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About Me

I am Yifan Cai, a fifth-year Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Linh Thi Xuan Phan at the University of Pennsylvania. I got my bachelor’s degree from the School of Software at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2020.

My projects mainly focus on achieving safety (predictability in performance) and security in resource-constrained systems, including traditional distributed systems and real-time cyber-physical systems (CPS). My past and present projects include but are not limited to:

• Ensuring data confidentiality and integrity across heterogeneous memory tiers
• Byzantine fault-resilient cyber-physical systems, with theoretical worst-case guarantees
• Revealing and exploiting scheduling-based side channels in IoT/embedded platforms
• Analyzing performance (e.g., deadline violations) in complex systems

I am looking for postdoc opportunities. Feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in my work, or check out my CV and publications!

Experience

I worked as an intern at Roblox research in the summer of 2024, on improving the scalability of real-time gaming experiences.

In 2020 and 2023, I interned twice at Alibaba Cloud with Dr. Wenchao Zhou, Dr. Sheng Wang, and Dr. Sha Mo on the secure data access and processing in a memory-constrained environment.

During undergraduate, I worked as a research intern at Penn advised by Prof. Vincent Liu in 2019 on discovering the impact of resource disaggregation on database systems; with Prof. Xianglei Huang at UMich in the summer of 2018 on applying ML to solar energy forecasting; with Prof. Jianping He at SJTU on consensus protocols in distributed systems; and with Prof. Zhaoguo Wang at SJTU on my thesis on resource disaggregation.

Teaching and Services

• Teaching
  • Teaching assistant for CIS 505 Software Systems (2021 Fall, 2022 Fall)
• Journal Review
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS)
  • IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoTJ)