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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, especially on the resource allocation, scheduling, and security for time-sensitive systems. I worked and have been working on projects related to

• Security and reliability for large scale safety-critical systems against Byzantine attacks with worst-case timing guarantees.
• Confidentiality, integrity, and freshness of data for fine-grained accesses in heterogeneous memory systems.
• Investigation of potential privacy vulnerabilities in embedded systems task scheduling mechanisms.
• Analysis for various long-term average properties (e.g., deadline misses) of tasks in a system with shared resources.

I worked as an 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) at Alibaba Cloud with Dr. Wenchao Zhou, Dr. Sheng Wang, and Dr. Sha Mo on the security aspects of cloud computing.

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; and with Prof. Jianping He at SJTU on consensus protocols in distributed systems.