Research groups are like start-up companies, and team members come and go. But we’d love to keep in touch with them. Over the past two decades, the iQua group has a proven track record of hosting excellent students and postdoctoral fellows, who went on to start their professional careers in both academia and industry.

In particular, here is a list of team members in the past who started academic careers after graduation, in reverse chronological order of their graduation date.

  • Tianhang Zheng (Ph.D., July 2023) — Assistant Professor (tenure-track), Division of Computing, Analytics, and Mathematics, University of Missouri (Kansas City Campus), Kansas City, Missouri, USA

  • Chen Ying (Ph.D., February 2023) — Teaching-Stream Assistant Profesor, Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  • Salma Emara (Ph.D., December 2022) — Teaching-Stream Assistant Professor, Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  • Wanyu Lin (Ph.D., August 2020) — Assistant Professor (tenure-track), Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR

  • Hao Wang (Ph.D., July 2020) — Assistant Professor (tenure-track), Division of Computer Science & Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA

  • Li Chen (Ph.D., July 2018) - Assistant Professor (tenure-track), School of Computing and Informatics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, Louisiana, USA

  • Liyao Xiang (Ph.D., July 2018) - Assistant Professor (tenure-track), John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, P. R. China

  • Jun Li (Ph.D., July 2017) - Assistant Professor (tenure-track), Queens College & Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, New York, USA

  • Xu Yuan (Postdoctoral Fellow, July 2017) - Associate Professor (with tenure), Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware, Delaware, USA

  • Yanjiao Chen (Postdoctoral Fellow, April 2016) — Professor, College of Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, P. R. China

  • Wei Wang (Ph.D., August 2015) — Associate Professor (with tenure), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR

  • Chen Feng (Ph.D., August 2014) — Associate Professor (with tenure), School of Engineering, University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus), Okanagan, British Columbia, Canada

  • Di Niu (Ph.D., April 2013) — Associate Professor (with tenure), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

  • Henry Hong Xu (Ph.D., March 2013) — Associate Professor (with tenure), Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

  • Yuan Feng (Ph.D., March 2013) — Assistant Professor (tenure-track), Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

  • Jiahua Wu (M.A.Sc., September 2009; Ph.D., Toronto, 2014) — Assistant Professor, Business School, Imperial College London

  • Chuan Wu (Ph.D., July 2008) — Professor (with tenure), Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

  • Mea Wang (Ph.D., April 2008) — Professor (with tenure), Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

  • Xinyu Zhang (M.A.Sc., June 2007; Ph.D., Michigan, 2012) — Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, USA

  • Ying Zhu (Ph.D., August 2006) — Associate Professor (with tenure), Faculty of Business and Information Technology (cross-appointed in Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science), Ontario Tech University, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada

  • Zongpeng Li (Ph.D., August 2005) — Professor (with tenure), Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China

A Complete List of Graduates

Ph.D. graduates — Hao Lan (2023) · Tianhang Zheng (2023) · Chen Ying (2023) · Salma Emara (2022) · Wanyu Lin (2020) · Hao Wang (2020) · Shuhao Liu (2018) · Li Chen (2018) · Liyao Xiang (2018) · Jun Li (2017) · Wei Wang (2015) · Zimu Liu (2014) · Chen Feng (2014) · Di Niu (2013) · Henry Hong Xu (2013) · Yuan Feng (2013) · Jin Jin (2010) · Yunfeng Lin (2010) · Hassan Shojania (2010) · Chuan Wu (2008) · Mea Wang (2008) · Jiang Guo (2007) · Ying Zhu (2006) · Weihong Wang (2005) · Zongpeng Li (2005)

M.A.Sc. graduates — Tim-Cheng Gu (2024) Yifan Gong (2019) · Siqi Ji (2016) · Yinan Liu (2016) · Yiwei Pu (2014) · Yuefei Zhu (2012) · Junqi Yu (2010) · Jiahua Wu (2009) · Elias Kehdi (2009) · Xinyu Zhang (2007) · Kevin Yuen (2006) · Xin Zhou (2004) · Selwyn Yuen (2004) · Gregory Hartl (2004) · Shahid Bashir (2002) · Edmond Poon (2002) · Jilei Liu (2002) · Karen H. Wang (2001)

Postdoctoral fellows — Zhiming Hu (2019) · Xu Yuan (2017) · Yanjiao Chen (2016) · Tara Small (2006)

Hao Lan, Ph.D., September 2023

Dr. Hao Lan received both of his B.E. and M.E. degrees from Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in 2015 and 2018 respectively. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China.

