I received my B.S and M.S. from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Princeton University. I have been with Rice University since September 2005. I was a visiting researcher with Microsoft Research for the summer of 2011 and March to December 2012. At Rice, I lead the Efficient Computing Group to make computing, communication, and interfacing more efficient and effective. Our recent research focus has been on mobile & embedded systems. I am a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and of the best paper awards from ACM MobileHCI 2007, IEEE PerCom 2009, ACM MobiSys 2011, 2013 and 2014, and ACM ASPLOS 2014. I was a PC co-chair for MobiSys 2012, IPSN 2014, APSys 2016, and PC chair for HotMobile 2019. In 2014, I received the Duncan Award from Rice University and the Rockstar Award from ACM SIGMOBILE. I am a Fellow of IEEE.

I am an experimental computer scientist and I build systems as a way to validate research hypotheses. I care about how computing and information technologies can serve people untethered, or Mobile Computing. In this space, my students and I have built mobile operating systems, mixed-signal sensors, world's first massive MIMO base stations, as well as novel ways for mobile systems to collaborate and the first publicly reported longitudinal study of smartphone users in the field. Lately I am interested in pushing the limits of software systems by embracing analog hardware, formal methods, and new systems programming languages. We are building a new operating system with baremetal efficiency and runtime composability for edge servers and embedded systems alike.

If you are interested in using our Argos massive MIMO systems, they are commericially available from Skylark Wireless, a starup co-founded by my former Ph.D. student Clay Shepard. They will also be available soon as part of the NSF-funded Platform for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program.

Full CV

I will join Yale Computer Science in January 2020. If you enjoy buidling systems and find our recent work interesting, email me with your CV for opportunities.

Recent Talks

• Time to retire Linux (and C) (Keynote at IEEE IoTDI. Theseus OS.)
• Taming the mess at the hardware/software boundary (invited talks at USC, UCLA and Chicago)
• Toward continuous mobile vision (Invited talks at Dartmouth and Univ. of Washington)
• Many-antenna base stations are interesting systems (Keynote at All Things Cellular, August 2014)(Slides for the panel discussion)
• Sources of inspiration in mobile computing (for the SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award received at MobiSys 2014).

Selected Recent Publications (Full list)

• Ginseng: Keeping secrets in registers when you distrust the operating system (NDSS 2019) (PDF) ( Distinguished Paper Finalist)
• A characterization of state spill in modern operating systems (EuroSys 2017) (PDF)
• RedEye: Analog ConvNet image sensor architecture for continuous mobile vision (ISCA 2016) (PDF)
• Rio: a system solution for sharing I/O between mobile systems (MobiSys 2014) (PDF, received Best Paper Award)
• K2: a mobile operating system for heterogeneous coherence domains (ASPLOS 2014) (PDF, received Best Paper Award)
• Argos: practical base stations with many antennas (MobiCom 2012) (PDF)

Dangerous Opinions

• Tips about writing systems papers
• Finding your advisor at Rice
• The sciences of system building (it is art too)
• The Prophet Dilemma: a Challenge to Induction