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About Me

I am Yifan Cai, a fourth-year Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Linh Thi Xuan Phan at the University of Pennsylvania. I got my bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2020. My research interest is in various aspects of systems, including performance, security, and reliability.

I am working as a research intern at Roblox research in the summer of 2024, on improving the scalability of gaming experiences.

In 2020 and 2023, I worked as an intern (twice) in the database and storage lab @ Alibaba Cloud with Dr. Wenchao Zhou, Dr. Sheng Wang, and Dr. Sha Mo. We focused on the security aspects of cloud computing.

Before that, I was a research intern at Penn advised by Prof. Vincent Liu in 2019. We worked on discovering the impact of resource disaggregation on database systems.

I worked with Prof. Xianglei Huang in the summer of 2018. We designed an implemented a system that could forecast solar energy based on historical data and other factors such as wind and cloud.

During my undergraduate, I worked with Prof. Jianping He on consensus protocols in distributed systems.