About me

My Curriculum Vitae.

I joined Databricks in December 2023, working at the intersection of ML and systems—automation and performance for large-scale distributed systems. I co-own DBSQL workload management and own ML-based predictive costing for all DBSQL queries, turning runtime/cost priors into smarter scheduling, bin-packing, and autoscaling. I also lead LLM-guided auto-evolution of system policies (agent + simulator), and an ongoing foundation-model effort over systems logs to turn platform telemetry into actionable signals for reliability and efficiency. Separately, I co-built QuickPredict, a history-driven prediction service that provides runtime/cost estimates (with confidence) for similar workloads, which the DBSQL scheduler and SQL planner use to improve placement and plan quality.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Prof. Arun Kumar’s ADALab UC San Diego (2023). My research focused on ML systems, spanning applied ML systems (new capabilities) and systems for ML (infrastructure that makes training faster and more reliable). Highlights include: Panorama (open-vocabulary, high-throughput video recognition via cascaded detection + embedding search), Cerebro / Model Hopper Parallelism (a novel execution mode that increases trial throughput for large-scale model selection), Lotan (large-scale GNN training by decoupling graph data movement from neural compute with partitioning/batching), and the first in-database distributed deep-learning system (multi-node DL directly over DBMS-resident data).

These PhD projects have shipped and influenced industry. Cerebro/Cerebro-DS were open-sourced, incorporated into Apache MADlib, and integrated with VMware Greenplum, enabling external teams (including UCSD public-health researchers) and appearing as third-party tools for Databricks users. These work also helped inspire RapidFire AI, a startup founded by my PhD advisor centered on these ideas.

I received my B.S. in theoretical physics from Nankai University (China) in 2016. I was fascinated by quantum gravity, black holes, and the search for the ‘ultimate truth’-and published two papers from that work.