Dr. Lan’s research interests include datacenter networking, distributed computing, and software defined networking. More specifically, he is interested in optimizing machine learning clusters using reinforcement learning.

Tianhang Zheng, Ph.D., July 2023

Dr. Tianhang Zheng received his B. Eng. degree and M. Sc. Degree from Peking University and University at Buffalo, respectively. In his Master’s studies, he has published several top conference and journal papers. In his Ph.D. studies, his research interests focused on statistical learning theory, trustworthy machine learning, and computer vision.

Dr. Zheng is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Division of Computing, Analytics, and Mathematics, University of Missouri (Kansas City Campus), Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Chen Ying, Ph.D., February 2023

Chen Ying received her B.Engr. degree from School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China, 2017. In her undergraduate years, Chen achieved excellent academic performance, ranking top 1% among four hundred students. In the summer of 2016, she took an internship at the University of Toronto, receiving an opportunity to build robots that could track and monitor signs of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. That was when she fell in love with the city and the university, and made up her mind to continue her graduate studies here.

She enjoys traveling and photography in her leisure time.

Salma Emara, Ph.D., December 2022

Salma Emara is currently a teaching-stream Assistant Professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto. She joined the iQua group in September 2018 as a M.A.Sc. student and transferred to the Ph.D. program in September 2019. She received her BASc in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt in June 2018. She ranked top of her graduating class in June 2018. Her research interests focus on finding practical solutions to networking problems using Deep Reinforcement Learning.

In her leisure time, Salma enjoys long walks in the City of Toronto.

Wanyu Lin, Ph.D., August 2020

Wanyu Lin is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR. She joined the iQua group in Fall 2015. She received her B.Engr. degree in 2012 from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China and her M.Phil. degree in 2015 from the Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, semi-supervised learning, graph neural networks and few-shot learning, searchable encryption in the cloud.

Wanyu enjoys reading, singing and jogging in her leisure time. She loves to explore new places and enjoys the natural beauty in the form of daily jogging. She successfully completed her first half-marathon in the 2014 Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon and her first full-marathon in the 2017 Toronto Scotialbank Marathon.

Hao Wang, Ph.D., July 2020

Hao Wang is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Division of Computer Science & Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. He joined the iQua group in Fall 2015. He received both of his B.E. and M.E. degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in 2012 and 2015 respectively. During his Master’s studies, he worked as a research assistant at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for 14 months.

Hao’s research interests include datacenter networking, distributed computing and software defined networking. He is very fond of elegant and practical solutions targeting real-world problems, and he enjoys working with his favorite MacBook tremendously. He co-founded a start-up with friends, and worked as an intern at both Intel and Microsoft. Over time, pursuing a Ph.D. degree and thinking independently became more attractive to him.

In his spare time, Hao likes doodling with his iPad and playing badminton. Inspired by Baochun, he runs regularly with a goal of finishing a full marathon during his Ph.D. studies.

Shuhao Liu, Ph.D., October 2018

Shuhao Liu joined the iQua group in Fall 2014. He received his B.S. degree from Department of Automation, Tsinghua University in 2012. Then he joined National University of Defence Technology, Changsha, where he received an M.Sc. degree in 2014. During that time, he visited the City University of Hong Kong for five months, working as a research assistant.

His research topics include datacenter networking, software-defined networking and big data analytics. He loves to learn all kinds of new technologies, and he always dreams of developing one than can change the world. Being a little bit geeky, he finds coding very interesting. His favourite editor is Vim.

Shuhao has a colourful after-work life. He plays basketball a lot. Movies and photography are also his favourites.

Li Chen, Ph.D., August 2018

Li Chen is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, School of Computing and Informatics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto in 2018, after six years of graduate study in the iQua group under the supervision of Baochun, where she also received her M.A.Sc. degree in January 2015. She visited the Hong Kong Polytechnic University from 2013 to 2014 for 8 months. In July 2012, she received her B.Eng. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

During her graduate years in the iQua group, Li has studied interesting research problems related to resource allocation and performance optimization in the era of cloud computing and machine learning, with the constraints of fairness. She is interested in applying theoretical tools to study real problems and deriving insights to guide the design of a practical system. She won the award of best paper candidate for the paper published in IEEE IC2E 2016, the award of best-in-session presentation for the presentation of her work in IEEE INFOCOM 2016, and the student travel grant from USENIX ATC 2018.

