I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. My research interests lie in the broad area of applied probability, with a focus on decision-making in large stochastic systems. I have worked on problems in queueing systems, bandits, and reinforcement learning. Many of the problem formulations I have studied are motivated by resource orchestration in modern computing systems. I have also worked on large random graphs, with a focus on characterizing statistical limits and computational limits, and data privacy, especially at its intersection with information theory and game theory. My research is driven by a dual objective: to understand fundamental limits, and to design algorithms and approaches to achieve them.

Bio

I joined the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 2018 as an Assistant Professor. Previously, I was a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Arizona State University, working with Prof. R. Srikant and Prof. Lei Ying. I received my Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Arizona State University in 2016, advised by Prof. Lei Ying and Prof. Junshan Zhang. I received my Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University in 2009. My dissertation received the Dean’s Dissertation Award in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University in 2016 (news article). I received the Kenneth C. Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award at ACM SIGMETRICS 2016, the Best Paper Award at ACM MobiHoc 2022, an NSF CAREER Award in 2022, and the ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Research Award in 2023.

Recent news

[Oct 2023] Honored to be elected to join the INFORMS Applied Probability Society (APS) council! Looking forward to organize the APS cluster at INFORMS 2024!

[Sep 2023] Our paper “Restless Bandits with Average Reward: Breaking the Uniform Global Attractor Assumption” led by Yige Hong is accepted as a spotlight at NeurIPS 2023.

[Jun 2023] Honored to receive the ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Research Award!

[Oct 2022] Our paper “Tackling heterogeneous traffic in multi-access systems via erasure coded servers” led by Tuhinangshu Choudhury receives the Best Paper Award at ACM MobiHoc 2022.

[Aug 2022] Excited to spend the fall participating in the Data-Driven Decision Processes program at the Simons Institute!

[Jun 2022] Excited to be invited to give a talk “Sharp waiting-time bounds for multiserver jobs” at the Stochastic Networks Conference 2022!