Just joined Northeastern University this Jan. as a PhD student, supervised by Prof. Mallesham Dasari. Will continue working on network systems.
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My name is Zhewen Yang (杨哲闻), I know it is hard to pronounce,
so you can also call me Lucas. I was born in China, a beautiful country with amazing peoples.
I'm currently a PhD student in Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, located in Boston, MA.
Before coming to the United States, I earned my bachelor's degree in Computer Science (Honors Science Program) from Xi'an Jiaotong University in China. During my gap year, I was fortunate enough to spend time at Nanjing University, where I worked on research projects in the State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology under the supervision of Professor Chen Tian.
I just received my Master's degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.
Apart from my academic interests, I'm a passionate sports and pop Culture enthusiast as well as a sports fan.
I am a fan of OBJ, Lonzo and Shohei, I do not like Yankees. I am also a huge Sci-Fi fan who addicted to Star Wars.
I love music (although I can not play a single instrument), I love r&b music like those from SZA, David Tao and the Weeknd.
I play a lot of MTG recently.
Thank you for taking the time to learn a bit more about me. Let's connect and see how we can make the world a better place through technology and our shared interests!
Bachelor of Engineering Computer Science and Technology (Honors Science Program)
Xi'an, China
Experience
Research Assistant
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Advisor: Prof. Zili Meng (HKUST)
Study and analyze the frontier video steaming and networking solution for high-quality transmission.
Participating in developing the next-generation lossless video streaming framework. (ongoing project)
Now preparing a paper submission on USENIX NSDI 2025
Lab Intern
University of Michigan
Advisor: Prof. Ryan Huang (UMich) and Prof. Chang Lou (UVA)
Help building a system to detect the silence failures in distributed systems (Still working on this, so I can not talk much about it here)
Now preparing a paper submission on USENIX OSDI 2024
Lab Intern
University of California, Berkeley
Advisor: Prof. Scott Shenker (UCB)
Help building a new network architecture that make network service more reasonable and reliable (Same, still working on this, so I can not talk much about it here)
Research Assistant
Nanjing University, China
Advisor: Prof. Chen Tian (Nanjing University) Publication: "Norma: Towards Practical Network Load Testing." Published on USENIX NSDI, 2023 (3rd student author)
Project: Bandwidth Allocation Among Tenants with QoS (Quality of Service) System Development and Research in
Datacenter Networks (A paper post on arXiv by me)
Teaching Assistant
Nanjing University, China
Being a TA of the Computer Network course (teaching by Prof. Chen Tian) at Nanjing University
Designed and implied the course HWs and exams
Software Developer Intern
Baidu, Inc., China
Designed and developed end-to-end solutions, including site acceleration, continuous delivery, capacity management, elastic computing, failure analysis, traffic distribution, and performance tuning
Designed programs of 500+ lines using C++ and Java to conduct maintenance of the Baidu Voice Assistant system and network during the Chinese New Year peak network usage period, and reduced error rate by 10%-20%
Pitched the program to the company and successfully incorporated it into DuerOs, a popular smart home appliance
Student Researcher
Xi'an Jiaotong University
As a intern researcher in ANTS Lab with the guidance of Prof. Peng Zhang and Prof. Hao Li Did studies and research works on topics of networking verification
Exchange Student
University of California, Berkeley, CA
Fully funded by Xi'an Jiaotong University to be in the Berkeley International Study Program
Courses: Introduction to Database, Machine Structures, Numerical Analysis
Summer School Student
University of Alberta, Canada
Fully funded by Xi'an Jiaotong University to be in the International Undergraduate Summer Enrichment Program in Mathematics
Took lectures and finished a statistical machine learning project
Publications
Deriving Semantic Checkers from Tests to Detect Silent Failures in Production Distributed Systems [OSDI’25]
Chang Lou, Dimas Shidqi Parikesit, Yujin Huang, Zhewen Yang, Senapati Diwangkara, Yuzhuo Jing, Achmad Imam Kistijantoro, Ding Yuan, Suman Nath, Peng Huang
ProNet: Network-level Bandwidth Sharing among
Tenants in Cloud [arXiv] Still working on it for future conferences
An effective video transmission method to improve video quality with lower delay* (*Not
the actual name of the paper) Submission made to the ICNP 25', under review.
Will be more in the future!
Conference Presentations
Yang, Z. (2023, April 19). Norma: Towards Practical Network Load Testing [Conference presentation]. 20th USENIX
Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 23), BOSTON, MA, USA
Will be more in the future!
Teaching & Mentoring Experiences
Computer Networks
Teaching Assistant Nanjing University
Nanjing, CN
Prepared lectures, lab sessions on SDN, and programmable network topics for over 50 sophomore-junior undergrads
Hosted several office hours for students on assignment and exam revise
Participated in the design and graded course assessments to ensure students understood materials and stayed on track
