Welcome to Feng Yan's Homepage

Dr. Feng Yan is a (tenured) Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department and Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of Houston and the director of the Intelligent Data and Systems Lab (IDS Lab). Before that, Dr. Yan was a (tenured) Associate Professor at University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. Yan is the recipient of the Regents' Rising Researcher Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the NSF CRII Award, the Outstanding Service Award of IEEE ACSOS, and the CSE Best Researcher Award. Dr. Yan and his students are the recipients of the Best Student Paper Award of IEEE CLOUD 2018, the Best Paper Award of CLOUD 2019, and the Best Student Paper Award of ITNG 2021. He earned M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science of William & Mary, where he worked with Evgenia Smirni and Alma Riska from EMC. He also worked at Microsoft Research with Yuxiong He, Olatunji Ruwase, and Trishul Chilimbi and HP Labs with Lucy Cherkasova.

Dr. Yan's research bridges Big Data, Machine Learning, and System areas. He also conducts interdisciplinary research and has been using Big Data and Machine Learning to innovate domain science and engineering.
Some of his recently focused research topics include: Large Language Models (LLM), Large-scale Distributed Deep Learning, Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS), AutoML/Neural Architecture Search (NAS), Serverless Computing, Federated Learning, Big Data/AI-driven Wildfire/Material/Pavement.

Dr. Yan and his team are actively publishing at the most prestigious venues in Machine Learning (e.g., NIPS, ICLR, KDD, AAAI, WWW, etc.) and Computer Systems (e.g., SOSP, SC, HPDC, VLDB, USENIX ATC, EuroSys, FAST, HPCA, etc.). Dr. Yan and his team are actively collaborating with industry and national labs to solve important yet challenging problems to generate real-world impact.

UH is a Carnegie R1 (highest research activity) institution and among the top doctoral research universities in the US. According to CSRankings, UH is ranked at 78 overall in Computer Science. According to Shanghai Ranking, UH is ranked at 63-85 overall in US and 201-300 World-wide.

PhD Openings: I am always looking for self-motivated students to join my team. If you are interested, please send me your CV and materials that you believe will help you get the position (e.g., Research Statement, Personal Statement, Publication, Transcripts, Awards, etc.).
• For Fall enrollment, contact me by May. For Spring enrollment, contact me by Oct.
• Due to the large volume of application emails, I may not be able to respond every email. I usually review them in a batch and will contact you if I decide to move forward with you to the next stage.
• If you want a prioritized consideration and my email response, you can pick one (or a few) paper(s) from my recent publications and write a paper review (summary, your thoughts of the paper, especially weakness, what can be improved, potential follow up directions, etc.).

Please follow ACM SIGMETRICS X, LinkedIn, and YouTube Channel (for any social media questions regarding ACM SIGMETRICS, contact me at fyan5 at uh.edu).

If you are interested in sponsoring ACM SIGMETRICS, please contact me at fyan5 at uh.edu.

Selected Awards and Grants

    • NSF EPSCoR Award ($20M in total)
    • Regents' Rising Researcher Award, 2022
    • Outstanding Service Award of IEEE ACSOS, 2022
    • NSF CAREER Award (Sole PI)
    • CSE Best Researcher Award, 2020
    • NSF BIGDATA Award (Lead PI)
    • NSF CRII Award (Sole PI)
    • NSF National AI Research Institutes (planning) Award (UNR PI)
    • NSF REU Award (Co-PI)
    • FAA BAKFAA Award (Co-PI)
    • AWS Cloud Credits for Research Award (Sole PI)
    • Best Student Paper Award, IEEE CLOUD 2018
    • Best Paper Award, CLOUD 2019
    • Best Student Paper Award, ITNG 2021

Publications



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