AI PhD Researcher · Software Engineering

Linqiang (Jackson) Guo

AI-driven mobile automation · LLM agents · Multimodal VLM pipelines

Software Engineering PhD student at Concordia University, building LLM-based agents that reason about state, recover from failure, and understand user interfaces. Former backend engineer at Walmart Global Tech.

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Portrait of Linqiang Guo
01 — News

Latest News

  • Jun 2026

    New preprint Beyond the GUI Paradigm: Do Mobile Agents Need the Phone Screen? is now on arXiv (under review).

  • Dec 2025

    Our paper Agent SAMA: State Aware Mobile Assistant was accepted to AAAI 2026.

  • 2025

    MAPLE was accepted to the COLM 2025 Workshop.

  • 2025

    Guiwatcher was accepted to ICSE 2025.

  • Jan 2025

    Started as a Teaching Assistant at Concordia University.

  • Jan 2024

    Began my PhD and joined the SPEAR Lab in Montreal.

02 — About

Research at the intersection of AI and software systems.

My work focuses on intelligent mobile software systems — designing agents that combine large language models, vision-language pipelines, and finite-state reasoning to automate and test complex mobile applications, and to stay state-aware, robust, and recoverable when things go wrong.

Before my PhD I built and maintained microservices for customer personalization and recommendation at Walmart Global Tech, integrating GenAI into search and tuning Milvus on Kubernetes. I hold an MS in ECE (AI track) from the University of Miami and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Missouri.

  • 📍 Montreal, Canada
  • 🎓 PhD @ Concordia University
  • 🤖 LLM agents & mobile automation
  • ✉️ linqg327@gmail.com

Education

  1. 2024 — Present

    PhD, Software Engineering

    Concordia University · Montreal, CA

  2. 2020 — 2022

    MS, Electrical & Computer Engineering (AI track)

    University of Miami · Miami, US

  3. 2016 — 2019

    BS, Electrical Engineering

    University of Missouri Columbia · US

03 — Skills

Tools & Tech

💻

Languages

  • Python
  • C
  • Java
  • SQL
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • MATLAB
🧠

AI / ML Frameworks

  • LLM fine-tuning
  • Multimodal VLM
  • PyTorch
  • OpenCV
  • HuggingFace
  • Unsloth
⚙️

Backend & Platforms

  • Spring Boot
  • Spring Cloud
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS
  • MySQL
  • Linux
  • ADB
04 — Publications

Selected Papers

  • arXiv 2026

    Beyond the GUI Paradigm: Do Mobile Agents Need the Phone Screen?

    Li Gu, Zihuan Jiang, Linqiang Guo, Zhixiang Chi, Ziqiang Wang, Huan Liu, Yuanhao Yu, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Yang Wang

    Under Review

  • AAAI 2026

    Agent SAMA: State Aware Mobile Assistant

    Linqiang Guo, Wei Liu, Yi Wen Heng, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Yang Wang

  • ICSE 2025

    Guiwatcher: Automatically Detecting GUI Lags by Analyzing Mobile Application Screencasts

    Wei Liu, Fang Lin, Linqiang Guo, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Ahmed E. Hassan

  • COLM 2025 WS

    MAPLE: A Mobile Assistant with Persistent Finite State Machines for Recovery Reasoning

    Linqiang Guo, Wei Liu, Yi Wen Heng, Yiming Wang

  • CMIG

    Registration on DCE-MRI Images via Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation

    Naxin Cai, Houjin Chen, Yanfeng Li, Yahui Peng, Linqiang Guo

    Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics (IF 7.422)

  • Under Review

    Screencast-Based Analysis of User-Perceived GUI Responsiveness

    Wei Liu, Linqiang Guo, Yi Wen Heng, Cheng Li, Ahmed E. Hassan

  • Under Review

    PopSweeper: Automatically Detecting and Resolving App-Blocking Pop-Ups to Assist Automated Mobile GUI Testing

    Linqiang Guo, Wei Liu, Yi Wen Heng, Yiming Wang

05 — Experience

Where I've Worked

  1. Jan 2024 — Present

    Research Assistant · SPEAR Lab

    Software Performance, Engineering, Analysis & Reliability Lab · Montreal, Canada

    • Research intelligent mobile software systems with a focus on AI-driven automation and UI understanding.
    • Develop methods to improve agent reasoning, state awareness, and robustness in complex mobile environments.
    • Co-authored multiple papers at AAAI, ICSE, TOSEM, and COLM.
  2. Jan 2025 — Dec 2025

    Teaching Assistant · Concordia University

    Montreal, Canada

    • Assist teaching Software Engineering: software design, UML modeling, testing, project management.
    • Lead weekly tutorials and support students via office hours and online discussions.
    • Guide students through core SE concepts and GitHub-based project workflows.
  3. Sep 2022 — Nov 2023

    Backend Developer (Contract) · Walmart Global Tech

    California, USA

    • Built and maintained microservices for customer personalization, data ingestion, and recommendation using Java, Spring, and cloud tools.
    • Optimized performance of the Milvus vector database on Kubernetes.
    • Integrated GenAI workflows into search, improving query understanding and relevance ranking.
    • Deployed scalable API endpoints and streamlined CI/CD with data science and platform teams.
  4. Jan 2020 — Feb 2020

    Software Engineer Intern · CPECC Gulf Region

    Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    • Developed RESTful web services with Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Maven, and Hibernate.
    • Tested features with JUnit and Mockito; used Git/GitHub for version control and review.
06 — Off the Clock

Beyond Work

Pocky at the beach

Life with
Pocky

Coffee, long walks, and my dog Pocky — a look at the moments away from the keyboard.

Step inside ↗
07 — Contact

Let's Connect

Interested in collaborating on AI agents, mobile automation, or software-engineering research? I'd love to hear from you.

Email me ✉️
GitHub linqg327@gmail.com Résumé (PDF)