In her spare time, she enjoys music, reading, hiking and traveling, to explore and appreciate the beauty of life.

Liyao Xiang, Ph.D., July 2018

Liyao Xiang is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China. She received her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2012, and Ph.D. in Electrical Computer Engineering at University of Toronto in 2018. In her graduate studies, she focused on designing an indoor localization system based on crowd intelligence as well as privacy-preserving deep learning.

Her general research interests cover the intersected areas of security, privacy, machine learning, and mobile computing. Topics include adversarial learning, privacy analysis in data mining, mobile systems and applications, and mobile cloud computing. In particular, she is interested in identifying fundamental security and privacy threats in machine learning systems, and designing practical countermeasures.

Jun Li, Ph.D., July 2017

Jun Li is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University. He joined the iQua group at the University of Toronto as a Ph.D candidate in September 2012. Before coming to Canada, he spent seven wonderful years at Fudan University, located in Shanghai, China, where he received his B.S. and M.S. degrees both in Computer Science, in 2009 and 2012, respectively.

Jun is interested in coding theory and distributed storage systems. While at the University of Toronto, his research focused on how to store and repair data with less time, bandwidth and disk I/O consumption in large-scale distributed storage systems, by applying mathematical tools such as coding theory and graph theory.

Wei Wang, Ph.D., August 2015

Wei Wang is currently a tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He joined the iQua group in 2010, co-supervised by Prof. Baochun Li and Prof. Ben Liang, and graduated with his Ph.D. degree in 2015. Prior to his Ph.D. endeavour at the University of Toronto, he received the B. Engr. and M. Engr. degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2007 and 2010, respectively, both in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Wei’s general research interests cover the broad area of cloud and distributed systems, with special emphasis on serverless computing, private and secure machine learning systems, and large-scale cluster management. He published extensively in top venues such as NSDI, ATC, SoCC, SC, INFOCOM, etc. Some of his works have made a practical impact on the production systems of Alibaba.

Zimu Liu, Ph.D., August 2014

Zimu Liu did his undergraduate program at the Department of Computer Science at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, P.R. China, and received his B.Engr. degree in July 2007. In September 2007, Zimu joined the iQua group, and he has completed his M.A.Sc. degree in December 2009, and is continuing to pursue his PhD degree in the group.

During his undergraduate life, Zimu kept excellent academic records, especially in math and computer science courses and ranked top 3% in his department. Based on his solid background, Zimu worked on various programming and research projects, such as “Research and Implementation of Automatic Meta-Information Extraction for Chinese Documents without Dictionary Support” (Jiangsu Province Science Research Fund Candidate). His undergraduate thesis, which won an Excellent Thesis Award at Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, focused on secure data transmission on the Internet.

His research interests focused on statistical studies on large-scale peer-to-peer applications and design of algorithms for distributed systems. In particular, he is interested in deriving insights from extensive measurements and statistical studies of real-world commercial live streaming applications, and improving performance and quality of peer-to-peer video-on-demand systems.

In his spare time, he has devoted his efforts to the maintenance of iQua’s computing resources, and enjoys writing code in various scripting and programming languages.

Chen Feng, Ph.D., August 2014

Chen Feng is currently an Associate Professor (with tenure) at the School of Engineering, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. In 2014-2015, he was an NSERC postdoctoral fellow, working with Prof. Michael Gastpar and Prof. Bobak Nazer. Chen received his B.Eng. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2006. He joined the iQua group in 2006, and completed his M.A.Sc and Ph.D. degrees in 2009 and 2014, respectively. His PhD co-supervisor is Professor Frank Kschischang.

Chen’s research philosophy is to bridge the gap between theoretical advances and system implementations. In particular, he is interested in adapting new ideas and tools from information theory, coding theory, and optimization to design better networking systems. In his spare time, he enjoys learning math and solving math puzzles. He also practices meditation and Tai Chi regularly.

Chen was a recipient of the prestigious NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2014, the Graduate Student Endowment Fund Scholarship in 2013, the Shahid U.H. Qureshi Memorial Scholarship in 2013, and the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad in 2012.

Di Niu, Ph.D., April 2013

Di Niu is currently an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta. He 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. From September 2006 to August 2012, Di was a member of the iQua group at the University of Toronto, and he received his Ph.D. degree in April 2013. He was the recipient of Postgraduate Scholarship for Doctoral Students (PGS-D) from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) from 2010 to 2012, and the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship for Master’s Students (CGS-M) from NSERC from 2006 to 2008.

