This is Tianyin, a watchman in the cornfields who tries to do relevant systems research. More professionally, I am an ass prof in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I'm also affiliated with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UIUC.

Before joining UIUC, I spent a year at Facebook's Core Systems, working on dealing with datacenter failures and eating free food (see my interview by Facebook). I spent six wonderful years at sysnet at the University of California San Diego until my rock star advisor kicked me out (I wished to be a tenured grad student¹). I worked with NetApp to study production data ontap. I had a short experience at Whova where I learned dedication (check out Whova's resources for organizing conferences). I worked in Germany and backpacked Europe for 1.5 years at Goettingen before starting my grad school.

As a "professor", my meta-advice is to be serious and sincere to life and work. Winter is coming! Don't fight a fake war or someone else's war. Fight for what matters to the living or the dead.

I am a part of CS CARES. If you need help, please don't hesitate to reach out -- you'll never walk alone.

¹ I am constantly looking for such a job. Please contact me if you have or know one.

The goal of my research is to make computer systems reliable and secure, especially those operating at the cloud and datacenter scale. My mission is to help today's systems defend against all kinds of errors and defects, such as software bugs, configuration errors, and design flaws. I am very happy that some of our work helps improve reliability of real-world systems (check out bugs we detected/fixed).

I am interested in all kinds of black magic. My view of systems research is to build the right swords to kill the dragon (not windmills).

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CS 598(XU): Reliability of Cloud-Scale Systems (Fall 18) (Spring 19) (Spring 22)

CS 523: Advanced Operating Systems (Fall 19) (Fall 20) (Fall 21) (Spring 23)

CS 423: Operating System Design (Spring 20) (Fall 22)

CS 591(SN): Systems Reading Group (Spring 19) (Fall 19) (Spring 20) (Fall 20) (Spring 21) (Fall 21) (Spring 22) (Fall 22) (Spring 23)

CS 591(SE): Software Engineering Seminar (Fall 19) (Spring 20) (Fall 20) (Spring 21) (Fall 21) (Spring 22) (Fall 22)

2023 Gilles Muller Best Artifact Award at EuroSys'23

2022 Intel Rising Star Faculty Award

2022 NSF CAREER Award

2021 Facebook Academic of the Month

2021 Best Student Paper Award at SIGCOMM'21

2021 SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FSE'21

2021 SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ISSTA'21

2021 (Fall) UIUC List of Teachers Ranked as Outstanding (for cs591DS)

2020 Facebook Distributed Systems Research Award

2020 Best Paper Award at ASPLOS'20

2020 (Fall) UIUC List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (for cs523)

2019 Best Demo Award at MobiCom'19

2019 (Fall) UIUC List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (for cs523)

2019 (Spring) UIUC List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (for cs598)

2018 (Fall) UIUC List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (for cs598)

2017 UCSD CSE Doctoral Award for Research

2016 Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI'16

2010 Erasmus Mundus LiSUM Scholarship

2009 Best Paper Award at International Conference on Communications

The Sieve team is spotlighted by CS news

Sieve is covered by VMware Office of CTO Blog and is endorsed by Kit Colbert (VMware CTO)

Cozart is selected as a 2022 CACM Research Highlight article: pdf

Sieve is selected for presentation at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon

Sam and Wenyu are spotlighted in CS news

YiFei is spotlighted by both ECE news and CS news

Draco has been upstreamed to the Linux kernel (RFC, code) (LWN, CSL, IllinoisCS, C3SR, Phoronix)

Elastic cuckoo page table is selected as IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention

Illinois CS News on Elastic Cuckoo Page Tables

Defusing the Configuration Time Bomb (video) (slides)

Validated Configurations with Ciris (slides) (manual)

The Morning Paper's coverage of Taiji (article)

The Morning Paper's coverage of Maelstrom (article)

The Morning Paper's coverage of WebRSync (article)

W3C Authentication References count our access-control-misconfiguration paper at CHI'17.

The Morning Paper's coverage of PCheck (article)

It Will Never Work in Theory on our too-many-knobs paper at FSE'15 (article)

Co-lead of Infrastructure for Trusted and Confidential Computing at IIDAI

Co-editor of SIGOPS Blog

Area Chair on Configuration Management, Journal of Systems Research (Why JSys?)

