I welcome equiries from highly motivated, committed and bright students wishing to do a PhD in the multidiciplinary area of applying advanced natural language process and machine learning techniques to requirements engineering and software engineering tasks.

My expertise and research lies within the areas of Software Engineering (SE) and Requirements Engineering (RE), with intersection to Conceptual Modelling, Software Design Patterns, Service-Oriented Computing, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL). I obtained a PhD and MPhil in Computer Science from the University of Leeds.

I was among the first researchers internationally who pioneered the development of patterns for software design. For more than a decade, I conducted research in the fundamental principles of software design patterns and developed a theory of pattern-based software design, published in my book “Toward a General Formal Foundation of Design: Symmetry and Broken Symmetry”. A longstanding researcher in software patterns, I was a founding member of the Asian Pacific Conference series on Pattern Languages of Programs and a program co-chair for the first of this conference, held in 2000. I was a leader of the UK’s first multidisciplinary academic network on service science from 2007 to 2010 (funded by EPSRC) (http://www.ssmenetuk.org/). 

• IBM Faculty Awards (2004, 2005, and 2008) for my contributions to software patterns and service science.
• Best Tool Demo Award at 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, for "TRAM: A Tool for Transforming Textual Requirements into Analysis Models."  K. Letsholo, L. Zhao and E.-V. Chioasca. 

I have been an editor and an editorial board member for the following international journals:

• Associate Editor of Springer Requirements Engineering (the flagship journal in Requirements Engineering) (2019 – present).
• Associate Editor of Wiley Expert Systems (2010 – present).
• Editorial Board Member of Springer Requirements Engineering (2008 - 2019).
• Editorial Board Member of IGI Global International Journal of Big Data Intelligence and Applications (2019 - present).
• Guest Editor for a special issue on Advances and Applications of Problem Orientation. Expert Systems, Wiley.
• Guest Editor for a special issue on Knowledge Intensive Service Systems. International Journal of Services Technology and Management, Inderscience.

• Requirements Engineering
• Software Design Patterns
• Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering
• Machine Learning/Deep Learning for Requirements Engineering

1. M. Ajagbe and L. Zhao, Supplementary material of ”Retraining a bert model for transfer learning in requirements engineering: A preliminary study”, March 2022. [Online]. Available: https://zenodo.org/record/6354280
2. M. Binkhonain and L. Zhao. Supplementary material of "multiclass classification of software requirements with imbalanced, high dimensional and low sample size data", January 2022. [Online]. Available: https://zenodo.org/record/5886111/#.Yht4pC8Rq8X
3. W. Alhoshan, R. Batista-Navarro and L. Zhao. FN-RE: A Corpus of Requirements Documents Enriched with Semantic Frame Annotations. June 2018. [online]. Available: https://zenodo.org/record/1291660