Henry Hong Xu, Ph.D., March 2013

Henry Xu is currently an Associate Professor (with tenure) in Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong. Henry received his B.Engr. with honors, First Class, from Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2007. He joined the iQua group in September 2007, and completed his M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in October 2009 and June 2013, respectively.

Henry’s research interests include data center networking, software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), cloud computing, and computer systems. He focuses on designing, building, and modeling network systems and protocols. The overarching goal of his research is two-fold: improving performance, and reducing complexity, both defined broadly. He is also interested in data mining and analytics.

Yuan Feng, Ph.D., March 2013

Yuan Feng joined the iQua group at the University of Toronto in September 2008, and received her M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in December 2010 and March 2013, respectively. Yuan received her B.Engr. degree from the School of Telecommunications in Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in July 2008. Her research interests are in the areas of cloud computing, mobile applications, multimedia streaming, and distributed systems. She was the recipient of the 2012 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad by the China Scholarship Council.

In her undergraduate years, Yuan achieved excellent academic performance, especially in mathematics and communications courses, and held the top-level scholarship (top 25 of the 5000 students in a grade) for three years. Her solid mathematical background and dedication to courses has led to a ranking of #1 among 115 students in her major.

Jin Jin, Ph.D., September 2010

Jin Jin is currently a leading member of the quantitative research group at Fidelity Investments Inc., a global leading financial institution, in Boston Massachusetts. His research focuses on how to provide customized investments and financial solutions efficiently and fairly, for millions of American clients under the Fidelity Investments service. He is responsible for the design, construction, and management of asset allocation solutions, as well as the data-backed and highly scalable methodologies for many of Fidelity’s investment portfolios. Before that, Jin worked at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in Toronto Canada, where he was one of the main contributors to the quantitative strategy for asset allocation and total portfolio management for over $400 billion assets in the firm.

Jin joined the iQua group in 2006, and his research interests mainly focused on wireless communication networks, with a focus of attention on the IEEE 802.16 family of standards (a.k.a WiMAX in the industry). He took advantage of state-of-the-art techniques and theories to improve system performance, especially using network coding. During his Ph.D. studies, Jin published 10 peer-reviewed papers in total at top conferences and journals, and these publications were cited over 400 times in the past 10 years by internationally renowned researchers and industry leaders. Jin’s work has been specially adopted and proven successful in different areas across multiple companies, including LG Electronics Inc. and other firms. Jin also served as a reviewer for more than 20 conferences and journals.

Jin received his Bachelor of Engineering degree with a major in automation in 2004, and his Master of Science degree with a major in computer science in 2006, both at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Yunfeng Lin, Ph.D., February 2010

Yunfeng Lin is currently working as a Researcher at Intel Labs China, Beijing. While a member of the iQua group, he is 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, Ph.D., February 2010

Hassan Shojania is currently working as a Software Engineer at Google Inc., in Mountain View, California. From 2010 to 2016, he worked at Apple Inc. in Cupertino, California. He 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.

Chuan Wu, Ph.D., July 2008

Chuan Wu is now a Professor (with tenure) at Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong. She joined the iQua group in September 2004. Her research interests include performance optimization and measurement studies of large-scale peer-to-peer streaming systems.

As the third Tsinghua alumni in iQua (after Zongpeng and Weihong), Chuan has received her B.Engr. degree and M.Engr. degree in 2000 and 2002, respectively, from the Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. After 2002, she worked in the Information Technology industry as a software designer and developer for two years, before she started pursuing her Ph.D. studies.

Mea Wang, Ph.D., April 2008

Mea Wang is now Professor (with tenure) at the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary. She joined the iQua group in 2002, after receiving her Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) degree with first-class honour from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba. She has completed her Master of Applied Science degree under the NSERC PGS A award in 2004, and has been awarded the Ontario Graduate Scholarship in 2005 and the NSERC PGS D award in 2006.

Mea is interested in designing and building overlay and peer-to-peer protocols that work well in reality. Her Master’s thesis research has focused on the design and implementation of a fully distributed and resource-efficient algorithm to deliver complex services, by federating primitive services in overlay and peer-to-peer networks. Her PhD thesis is on her work on Crystal, a scalable framework for rapid peer-to-peer protocol development and testing in the server cluster setting. Her research interests also include the application of network coding, especially in the peer-to-peer streaming case.

