About Me

Welcome to my personal website! My name is Hao He (何昊, the “He” is pronounced like “Her” without “r”). I am currently a Ph.D. student in Software Engineering at Carniegie Mellon University, advised by Bogdan Vasilescu and Christian Kästner. In the past, I am fortunate to have worked with Minghui Zhou at Peking University.

I build end-to-end data systems and apply causal inference methods to measure the real-world impact of GenAI on software development in both open-source ecosystems and enterprise organizations. My work spans the full stack from data infrastructure to ML systems to LLM applications, with award-winning publications, deployment in production, and coverage by the New York Times. See the publication list below for details.

Selected Publications

[MSR'26] Speed at the Cost of Quality: How Cursor AI Increases Short-Term Velocity and Long-Term Complexity in Open-Source Projects

Hao He, Courtney Miller, Shyam Agarwal, Christian Kästner, and Bogdan Vasilescu
In: The 2026 23rd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories
[DOI] [PDF] [Code] 🏆Distinguished Paper Award!

[ICSE'26] Six Million (Suspected) Fake Stars in GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Spams, and Malware

Hao He, Haoqin Yang, Philipp Burckhardt, Alexandros Kapravelos, Bogdan Vasilescu, Christian Kästner
In: The 2026 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
[DOI] [PDF] [Code]

[ICSE'26] Designing Abandabot: When Does Open Source Dependency Abandonment Matter?

*Courtney Miller, *Hao He, Weigen Chen, Elizabeth Lin, Chenyang Yang, Bogdan Vasilescu, Christian Kästner
In: The 2026 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
[DOI] [PDF] [Code] *Joint First Authors

[FSE'25] Pinning Is Futile: You Need More Than Local Dependency Versioning to Defend Against Supply Chain Attacks

Hao He, Bogdan Vasilescu, Christian Kästner
In: The 2025 ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering
[DOI] [BibTeX] [PDF] [Code] 🏆Distinguished Paper Award!

[ASE'23] Understanding and Remediating Open-Source License Incompatibilities in the PyPI Ecosystem

*Weiwei Xu, *Hao He, Kai Gao, and Minghui Zhou
In: The 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
[DOI] [BibTeX] [PDF] [Code] *Joint First Authors

[TSE] Automating Dependency Updates in Practice: An Exploratory Study on GitHub Dependabot

*Runzhi He, *Hao He, Yuxia Zhang, and Minghui Zhou
In: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
[DOI] [BibTeX] [PDF] [Code] *Joint First Authors

[ICSE'22] Recommending Good First Issues in GitHub OSS Projects

*Wenxin Xiao, *Hao He, Weiwei Xu, Xin Tan, Jinhao Dong, and Minghui Zhou
In: The 2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering
[DOI] [BibTeX] [PDF] [Code] *Joint First Authors

[ICPC'22] Demystifying Software Release Note Issues on GitHub

Jianyu Wu, Hao He, Wenxin Xiao, Kai Gao, and Minghui Zhou
In: The 2022 IEEE/ACM 30th International Conference on Program Comprehension
[DOI] [BibTeX] [PDF] [Code] 🏆Distinguished Paper Award!

[ESEC/FSE'21] A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Java Library Migrations: Prevalence, Trends, and Rationales

Hao He, Runzhi He, Haiqiao Gu, and Minghui Zhou
In: The 2021 ACM 29th Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
[DOI] [BibTeX] [PDF] [Code]

See here or my Google Scholar or DBLP for a full list.