Welcome to Feng Yan's Homepage

I have moved to University of Houston from Fall 2022. This site is no longer maintained, please visit my new website at University of Houston.

I am Associate Professor at the Computer Science & Engineering Department of University of Nevada, Reno. I earned M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science of William & Mary, where I worked with Evgenia Smirni and Alma Riska from EMC. I also worked at Microsoft Research with Yuxiong He, Olatunji Ruwase, and Trishul Chilimbi and HP Labs with Lucy Cherkasova.

My research bridges Big Data, Machine Learning, and System areas. I also enjoy interdisciplinary research and have been using Big Data and Machine Learning to innovate domain science and engineering.
Some of my recently focused research topics include: 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.

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

UNR is a Carnegie R1 (highest research activity) institution and among the top doctoral research universities in the US. According to CSRankings, UNR is ranked at 101nd (the 74th in the last 2 years) overall in Computer Science. I am ranked the 1st in CSE in the number of papers published at top venues and leading UNR to rank at the 25th in High-performance computing (HPC) (the 12th in the last 5 years and the 7th in the last 2 years), the 49th in Operating systems (the 29th in the last 2 years), the 115th in Artificial intelligence (the 93th in the last 2 years), and the 125th in Machine learning & data mining (the 102th in the last 2 years).

Multiple PhD/MS/BS (with assistantship) 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 July. For Spring enrollment, contact me by Nov.
• For undergraduates, you can apply the UNR PREP and NSF REU Site for financial support.
• 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.).

Our NSF REU Site is hiring undergraduate students for Summer 2022, please apply via this link.

Please follow ACM SIGMETRICS Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube Channel (for any social media questions regarding ACM SIGMETRICS, contact me at fyan at unr.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