Jiang Guo, Ph.D., September 2007

Jiang Guo graduated from the group with a Ph.D. degree in September 2007, and now working as a Senior Software Developer at CNIB, in Toronto. Jiang received his B.Engr. in 1997 in Automatic Control from Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China, and his M.Engr. degree in 2000 in Computer Science from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P. R. China.

Jiang’s research interests are in the areas of networking and distributed systems. In particular, he is interested in designing distributed application-layer algorithms and protocols, by applying microeconomic theory and game theory to the analysis of node behavior in peer-to-peer networks. He has published a number of papers in the area. As a hands-on experimentalist, he has also made important contributions to the first implementation of iOverlay, a lightweight middleware framework for rapid development and testing of overlay algorithms.

Ying Zhu, Ph.D., August 2006

Ying Zhu graduated from the group with a Ph.D. degree in August 2006, at which time she joined the Faculty of Business and Information Technology, Ontario Tech University, in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, where she is currently an Associate Professor. While in the group, she was interested in designing decentralized algorithms to improve the performance of overlay network topologies. Since 2004, she considered linear capacity constraints among overlay links as first-class entities, with one of her papers winning the Best Student Paper Award at the 13th International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS 2005), held in Passau, Germany. In 2003, she did some pioneering work on the use of network coding in overlay networks, leading to her paper published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

Before she joined the iQua group, she received her B.A.Sc. in computer science and mathematics from Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and M.A.Sc. in computer science from University of Toronto in 1999 and 2001, respectively.

While she is not reading a book on NP Completeness, she enjoys listening to music, attending live concerts of classical music and jazz, and reading non-academic books. She also loves to go to the latest movies, go skiing, play badminton, and travel to Europe. Her life is much beyond papers — a strategic decision in the right direction.

Weihong Wang, Ph.D., October 2005

Weihong Wang graduated from the iQua group with a Ph.D. degree in October 2005. During her tenure, she has studied the problem of resource allocation in peer-to-peer networks using games, microeconomics, markets, and machine learning. After her graduation, she worked as a Research Scientist at HP Labs China for five years, and then returned to Canada and worked as a Visiting Researcher at the University of Waterloo. Based on her LinkedIn profile, she has moved to California to work as a Software Engineer at Google Inc. since 2019. During her tenure at the University of Toronto, she has published several research papers, and was quite proud of her work published in IEEE INFOCOM 2005, IEEE IWQoS 2003, as well as the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

From 1993 to 1998, Weihong was an undergraduate student with a major in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Applied Mathematics at Tsinghua University, P.R. China. She received her M.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua university in 2001, with research and development experiences in power system control and flexible AC transmission systems.

Zongpeng Li, Ph.D., August 2005

Zongpeng Li was a graduate from the iQua group with a Ph.D. degree in August 2005, and was the first Ph.D. graduate from the group. He is currently a Professor (with tenure) at his alma mater, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China. Zongpeng held academic positions at the University of Calgary from 2005 to 2017, and was promoted to the rank of Professor (with tenure) at the University of Calgary in 2016. Zongpeng has been interested in the general area of computer networks, with an algorithmic accent. In particular, he is interested in Internet algorithms, wireless ad hoc networks, multicast, network coding, game theory, queuing theory, as well as network optimization based on mathematical programming, graph theory, combinatorics, and approximation algorithms.

While at the University of Toronto, Zongpeng has worked on and published quite a number of very interesting papers, including two contributions in IEEE INFOCOM 2005 and one paper in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, all about his work on network coding in undirected networks. In August 2005, he joined the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary. He has been active in the field ever since, with a large number of high-quality and highly cited publications (with an H-index of 48 and a total of over 9700 citations as of September 2024).

Before he joined the iQua group, Zongpeng received his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1999, and his M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Toronto in 2001.

While not proving theorems, Zongpeng has been a hobbyist of Go (the board game).

Tim-Cheng Gu, M.A.Sc., May 2024

Tim-Cheng Gu joined the iQua group in September 2022, after receiving his B.A.Sc. Degree of Honours Computer Engineering - Co-operative Program with Distinction in 2022 from the University of Waterloo. He is interested in building next-generation AI assisted distributed systems.

Tim enjoys listening to good music while reading an interesting book. When he has spare time, he also loves to take long walks. He thinks there’s no better way to know a place than by wandering through its streets and alleys at one’s own feet.

