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. My research is concerned with both mobile network infrastructures and devices. Lately I am interested in pushing the limits of software systems by embracing analog hardware, formal methods, and new systems programming languages. I have also developed an interest in the control system of quantum computers, which is surprisingly similar to the massive MIMO systems we have worked on.

Biosketch, Full CV

☆Postdoc, graduate and undergraduate research opportunities available in a broad range of experimental topics. Many of the opportunities are collaborative with colleagues from the NSF AI Institute and Yale Quantum Institute.

Theseus, an operating system written in Rust to explore OS structure and state management, is open-source here.

Hopter, an embedded operating system also written in Rust as an alternative to FreeRTOS, is open-source here.

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 are also available as part of the POWDER testbed.

We have recently released a complete software realization of massive MIMO baseband here.

Ph.D. Alumni (and their first jobs)

• Kevin Boos (Founder of Theseus Systems): Ph.D., 2020 (Best Paper Award, MobiSys'14).
• Min Hong Yun (Google): Ph.D., 2018 (Best Paper Award, MobiSys'14; Distinguished Paper Finalist, NDSS'19).
• Clayton Shepard (CTO and Co-founder of Skylark Wireless): Ph.D., 2017 (ACM SigMobile Test of Time Award 2022).
• Robert LiKamWa (Assistant Professor, Arizona State EE & Media): Ph.D., 2016 (Best Paper Award, MobiSys'13).
• Ardalan Amiri Sani (Assistant Professor, UC Irvine CS): Ph.D., 2015 (Best Paper Award, MobiSys'14).
• Hang Yu (MobiSport): Ph.D., 2015.
• Felix Xiaozhu Lin (Assistant Professor, Purdue ECE): Ph.D., 2014 (Best Paper Award, ASPLOS'14).
• Mian Dong (Co-founder of MobiSport): Ph.D., 2013 (Best Paper Award, MobiSys'11).
• Ahmad Rahmati (Apple): Ph.D., 2012 (Best Paper Award, MobileHCI'07).
• Jun Yao (Assistant Professor, UMass-Amherst ECE): Ph.D., 2011.

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)

• Blindfold: Confidential memory management by untrusted operating system (NDSS 2025) (arXiv) (Distinguished Paper)
• Prompt Cache: Modular attention reuse for low-latency inference (MLSys 2024) (arXiv) (impact: Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI)
• Fusion Blossom: fast MWPM decoders for QEC (IEEE QCE 2023) (arXiv) (Best Paper, 1st Place, Quantum Systems Software)
• Theseus: an experiment in operating system structure and state management (OSDI 2020) (PDF)

Dangerous Opinions

• Tips about writing systems papers
• Finding your advisor at Rice (and Yale too)
• The sciences of system building (it is art too)
• The Prophet Dilemma: a Challenge to Induction
• A simple proof of better sufficient condition for fixed-priority scheduling feasibility