• Calton Pu, Qingyang Wang, Yasuhiko Kanemasa, Rodrigo Alves Lima, Joshua Kimball, Shungeng Zhang, Jianshu Liu, Xuhang Gu. "A Functional Model and Analysis of Next Generation Malware Attacks and Defenses", in the Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications (TPS-ISA 2021), Atlanta, USA, December 13–15, 2021.
• Shungeng Zhang, Qingyang Wang, Yasuhiko Kanemasa, Jianshu Liu, and Calton Pu, "DoubleFaceAD: A New Datastore Driver Architecture to Optimize Fanout Query Performance.", in the 21st ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware'20), Delft, Netherlands, December 2020.
• Jianshu Liu, Shungeng Zhang, Qingyang Wang, and Jinpeng Wei, "Mitigating Large Response Time Fluctuations through Fast Concurrency Adapting in the Cloud.", in the 34th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'20), New Orleans, LA, USA, May 2020.
• Shungeng Zhang, Huasong Shan, Qingyang Wang, Jianshu Liu, Qiben Yan, and Jinpeng Wei, "Tail Amplification in n-Tier Systems: A Study of Transient Cross-Resource Contention Attacks", in the 39th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'19), Dallas, Texas, July 2019.
• Shungeng Zhang, Qingyang Wang, and Yasuhiko Kanemasa, "Improving Asynchronous Invocation Performance in Client-server Systems", in the 38th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'18), Vienna, Austria, July 2018. (Acceptance rate < 20%)
• Qingyang Wang, Chien-An Lai, Yasuhiko Kanemasa, Shungeng Zhang, and Calton Pu, "A Study of Long-Tail Latency in n-Tier Systems: RPC vs. Asynchronous Invocations", in the 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'17), Atlanta, GA, June 2017. (Acceptance rate: 90/531=16.9%)

Journal Articles ( * students under my supervision )

• Jianshu Liu, Shungeng Zhang, Qingyang Wang, and Jingpeng Wei, "Coordinating Fast Concurrency Adapting with Autoscaling for SLO-Oriented Web Applications.", in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE TPDS), 2022.
• Shungeng Zhang, Qingyang Wang, Yasuhiko Kanemasa, Huasong Shan, and Liting Hu, "The Impact of Event Processing Flow on Asynchronous Server Efficiency", in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE TPDS), vol.31, issue 3 (September 2019), 15 pages.
• Qingyang Wang^§, Shungeng Zhang^§, Yasuhiko Kanemasa, Calton Pu, Balaji Palanisamy, Lilian Harada, and Motoyuki Kawaba, "Optimizing N-Tier Application Scalability in the Cloud: A Study of Soft Resource Allocation", in the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems (ACM TOMPECS) (^§ Equal contribution), vol. 4, issue 2, Article 10 (June 2019), 27 pages.
• Qingyang Wang, Shungeng Zhang, Yasuhiko Kanemasa, Calton Pu, "Mitigating Tail Response Time of n-Tier Applications: The Impact of Asynchronous Invocations", in ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (ACM TOIT), vol. 19, no. 3, Article 36 (July 2019), 25 pages.
• Qingyang Wang, Hui Chen, Shungeng Zhang, Liting Hu, and Balaji Palanisamy, "Integrating Concurrency Control in n-Tier Application Scaling Management in the Cloud", in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE TPDS), vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 855-869, April 1 2019.

Workshops ( * students under my supervision )

• Jing Zou* presented a poster titled "DARD: Dice Adversarial Robustness Distillation Against Adversarial Attacks" at the Artificial Intelligence in Research and Education (AIRE) Workshop on November 21, 2025.
• Prajwal Basnet* presented a poster titled "FlushSync: Hardware Resource Stalling caused by Asynchronous Services in LSM-tree based Stateful Streaming Processing Engine" at the Cyber-Physical Systems Innovation Symposium 2025 on September 05, 2025.

Grants and Fellowships

• CRII: CNS: An Experimental Infrastructure to Reduce Latency Long-tail in Real-time Stream Processing
  PI: Shungeng Zhang | Years: 2023–2027 | Funding: National Science Foundation | Amount: $175K
• NSF Engines Development Award: Advancing cybersecurity technologies in the Central Savannah River Area (GA, SC)
  Senior Personnel: Shungeng Zhang | Years: 2023–2026 | Funding: National Science Foundation | Amount: $999K

Current PhD Students

• Prajwal Basnet
• Jing Zou

Teaching

• AIST 3310: Advanced Networking (Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025, Fall 2025)
• CENG 2001: Introduction to Cybersecurity Engineering (Spring 2023)
• AIST 4720: Enterprise System Architectures (Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2026)
• CSCI 1200: Introduction to Computers and Programming (Fall 2021)

Experiences

• Sep. 2021 – Present, Assistant Professor at Augusta University
• Aug. 2015 - Aug. 2021, Research Assistant at Louisiana State University, supervised by Prof. Qingyang Wang
• Jun. 2019 - Aug. 2019, Research Intern at FUJITSU LABORATORIES LTD. (Japan), supervised by Dr. Yasuhiko Kanemasa
• Jun. 2014 - Jan. 2015, Research Assistant at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, supervised by Prof. Gang Shen
• Jun. 2013 - Sep. 2014, Research Assistant at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, supervised by Prof. Wenyu Liu

Professional Activities

Program Committee Member

• European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) (2026)
• ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) (2022–2026)
• International Conference on Smart Computing and Communication (SmartCom) (2023)

Journal Reviews

• ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT)
• The Journal of Supercomputing
• Data & Knowledge Engineering
• Future Generation Computer Systems
• IEEE Internet of Things Journal
• IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
• Journal of Systems Architecture

Other Activities

• Grant Panelist: NSF 2025
• Workshop Organization: Artificial Intelligence in Research and Education (AIRE) Workshop (2025)