Yifan Gong, M.A.Sc., September 2019

Yifan Gong joined the iQua group in September 2017, after receiving her B.Engr. degree (with honor) in Telecommunications Engineering at Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in July 2017.

During her undergraduate years, she maintained excellent academic performance, ranking first in the Education Experimental Class. She also joined the National Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks at Xidian University in her junior year and participated in research projects on optical network-on-chip systems.

In her spare time, Yifan loves to have a chat with friends over a cup of milk tea. She also enjoys collecting beautiful things, drawing pictures and listening to music.

Siqi Ji, M.A.Sc., September 2017

Siqi Ji joined the iQua group as an M.A.Sc. student in September 2015. She received the B.Engr. degree from Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2015.

In her undergraduate years, Siqi showed excellent performance both in her major courses and research projects. Her undergraduate studies mainly focused on the field of Computer-aided Design in VLSI. In the summer of 2014, she received the opportunity to be a research assistant supervised by Prof. Xin Li in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Her research topic was “Effective method for Statistical Element Selection Optimization.” During her undergraduate life, she also took part in many social activities and showed excellent leadership skills. While in the group, Siqi’s research interests were in the area of datacenter networks.

Yinan Liu, M.A.Sc., September 2016

Yinan Liu joined the iQua group as an M.A.Sc. student in September 2014. She received her B.Engr. degree from the School of Telecommunications in Xidian University, Xi’an, China, in July 2014. Her general research interests cover inter-datacenter and software-defined networking, and she hopes to design something that can solve practical problems.

Yiwei Pu, M.A.Sc., June 2013

Yiwei Pu joined the iQua group as an M.A.Sc. student in September 2010. He currently holds the postion of Director, Global Markets at BMO Capital Markets, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His M.A.Sc. thesis is titled “On the Benefits of Network Coding in Multi-Party Conferencing.”

Yuefei Zhu, M.A.Sc., September 2012

Yuefei Zhu joined the iQua group as a new M.A.Sc. student in September 2010. He received his B. Engr. degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in July 2010, and then joined the iQua group in September 2010.

In his undergraduate years, Yuefei achieved excellent academic performance both in courses and projects, and ranked top 5% in the department. He joined the Institute of Wireless Communication Technology of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2009, and worked on a research project to apply compressive sensing into wireless communications. Currently, his research focuses on auction design in networks, especially for efficient and practical resource allocation problems.

Junqi Yu, M.A.Sc., September 2010

Junqi Yu joined the iQua group as a new M.A.Sc. student in September 2008, co-supervised by Professor Ben Liang. Junqi received her B.Engr. degree from the Department of Electronics and Information Engineering in Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, in July 2008.

During her undergraduate studies, Junqi worked hard and showed excellent academic performance. In the third year, she was sent as one of the six students from Xi’an Jiaotong to study at Korea University. She won scholarships every year. In particular, in her third year, she was awarded the prestigious National Scholarship from the Ministry of Education in China. Her undergraduate thesis focused on page segmentation and classification of document images, when she designed and implemented a complete page layout analysis system. Besides studying, she also did a summer internship at SK Telecom, which is the largest mobile operator in South Korea.

Jiahua Wu, M.A.Sc., September 2009

Jiahua Wu received his B.Engr. degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering in Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R. China. In September 2007, he joined the iQua group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, and completed his M.A.Sc. degree in September 2009. After receiving his PhD degree in Operations Management from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, he is now an Assistant Professor at Imperial College London.

Jiahua earned a highly competitive spot to become the top ten among the over 90,000 students who took part in the College Entrance Examination in Shanghai in 2003. Then he got the chance to study in one of the best EE programs in China. His undergraduate studies mainly focused on the field of signal processing and communication systems and he got exceptional grades in his courses. As part of his undergraduate research experience, he worked on several projects, such as Digital circuit design in an RFID system , and a FPGA application project based on Xilinx Spartan-II. His bachelor thesis research was on the topic of pilot-symbol-aided channel estimation in OFDM systems.

In the master phase, his research interests are in the analysis and algorithm design of peer-assisted video-on-demand (VoD) systems. In particular, his research focuses on quality and performance improvements in large-scale peer-assisted VoD systems.

