Timeline

     2017
(Feb. – May) 

Microsoft AI School, Redmond, WA, USA
Attended the inaugural Advanced AI School, which was designed for an elite set of full-time Microsoft employees and was led by Deep Learning Technology Center (DLTC) researchers. 1148 employees submitted proposals, and only 40 candidates were selected. After graduating from the AI school, I gradually shifted research interest from PL to system for AI and AI for system problems.

     2016
(Oct.) – present

Microsoft Research — Technology, Redmond, WA, USA
After graduation from OSU, I joined Microsoft Research at Redmond as a Senior Research Software Development Engineer in 2016, working with Yuxiong He on performance analysis and optimization in machine learning and deep learning systems.  This was my first job in an industrial research lab.

 2016 (April)

Passed my Ph.D. dissertation defense.
Committee: P. (Saday) SadayappanAtanas (Nasko) RountevRadu Teodorescu
Major: Concurrency
Minors: High Performance Computing and Distributed Software System

Dissertation:
Efficient Runtime Support for Reliable and Scalable Parallelism, Ph. D. Dissertation, August 2016.[external]

After my PhD defense, April 27 2016, in front of DreeseLab, Columbus, OH, USA (from left to right: Man Cao, Aritra Sengupta, me, Mike Bond, Rui Zhang)

     2016
(May-Aug.)

Microsoft Research Lab, Redmond, WA, USA
Research intern with Kathryn McKinleyYuxiong HeSameh Elnikety
Provided global snapshot transactions in SQL Data Warehouse.

Having dinner with internship mentors from Microsoft Research, at EL Gaucho, Bellevue Downtown, August 16 2016 (from left to right: me, Sameh Elnikety, Kathryn McKinley, Yuxiong He).

 2015 (Dec.)

Obtained M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Ohio State University

     2015
(Aug-Nov.)

Microsoft Research Lab, Redmond, WA, USA
Research intern with Kathryn McKinleyYuxiong HeSameh Elnikety,Srikumar Rangarajan
Worked on supporting Clock-SI in Azure SQL.


Having an end-of-internship lunch with Azure SQL team, at BJ’S Restaurant & Brewhouse, Redmond town center, November 20 2015 (from left to right: Adrian-Leonard Radu, Srikumar Rangarajan, Sarvesh Singh, Joe Yong, Jared Moore, Nathan Fan, Apurva Sahasrabudhe, Alexy, me, Sumeet Dash, Michael Zwilling). Extra special thanks to Steve Lindell, Tengiz Kharatishvili, Tomas Talius, Mahesh Sreenivas, Sandeep Lingam, Eric Robinson, Waseem Basheer, Stuart Ozer, Torsten Grabs, Stuart Padley, Rakesh Veeramacheneni, Wayne Chen, Karl Deng, Fady Sedrak, Kabita Mahapatra, Jamie Reding, and Azure SQL team family! Your guidance and examples have been an inspiration to me as a professional and as a person.

     2015
(May-Aug.)

Microsoft Research Lab, Redmond, WA, USA
Research intern with Kathryn McKinleyYuxiong HeSameh Elnikety
I had the privilege of spending the summer of 2015 at Microsoft Research at Redmond as a research intern, working on read-scaling: leveraging resilience for performance.

     2010 (Sep.)
– 2016 (Aug.)

Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Michael D. Bond

Hardware is becoming more parallel, but writing concurrent programs to utilize parallel hardware is hard and error-prone. How to explore and build efficient runtime systems and runtime support to make complex, concurrent programs easier to program, more reliable, and more scalable? To achieve the best performance and scalability, I exploited optimizations opportunities in managed runtime: JIT compiler, garbage collector, adaptive system, static analysis, and dynamic analysis.

Awards:
“Ohio State University Fellowship Scholarship”,  2010, 2011,2013

Courses:

  • Computer Architecture(775), Advanced Architecture (6422)
  • Operating Systems (760), High-Performance Computing (621), Parallel Computing (721),Principle Locality in Design and Implementation of Computer and Distributed Systems (788.11)
  • Programming Languages (755), Compiler Design and Implementation (756), Dynamic Analysis of Software (5239), Parallelism in Modern Programming Language Implementations (5349)
  • Distributed Enterprise Computing (5234), Mobile App Development (5236)
  • Analysis of Algorithm (780), Computability and Unsolvability (725)

     2008 (July)
     – 2010 (Aug.)

SCTS & CGCL LabHuazhong University of Science and Technology
M.S. in Computer Architecture
Advisor: Hai Jin

Master’s Thesis:
A Study of Fault-Tolerance for Virtual Clusters with Coordinated Checkpointing”, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, June, 2010

With my master advisor Dr. Hai Jin at Marriott Waterfront (PPoPP’15), San Francisco, February 9th, 2015 (from left to right: me, Dr. Hai Jin, Dr. Guang R. Gao)

     2006 (Sep.)
     – 2007 (Jun.)

Center for Biomedical Imaging and Bioinformatics, HUST
Undergraduate Researcher
Mentors: Enmin Song, Renchao Jin
My first academic research experience as part of the “Teyiu” program (2%) at HUST. The human genome project constantly requires searching common segmentations of tens of thousands of genes. It is therefore important to find a fast algorithm to do common genome segmentation search. Proposed and implemented several substring algorithms (including Ukkonen’s suffix tree algorithm) to solve this problem, and proved that the genome classification problem could be solved in linear time complexity.

     2004 (Sep.)
     – 2008 (Jun.)

Huazhong University of Science and Technology
B.S. in Computer Science and Technology, GPA: 3.82
Ranked 6th out of the 500+ students in the department
Won the China National Scholarship, 8000¥ (<0.2% rate), 2008
Won merit-based scholarships consecutively for four years from 2004 to 2008
Won the 1st Prize in Chinese National Math Olympiad Competition, 2004