iQua Research Group

Yunfeng Lin

Yunfeng is currently a fourth-year Ph.D. Student in the iQua group, co-supervised by Professor Ben Liang. He received his B. Engr. degree from Tsinghua University in 2000, and his M. Math. degree from University of Waterloo in 2005, both in Computer Science.

Yunfeng enjoys understanding elegant theories such as information theory, stochastic process, machine learning, and game theory. As a consequence, he attempts to utilize these theoretical tools to obtain new insights and design efficient distributed algorithms to improve practical networked systems.

Hassan Shojania

Hassan joined the iQua group in January 2006. He received his B.Sc. from Tehran Polytechnic in 1994 and his M.Sc. from Queen’s University in 2005, both in Computer Engineering. He was a senior engineer with ATI Technologies before pursuing his graduate studies. His Master’s research was on VLSI design and implementation of a high performance H.264 CABAC encoder.

Hassan has a wide range of research interests, as he is often very open to new and cool ideas. He is interested in multimedia and distributed systems in general, and computer architecture and systems software in particular. He is certain that his Ph.D. studies would be exciting, and challenging as well.

Jin Jin

Jin joined iQua in September 2006, and now is a third-year Ph.D. student in the group. He received his B. Engr. degree with a major in automation in 2004, and his M. Engr. degree with a major in computer science in 2006, both in Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Jin’s research interests mainly focus on wireless networks, with a focus of attention on the IEEE 802.16 family of standards (or referred to as WiMAX in industry). He takes advantage of the state-of-the-art techniques and theories to improve the system performance, especially using network coding, which has received a tremendous amount of research attention in academia. Supervised by Professor Baochun Li and collaborated with LG Electronics., Jin has finished several research projects and now keeps on his study and research on various interesting topics on wireless networks.

Jin is easy going, self-motivated, and open-minded. With a passion in both academic and industrial research, he once tried to build his own start-up in Beijing, and received top awards in the Business Plan Competition, sponsored in part by Microsoft Research Asia. He enjoys sports and book reading. He now has his own personal website, broadcasting his latest news from his office and iMac in Toronto.

Di Niu

Di received his B.Engr. degree from the Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering in Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan) University, Guangzhou, P. R. China, in July 2005. Starting from September 2006, Di has been a member of the iQua research group at the University of Toronto, working towards a M.A.Sc. degree. He is currently a first year Ph.D. student in the group.

During his master’s studies, Di mainly worked on exploring the benefits and tradeoffs of applying network coding in P2P content distribution systems in light of peer dynamics and the application of network coding to large-scale measurement collection. Di’s intellectual curiosity lies in using mathematics as a tool to facilitate novel system designs, which are often hard to be achieved through intuition. He is also a fervent advocate of the application of technology in real life.

Chen Feng

Chen is currently a first-year Ph.D. student in the iQua research group, co-supervised by Professor Frank R. Kschischang. He received his B.Engr. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2006. After that, he joined the iQua research group as a Master student.

Chen’s research focuses on using advanced mathematical models to provide new insight into the design of real-world networked systems. He has a particular interest in adapting tools from various fields of applied mathematics such as coding theory, stochastic processes, and machine learning to address practical research challenges. During his master’s studies, Chen worked on the theoretical analysis of peer-to-peer streaming systems by applying the theory of network coding and Markov processes.