Elias Kehdi, M.A.Sc., August 2009

Elias Kehdi did his undergraduate program at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his B.Engr. degree in July 2007. In September 2007, he joined the iQua group as a first year M.A.Sc. student at the University of Toronto. He completed his M.A.Sc. degree in August 2009. He now works at Bloomberg, Inc., in New York City.

In his undergraduate years, he was placed on the dean’s honor list for every semester of his program. His studies focused on networking and signal processing. Elias presented his first paper on ECG monitoring systems at the 6th FEA conference at the American University of Beirut and it was nominated for best creative achievement award. He worked as a research assistant under the supervision of Professor Mazen Saghir and Professor Zaher Dawy writing a journal about the same topic as his first paper.

Elias enjoys math problems, therefore he completed a minor in mathematics.

Xinyu Zhang, M.A.Sc., June 2007

Xinyu Zhang has graduated with an M.A.Sc. degree in June 2007 from the group, with a thesis titled “Drift: a Highly Condensed Emulation Framework for Mobile Nodes in Server Clusters.” He has previously studied in the Department of Electronic and Communications Engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, and received his B.Eng. degree there with honors in July 2005. During his undergraduate years, Xinyu worked on various embedded system projects, such as “The Control Instrument for UCA Synthesizing Process,” “The Hypoids Pipeline Robot” (which won second prize in the Challenge Cup), “The Automobile Electronic Air-conditioner Based on FFMC-8L Microcontroller” and “The Platform for Automobile Rainwiper Testing.” His undergraduate thesis, which won an Excellent Thesis Award at the Harbin Institute of Technology, focused on the design patterns for microcontroller system software.

Xinyu continued to work in the iQua group as a full-time Research Technician in the 2007-2008 academic year, before continuing to pursue his Ph.D. degree at the University of Michigan, under the supervision of Professor Kang Shin. His research interests during this period focused on the application of network coding in wireless networks, as well as the development and use of cluster-based emulation platforms for large-scale wireless networks. He is currently a tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego.

Kevin Yuen, M.A.Sc., April 2006

Kevin Yuen received his M.A.Sc. degree in April 2006, officially becoming an iQua alumni. Kevin is co-supervised by Professor Ben Liang. He received the B.A.Sc. (Honours) degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2004. In his undergraduate design project, Kevin worked in a group to develop speculative parallelization for OpenMP compilers.

In Fall 2004, Kevin joined the iQua group, and undertook challenging research problems in designing efficient distributed algorithms in wireless networks. Particularly, he was interested in applying optimization techniques to achieve energy-efficient data gathering in sensor networks. The objective was to find the optimal transmission structure on the network graph and the optimal rate allocation on the sensor nodes, while considering the effect of non-ideal data aggregation and wireless channel interference simultaneously. Kevin’s work has led to two conference papers (ICC and Networking 2006), as well as a journal paper, accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

Kevin is now working at the IBM Toronto Laboratories in Markham, Ontario, as a software developer. He is currently in the process of applying for admission into a medical school, a dramatic change of course in his career.

Xin Zhou, M.A.Sc., September 2004

Xin Zhou’s M.A.Sc. thesis is on “iFlow and Beyond: Bandwidth-Efficient and Delay-Aware Information Access in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks.” Protractor Software Inc., Toronto, Ontario.

Selwyn Yuen, M.A.Sc., January 2004

Selwyn Yuen graduated from the iQua group and received his M.A.Sc. in January 2004. He received a B.A.Sc. degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2002, graduating on the Dean’s Honour List. While in the iQua group, his research focus was to apply game theory and mechanism design to solve some interesting problems in networking, including ad hoc network formation and overlay multicast tree construction. His research on the latter problem also led to an IEEE INFOCOM 2005 paper and a journal paper that appeared in ACM/Kluwer Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET).

Since his graduation, Selwyn worked briefly as a technology consultant before joining Scotia Capital as a credit derivatives associate, where his knowledge of modeling, optimizations, probability, and stochastic processes were put to good use. He left Scotia Capital after two years, and joined Canada Pension Plan Investment Board as a Quantitative Analyst, in the area of portfolio management.

In his spare time, Selwyn enjoys playing badminton, traveling, and watching (GREAT!) movies.

Gregory Hartl, M.A.Sc., August 2004

Gregory Hartl’s M.A.Sc. thesis is titled “On the Use of Data Inference for Energy Conservation in Wireless Sensor Networks.” He is currently Business Consultant at Varicent Software, Toronto, Ontario.

