We are actively looking for students who have the passion for advancing the state-of-the-art on intriguing research topics, and for writing high-quality research papers. Here are the current members of the group as of February 2024.

Sijia Chen · Chenghao Hu · Yufei Kang · Ningxin Su · Fei Wang · Dixi Yao · Kai Shen · Tim-Cheng Gu

Sijia Chen, Ph.D. Candidate

Sijia Chen is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the iQua group. He received his B.Engr. degree and M. Sc. Degree in Telecommunication Engineering from Xidian University, China. His research interests focus on multi-modal learning, Bayesian learning, and computer vision.

Chenghao Hu, Ph.D. Student

Chenghao Hu is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the iQua group, starting in September 2020. He received his B.Eng. degree from the South China University of Technology and M.Sc. from Tsinghua University. Chenghao’s current research interests focus on distributed machine learning, and specifically, using deep reinforcement learning to improve the performance of distributed training and inference.

Chenghao enjoys playing guitar alone in his leisure time, and he has a regular plan to work out.

Yufei Kang, Ph.D. Student

Yufei Kang is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the iQua group. She received her B.Engr. degree in Telecommunication Engineering in 2019 from Xidian University, China. In her undergraduate years, Yufei worked hard and performed well in her studies. In the summer of 2018, she worked as an intern at the Department of Cloud Computing and Big Data Research and Development at China Unicom Cloud Computing Ltd. Co.

Currently, her research interests focus on federated learning.

Ningxin Su, Ph.D. Candidate

Ningxin Su is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the iQua group, and joined in September 2020. She received her M.E. Degree and B.E. Degree from The University of Sheffield and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2020 and 2019, respectively.

Ningxin is not a “good” student at school. She loves dancing, singing and traveling. She thinks the museum is the best place to learn the history of a city, so one of her life goals is to visit as many museums as possible. Because of the pandemic of COVID-19, she changed her goal to visiting beautiful natural scenery. Her research interests focus on federated learning, specifically, asynchronous federated learning and federated unlearning.

Fei Wang, Ph.D. Student

Fei Wang is a second-year Ph.D. student in the iQua group. In June 2020, she received her B.Eng. degree with honours in Computer Science and Technology at Hongyi College, Wuhan University, China. Prior to graduate program enrollment, she spent two wonderful semesters at iQua participating in research studies as an intern. Fei’s research interests lie at the intersections of deep reinforcement learning, networking, and communication.

Fei enjoys hitting the gym and doing strength training. She loves to plan her trips to different countries and cities in her leisure time, stepping out to explore and experience elsewhere.

Dixi Yao, Ph.D. Student

Dixi Yao is a first-year Ph.D. student in the iQua group. He received his B.Eng. degree with AI honored program in Computer Science in 2022 from Shanghai JiaoTong University, China. He is interested in building more scalable, efficient and secure distributed machine learning systems, especially over mobile and edge devices.

Dixi likes to play basketball in his spare time and he was a member of the department team during his undergraduate studies.

Kai Shen, Ph.D. Student

Kai Shen is a first-year Ph.D. student in the iQua group. He received his B.Eng. degree in Computer Science and Engineering with Honours, First Class from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Kai’s current research interests focus on the intersection of networking, deep reinforcement learning, and federated learning.

Kai is an NBA fan and enjoys playing basketball in his spare time.

Tim-Cheng Gu, M.A.Sc. Student

Tim-Cheng Gu is a second-year M.A.Sc. Student in the iQua group. He received 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.