2023 OSDI, NSDI, DSN, Sigmetrics, ESEC/FSE Industry Track,

2022 SYSTOR, Sigmetrics, EdgeSys, ChinaSys, Middleware, ESEC/FSE Industry Track,

2021 HotOS, SOSP (virtual platform chair), EuroSys (sponsorship co-chair), ICSE, Sigmetrics SRC,

2020 OSDI, MobiSys, EdgeSys, FSE Tool/Demo,

2019 SOSP, APSys, SEConfig, EdgeSys

2018 EuroSys DW, EdgeSys, ICDCS

2017 SOSP SRC

2015 USENIX LISA (academic review committee)

Xudong Sun, PhD student (Fall 2019 - now), awarded Yunni and Maxine Pao Memorial Fellowship

Jinghao Jia, PhD student (Fall 2020 - now), awarded Richard T. Cheng Fellowship, Outstanding TA Award

Lilia Tang, PhD student (Fall 2020 - now), awarded Ray Ozzie Fellowship

Siyuan Chai, PhD student (Fall 2021 - now)

Tyler Gu, PhD student (Fall 2021 - now), awarded Gene Golub Fellowship

Shuai Wang, PhD student (Fall 2021 - now), co-advised by Darko Marinov

Zijie Zhao, PhD student (Fall 2022 - now), co-advised by Lingming Zhang

Henry Zhu, PhD student (Fall 2022 - now), co-advised by Aishwarya Ganesan and Ramnatthan Alagappan

Xinyu (Alex) Lian, MS student (Fall 2022 - now), co-advised by Darko Marinov

Anna Mazhar, MS student (Fall 2022 - now)

Jiyuan Zhang, MS student (Fall 2022 - now)

Fan Chung, Undergrad student (UIUC/NYCU) (Spring 2023 - now)

Wenqing Luo, MS 2023, co-advised by Aishwarya Ganesan and Ramnatthan Alagappan → Apple (Cloud Infra)

Parth Thakkar, MS 2023 → Meta (Dev Infra)

Yuxuan (Matt) Jiang, BE 2023 → University of Michigan (PhD)

Feiran (Alex) Qin, (ShanghaiTech/UIUC), Fall 2022 → North Carolina State University (PhD)

Kunle Li, BE 2023 → CMU (MS)

Muhammad Taha (LUMS) (Summer 2022) → Purdue (MS)

Yinfang Chen, PhD student, currently on leave at Microsoft Research Asia

Kai-Hsun (Kevin) Chen, M.Eng 2022 → Databricks → Anyscale

Wenyu Wang, PhD 2022, co-advised by Tao Xie, awarded 3M Foundation Fellowship → Meta → Stellar Cyber

Chaitanya B. Bhandari, research scholar, 2021--2022 → UIUC (MS)

Xinyu (Alex) Lian, BE 2022 → UIUC (MS)

Yicheng Lu, BE 2022 → UIUC (MS)

Kele Huang (CAS), Summer 2021 → Columbia University (PhD)

Wen Fan (USTC), Summer 2021 → Purdue University (PhD)

Jack Chen, MS 2021 (thesis) → Trend Micro

YiFei Zhu, BE 2021, awarded Highest Honor and University Honor → Google (kernel)

Sam Cheng, PhD student, co-advised by Darko Marinov → Switched to the AI/ML area after two years, in 2021

Andrew B. Yoo, MS 2021 (thesis), co-advised by Shuai Mu, awarded Siebel Scholar → Whova (Infra)

Yuanliang Zhang (NUDT), visiting PhD student, 2019--2020 ↔ NUDT

Zhanghao Chen, MCS 2020 (project) → ByteDance (Stream Computing Infra)

Qingrong Chen, MS 2020 (thesis), awarded Siebel Scholar → Facebook (AI Infra) → ByteDance (ML Infra)

Kaiyuan Zhang (UT Dallas), Summer 2020 → Purdue University (PhD)

Yiming Mao (Nanjing University), Summer 2020 → UC San Diego (MS)

Elaine Ang, MS 2019 (thesis) → Google (Spanner)

Illinois CS, OUR, NSF, VMware, Facebook, IBM/C3SR/IIDAI, Intel, Azure, GCP, and GitHub

soccer (career); travel; rock; biking; drinking; reading; bad jokes; turtles

I owe everyone in Fall 2020 CS-523 (modulo Aditi Partap) a donut due to COVID-19; ping me and I will pay my debts.