Felix Xiaozhu Lin 林 小竹

Associate Prof.

William Wulf Faculty Fellow

UVA Computer Science

CV

Contact

PhD in Computer Science (Rice 2014), MS in CS (Tsinghua 2008), and BS in Automation (Tsinghua 2006). Grew up in Chongqing, known for its “3D-stacked” buildings. Before moving to UVA, I spent six great years at Purdue.

We are recruiting! Recent interests:

• Geometric deep learning, algorithm x system x hardware: 3D vision, graph neural networks, etc.
• Efficient NLP, on-device BERT/GPT
• Other systems topics, see below.

At UVA CS, my group is looking for PhD students for building novel software systems. Our group has a strong builder culture. We expect you to show a passion in building experimental software, too.

Join us in beautiful Virginia!

The UVA campus at sunset, with Blue Ridge mountains in the back. Credit: UVA.

Efforts on refreshing OS education (UVA CS4414/CS6456). Principles: experience-based, with modern contents, and fun. Summary: four projects including an Arm64 baremetal kernel, multicore, trusted execution, and filesystem forensics.

The first offering in Fall’20 as CS6456. Well received! Materials; student feedbacks; schedule

Research (Publication)

I care about systems software.

Jun 2020: “OS frontiers in the AI era” For UVA graduate students. slides video

Mar 2019: Overview slides

I work with a group of students with enthusiasm in systems software. See XSEL.

Our current work bases on two premises:

1. Old kernels (e.g. Linux) are firmware

• Transkernel: unmodified Linux drivers on microcontroller-like cores (ATC’19 and HotMobile’17).
• Overwatch: safeguarding unmodified file systems for IoT devices (preprint)
• Power sandbox: power awareness redefined (Eurosys’18).

2. New OSes are defined by scenarios

• Elf: autonomous AI cameras (Mobisys’20, 3-min video, website, slides)
• VStore: managing large archival videos for analytics (Eurosys’19).
• StreamBox: stream analytics with manycores (ATC’17), with 3D-stacked memory (ASPLOS’19), and with Arm TrustZone (ATC’19).

My PhD work was on OS kernels for smartphones, e.g. the K2 project which won an award in ASPLOS’14. I continue to care about mobile/wearables, e.g. deep learning on them (WWW’19 & MobiCom’18).

See our group page for all projects.

Useful

Need a reference letter from me? | How do I determine final grades for undergrad classes? | How do we work with undergrads in research? | To signature requesters | Name in Chinese

We are one-hour from the gorgeous Shenandoah national park. Unlimited outdoor fun. Photo: http://virginia.org