Shahid Bashir, M.A.Sc., September 2002

Shahid Bashir is currently a P66 Cyber and Wireless Lead at Digital Transformation, in Houston, Texas, USA. He joined the iQua group in September 2000. His M.A.Sc. thesis is titled “QoS-aware Service Discovery Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks.”

Edmond Poon, M.A.Sc., September 2002

Edmond Poon’s M.A.Sc. thesis is titled “Fair Scheduling and Power-aware Protocols in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks.” He joined the iQua group in September 2000. He is currently at Dr Robot, Inc., Markham, Ontario, Canada.

Jennie Jilei Liu, M.A.Sc., September 2002

Jilei Liu is currently a Senior Manager at the Bank of Montreal Financial Group, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She joined the iQua group in September 2000. Her M.A.Sc. thesis is titled “Power-aware Protocols in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks.”

Karen Huan Wang, M.A.Sc. September 2001

Karen Huan Wang’s M.A.Sc. thesis is titled “Mobility-based Clustering and Partition Prediction in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks.” She joined the iQua group in September 2000. She is currently in the computer software business, San Francisco Bay Area.

Zhiming Hu, Postdoctoral Fellow, December 2016 — January 2019

From December 2016 to January 2019, Zhiming Hu has been working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the iQua group. He received his B.E. degree from the Department of Computer Science, Zhejiang University in 2011, and his Doctoral degree from the Department of Computer Science, Nanyang Technological University in 2016. Before he joined the University of Toronto, he was a research scientist in the Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR, Singapore.

His research interests are broadly in computer networking and distributed systems. He is a big fan of open source distributed systems like Hadoop and Spark. He has been working on Hadoop since 2009. Before he started his PhD studies, he worked as a full-time software engineer at Alibaba.com for half a year.

Xu Yuan, Postdoctoral Fellow, May 2016 — July 2017

Xu Yuan is currently a tenured Associate Professor, at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware. He has been working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the iQua group from May 2016 to July 2017. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech and B.S. degree from the Department of Information Security at Nankai University, Tianjin, China. His research interests include algorithm design and optimization for spectrum sharing, coexistence, and cognitive radio networks.

Yanjiao Chen, Postdoctoral Fellow, May 2015 — April 2016

Yanjiao Chen is currently a Professor at College of Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, P. R. China. She has been working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the iQua group at the University of Toronto from May 2015 to April 2016. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, in 2015 and her B.Engr. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2010.

Yanjiao is interested in the interdisciplinary area of network economics, combining wireless networks and microeconomics. Her previous work includes spectrum auctions, femtocell networks, video quality-of-experience (QoE) and crowdsourcing.

Tara Small, Postdoctoral Fellow, August 2005 — July 2006

Tara Small was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the group for one year, co-supervised by Professor Ben Liang.

Tara studied Mathematics and Physics as an undergraduate at the University of New Brunswick, earning the Governor General’s Medal for highest standing at the university at her graduation in 2000. In graduate school at Cornell University, Tara concentrated on Applied Mathematics, earning her M.S. in January 2004. With the support of an O’Brien Foundation Fellowship, she completed her Ph.D. dissertation the next year and received her Ph.D. degree in August 2005.

Tara’s PhD thesis project involved research into wireless delay-tolerant networking applying to whale communication. She has developed the Shared Wireless Infostation Model (SWIM), a networking model that gathers information from whale tags and transmits this information to collection stations efficiently. Some of her published works on this topic include “The Shared Wireless Infostation Model — A New Ad Hoc Networking Paradigm (or Where there is a Whale, there is a Way),” published at ACM MobiHoc 2003, a chapter in “Handbook of Sensor Networks,” a book from CRC Press published in July 2004, and “A New Networking Model for Biological Applications of Ad Hoc Sensor Networks,” appeared in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking in April 2006.

While in the iQua group, Tara extended her research work to scalable peer-to-peer networks. She used her mathematical background to devise methods to improve multimedia streaming in these overlay networks. Using techniques from randomized algorithms and optimization, Tara designed methods for media-content providers to serve high-quality streaming to network nodes without overwhelming provider cost. Among others, her papers were published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and accepted as a full paper in ACM Multimedia 2006.

After Tara concluded her work in the iQua group, she enjoyed a four-month excursion in Europe (must be great without paper deadlines!), and then returned to Canada and started working as a research scientist for the Federal Government of Canada. Let’s just say that she has continued to do the research that she loves to do, as always.