Jiayi Sun | University of Toronto

I am a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, supervised by Prof. Shurui Zhou in forcolab and the programming languages and software engineering group (PROSE).

My research focuses on LLMs and AI coding agents for scientific software and open-source software. I am interested in how agents can write scientifically correct code that reflects developers’ intentions and scientific assumptions, and how they can learn from failures. My broader interests include human-computer interaction (HCI) and applying causal inference to understand how AI tools affect developer productivity and software sustainability.

My research is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and NumFOCUS .

You can reach me at jiayi.sun.mail@gmail.com.

News

Nov 10, 2026	Happy to share that I received the Percy Edward Hart Award this year!
Oct 16, 2026	Prof. Shurui Zhou and I joined Richard Littauer on SustainOSS for a chat about our paper, Beyond Adoption: Examining the Evolution and Impact of Codes of Conduct on Open Source Communities, and what codes of conduct mean for open-source communities.
Apr 15, 2026	I was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to present our paper, Beyond Adoption: Examining the Evolution and Impact of Codes of Conduct on Open Source Communities, at ICSE 2026 (Research Track). Paper · Slides

Service

Reviewer: CHI 2026, CSCW 2025.
Sub-reviewer: ICSE 2023, FSE 2024, FSE 2026.

Selected Publications

Beyond Adoption: Examining the Evolution and Impact of Codes of Conduct on Open Source Communities

Jiayi Sun, Hongbo Fang, Junming Zhang, Jiakai Shi, Ruitao Lai, Anita Ihuman, Richard Littauer, and Shurui Zhou

In 2026 IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2026

DOI Bib PDF Slides

@inproceedings{sun2026beyond,
  title = {Beyond Adoption: Examining the Evolution and Impact of Codes of Conduct on Open Source Communities},
  author = {Sun, Jiayi and Fang, Hongbo and Zhang, Junming and Shi, Jiakai and Lai, Ruitao and Ihuman, Anita and Littauer, Richard and Zhou, Shurui},
  booktitle = {2026 IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1145/3744916.3773268},
}

Collaboration Challenges and Opportunities in Developing Scientific Open-Source Software Ecosystem: A Case Study on Astropy

Jiayi Sun, Aarya Patil, Youhai Li, Jin L. C. Guo, and Shurui Zhou

The 28th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), 2025

Bib PDF

@article{sun2025collaboration,
  title = {Collaboration Challenges and Opportunities in Developing Scientific Open-Source Software Ecosystem: A Case Study on Astropy},
  author = {Sun, Jiayi and Patil, Aarya and Li, Youhai and Guo, Jin L. C. and Zhou, Shurui},
  journal = {The 28th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)},
  year = {2025},
}

Awards

Percy Edward Hart Award — 2026.
ACM SIGSOFT CAPS Travel Grant — ACM SIGSOFT CAPS, 2026.
Mitacs Accelerate Award — Mitacs, 2025–26.