Jiawei Tyler Gu
Reliable Cloud System Management: Challenges and Tools
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Committee: Tianyin Xu (chair), Indranil Gupta, Darko Marinov, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Chen Wang

Siyuan Chai
Building an OS Framework for New Memory Translation Architectures
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, passed prelim on May 2, 2025.
Committee: Tianyin Xu (chair), Josep Torrellas, Darko Marinov, Saugata Ghose, Weiwei Jia

Yinfang Chen
Agentic AI for Cloud System Troubleshooting
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, passed prelim on Apr. 22, 2025.
Committee: Tianyin Xu (chair), Lingming Zhang, Darko Marinov, Minjia Zhang, Indranil Gupta, Minghua Ma

Jiawei Liu
Software Quality Assurance for Machine Learning Systems
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, passed prelim on Jan. 15, 2025.
Committee: Lingming Zhang (chair), Darko Marinov, Tianyin Xu, Tianqi Chen

Houxiang Ji
Memory Optimization Kernel Feature Offloading in Heterogeneous Systems
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, passed prelim on May 3, 2024.
Committee: Nam Sung Kim (chair), Josep Torrellas, Saugata Ghose, Tianyin Xu, Ren Wang

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Jason Liu
Designing Practical Security Systems via Information Flow Analysis of Log Data
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on June 30, 2025.
Committee: Adam Bates (chair), Gang Wang, Tianyin Xu, Patrick Traynor

Jovan Stojkovic
Chasing the Tail at Scale: Towards Cloud-Native Processor Architectures
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on May 30, 2025.
Committee: Josep Torrellas (chair), Darko Marinov, Jian Huang, Tianyin Xu, Hubertus Franke, Christina Delimitrou, Christopher Hughes, Dimitrios Skarlatos

Xudong Sun
Testing and Verification of Cloud Infrastructure Systems
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on May 7, 2025.
Committee: Tianyin Xu (chair), Aishwarya Ganesan, Philip Brighten Godfrey, Jon Howell, Darko Marinov, Lalith Suresh

Jinghao Jia
Making Safe OS Kernel Extensions Expressive, Efficient, and Easy to Program
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, defended on Apr. 4, 2025.
Committee: Tianyin Xu (chair), Adam Bates, Hubertus Franke, Michael V. Le, Darko Marinov, Dan Williams

Runxiang (Sam) Cheng
Regression Test Prioritization for Modern Software
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, defended on Apr. 1, 2025.
Committee: Darko Marinov (chair), Lingming Zhang, Tianyin Xu, Wei Yang

Tzu-Bin Yan
An Internet Measurement Framework for Low-Cost Vantage Point Sharing
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, defended on Mar. 25, 2025.
Committee: Kirill Levchenko (chair), Gang Wang, Tianyin Xu, Kimberly "kc" Claffy

Kuan-Yen Chou, Ph.D.
Scalable Verification of Complex Networks
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on Oct. 21, 2024.
Committee: Matthew Caesar (chair), Brighten Godfrey, Radhika Mittal, Tianyin Xu, David Walker, Steffen Smolka

Jie Huang, Ph.D.
On the Capabilities and Risks Of Large Language Models
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on April 5, 2024.
Committee: Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang (chair), Hao Peng, Hanghang Tong, Tianyin Xu, Diyi Yang

Hongpeng Guo, Ph.D.
Multi-objective Optimizations for Resource-efficient Large Scale Machine Learning Systems
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on Feb. 29, 2024.
Committee: Klara Nahrstedt (chair), Deming Chen, Tianyin Xu, Baochun Li

Bingzhe Liu, Ph.D.
Enhancing the Reliability of Dynamic Management in Cloud Infrastructures
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on Nov. 17, 2023.
Committee: Brighten Godfrey (chair), Ryan Beckett, Indranil Gupta, Tianyin Xu

Dan Plyukhin, Ph.D.
Fault-Tolerant and Fault-Recovering Garbage Collection for The Actor Model: A Collage-based Approach
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on Aug. 15, 2023.
Committee: Gul Agha (chair), Indranil Gupta, Tianyin Xu, Philipp Haller

Zhe Yang, Ph.D.
Soft Real Time Resource Management for Vision Based Internet of Things Systems
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on Sep. 27, 2022.
Advisor: Klara Nahrstedt
Committee: Klara Nahrstedt (chair), Brighten Godfrey, Tianyin Xu, Baochun Li

Wenyu Wang, Ph.D.
Empowering Automated Mobile UI Testing With External Support
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on Jun. 25, 2022.
Committee: Tao Xie (co-chair), Tianyin Xu (co-chair), Darko Marinov, Mukul Prasad

Hsuan-Chi (Austin) Kuo, Ph.D.
Attack Surface Reduction in Contemporary Operating Systems via Practical Kernel Debloating
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on Apr. 13, 2022.
Committee: Sibin Mohan (chair), Ravishankar Iyer, Vikram Adve, Tianyin Xu, Daniel Williams

Apostolos Kokolis, Ph.D.
New Architectures for Non-Volatile Memory Technologies
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on Apr. 6, 2022.
Committee: Josep Torrellas (chair), Jian Huang, David Padua, Tianyin Xu, John Kalamatianos, Thomas F. Wenisch, Vijay Nagarajan
David J. Kuck Outstanding PhD Thesis Award

Atul Sandur, Ph.D.
Scalable Resource Management for Internet-of-Things (IoT) Applications: Challenges, Methods and Tools
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on Jan. 6, 2022.
Committee: Gul Agha (chair), Klara Nahrstedt, Tianyin Xu, Myeongjae Jeon

Saurabh Jha, Ph.D.
Assessing Dependability of Emergent Large Scale Autonomous Systems In The Wild
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on Oct. 14, 2021.
Committee: Ravishankar K. Iyer (chair), Wen-mei W. Hwu, William T. Kramer, Tianyin Xu, Steve Keckler

Ali Kheradmand, Ph.D.
Foundations for Practical Network Verification
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on July 27, 2021.
Committee: Brighten Godfrey (co-chair), Grigore Roşu (co-chair), Tianyin Xu, Jitendra Padhye

Wing Lam, Ph.D.
Software Testing in a Non-Deterministic World
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on June 24, 2021.
Committee: Tao Xie (co-chair), Darko Marinov (co-chair), Tianyin Xu, Suman Nath
ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

Dimitrios Skarlatos, Ph.D.
Rethinking Computer Architecture and Operating System Abstractions for Good & Evil
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on August 19, 2020.
Committee: Josep Torrellas (chair), Christopher W. Fletcher, Nam Sung Kim, Christos Kozyrakis, Vijayaraghavan (Ravi) Soundararajan, Tianyin Xu
ACM SIGARCH - IEEE-CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award
David J. Kuck Outstanding PhD Thesis Award

Faria Kalim, Ph.D.
Satisfying Service Level Objectives in Stream Processing Systems
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on July 1, 2020.
Committee: Indranil Gupta (chair), Klara Nahrtstedt, Tianyin Xu, Ganesh Ananthanarayanan

Tarek Elgamal, Ph.D.
Utility-driven Optimization and Placement Framework for Visual IoT Analytics over Edge-cloud Environments
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on May 8, 2020.
Committee: Klara Nahrtstedt (chair), Indranil Gupta, Tianyin Xu, Rittwik Jana

Santhosh Prabhu, Ph.D.
Practical Verification of Network Planes
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, defended on March 12, 2020.
Committee: Matthew Caesar (chair), Brighten Godfrey, Tianyin Xu, Aurojit Panda, Alan Mishchenko