A picture of Ding Yuan

Ding Yuan

Professor, Canada Research Chair in Systems Software
Computer Engineering Group Chair
Sandford Fleming 2002E
10 King's College Road
Toronto, ON M5S 3G4 Canada
yuan at eecg dot toronto dot edu

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About me

I am a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Toronto, where I also serve as Chair of the Computer Engineering Group. My research focuses on systems software, with an emphasis on developing practical solutions to improve the availability and performance of large-scale software systems.

I hold the Canada Research Chair in Systems Software and am a recipient of McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction. I have served as Program Co-chair of SOSP, HotOS, APSys, and the inaugural Student Research Competition at SOSP. I currently serve as the Vice-Chair of ACM SIGOPS. I also received a few teaching awards, including the Gordon Slemon award and Student Choice Award (upper year instructor) of Faculty of Engineering.

I founded a startup company called YScope with my PhD students to bring our research into practice. Check out CLP, an open-source tool that can compress text and JSON logs and search compressed logs without decompression. This Uber Engineering Blog describes a deployment case-study of CLP.

I received my Ph.D from the Computer Science Department of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of a great advisor, Yuanyuan Zhou. I was also a visiting PhD student in the awesome System and Networking group of University of California, San Diego. My CV is here.

I am always looking for self motivated students to work with me. If you are interested, please submit your application here.

News

  • 2024/6: Jenny (Xiang) Ren will join the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University as assistant professor in Fall 2025. Congrats Jenny!
  • 2022/10: Yongle's PhD dissertation won The SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Thesis Award. Congrats Yongle!
  • 2022/9: CLP is deployed on Uber's big data platform. In 2021, Uber's growth eclipsed the capability of their existing log management tools, forcing them to start dropping Petabytes of INFO-level Spark logs due to scalability issues (e.g., capacity, SSD burn-out). We integrated CLP into their logging library (Log4j) on Uber's big data platform, achieving a 169x compression ratio. Now, all logs are retained, and efficiently analyzed, at 169x less cost. Check out Uber's Engineering Blog for more details. (Also checkout the Hacker News discussion.)
  • 2022/9: Received Meta 2022 Systems Research Award for CLP. Thanks Meta!
  • 2022/7: HBASE-12187 and all its subtasks have been closed and implemented. HBase developers opened HBASE-12187 to address the issues we found in our OSDI'14 paper. It consists of 9 subtasks, including integrating Aspirator checks (the tool from our paper) as a check-in policy, use other static checkers including Coverity, thorough code review, etc.
  • 2022/7: Our ATC'22 paper on runtime performance is invited to publish in USENIX ;login:.
  • 2022/2: Our ctFS paper is invited to publish in USENIX ;login: and ACM TOS by FAST'22 PC.
  • 2021/8: YScope, our startup to work on our open-source log compression and search technology, is launched.
  • 2020/5: Yongle Zhang will join Purdue as an assistant professor! Congrats Yongle!!
  • 2020/5: Aspirator is now part of Google's error-prone static checker. See the pull request.
  • 2019/10: Xu Zhao will join Facebook! Congrats Xu!!
  • 2018/1: Xu Zhao won Facebook Fellowship! Congrats Xu!
  • [Publication] 2017/3: Our JVM warm-up paper appears in Usenix ;login:
  • [Impact] 2016/10: Our JVM warm-up paper is covered by The Next Platform.
  • [Impact] 2016/8: Caitie McCaffrey gave an amazing presentation on our Simple Testing paper in Papers We Love@QCon New York.
  • [Job] 2015/4: Yongle will intern in Microsoft Research Redmond this summer.
  • [Publication] 2015/2: Our OSDI paper on failure analysis appears in usenix ;login:
  • [Impact] 2014/10: HBase developers will use aspirator, a simple bug finding tool described in our OSDI paper, as their compile-time checker!
  • [Impact] 2014/10: Our OSDI paper on distributed system failures prompted many online discussions:
  • [Fun] 2014/10: Yongle and I each gave a talk in OSDI; Yongle gave a cool demo of lprof in his talk, making his advisor look bad as I did not do one in mine :)
  • [Publication] 2014/7: We have two papers accepted by OSDI'14!
  • [Job] 2014/4: Xu will go to the Bay area for a summer internship in Twitter.

    • Selected publications

    Group

    It is fun to work with the following incredible people:

    Post-doc:

    Graduate students:

    Alumni:

    Teaching

    Program committee

    Misc

    I play a lot of sports, including basketball, skiing, swimming, and running. I was the captain of the Beihang's CSE basketball team when I was an undergrad and co-captain of the UIUC CS faculty & grad-student basketball team in the intramural games. I also ran some marathon and half-marathons (see a not-so-recent photo here). When I have more time, I also play accordion and piano.

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