CSE alum Fan Lai receives dissertation recognition at SOSP 2024

CSE alum Fan Lai (PhD 2023) has been recognized with a Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention at the 2024 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). Given by the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS), the Ritchie Award recognizes exceptional doctoral research in the field of software systems.

Lai’s dissertation, titled “Minimalist Systems for Pervasive Machine Learning,” leverages minimalist approaches to reduce the resource demands of machine learning. His research demonstrates that building a minimalist software stack that integrates artificial intelligence, systems, and networking can successfully minimize the amount of resources machine learning requires by: 1) reducing the amount of system execution required without sacrificing accuracy; and 2) reducing data collection by offloading demands to a larger, planet-scale data source.

Lai has earned numerous recognitions for his doctoral research on this topic. He was the 2023 recipient of the CSE David J. Kuck Dissertation Prize, as well as receiving the Michigan Engineering Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Prize for Outstanding PhD Research. He was also named a Machine Learning and Systems Rising Star by MLCommons in 2023 in recognition of his outstanding research and potential in the field. Lai is now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he continues to build systems for efficient machine learning and data analytics.