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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.

I am looking for postdoc opportunities starting Summer/Fall 2026.

My projects mainly focus on achieving safety (timely execution of critical tasks) 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 memory tiers (VeriDB and UEM)
• Byzantine fault-resilient cyber-physical systems (GeoShield)
• Scheduling-based side channels in IoT/embedded platforms (STAMP)
• Analyzing performance (e.g., deadline violations) in complex systems (LTA Analysis)

Here is an overview of my projects. 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 assistant, University of Pennsylvania
  • CIS 505 Software Systems, 2021 Fall
  • CIS 505 Software Systems, 2022 Fall
• Journal Review
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS)
  • IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoTJ)