Principle Investigator
Yufei Ding is the founder of PICASSO Lab. Yufei received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, and B.S. in Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China. Yufei’s research interests lie in the broad fields of domain-specific language design, architecture and compiler optimization, and hardware acceleration.
Post-Doc
Yue Guan is a postdoctoral visiting scholar working with Prof. Yufei Ding in the Department of Computer Science at UC San Diego. He received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 2024. He obtained his B.E. in Integrated System from Waseda University, Japan, in 2019. Yue’s research interests focus on efficient machine learning, particularly the co-design of model compression and ML systems.
Yue Guan
Ph.D. Students
Hezi Zhang is a third-year Ph.D. student working with Prof. Yufei Ding on quantum computing in the computer science department of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Her research goal is to tap into the computational power of matter allowed by quantum laws and facilitate the acceleration and scaling of quantum computing through algorithm and system design.
Hezi Zhang
Zheng Wang is a 3rd year Ph.D. student, working with Prof. Yufei Ding, at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego. He began his PhD studies at UCSB in 2021 and moved to UCSD in the fall of 2023. His research interests include high-performance system design and end-to-end optimization for deep learning (especially recommendation systems and LLM).
Keyi Yin is a second-year Ph.D. working with Prof. Yufei Ding at the University of California, San Diego, starting in 2023. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China. Keyi’s current research area is quantum computing system designs, especially quantum error correction code (QEC) based quantum computing optimizations.
Keyi Yin
Xiang Fang is a first-year Ph.D. student working with Professor Yufei Ding at the University of California, San Diego, starting in Fall 2024. He holds a B.S. degree in Mathematics from Zhejiang University and an M.A. degree in Financial Mathematics from Columbia University. Previously, he was a Ph.D. student in Statistics at UC Santa Barbara before switching his focus to quantum computing. Xiang’s current research focuses on quantum error correction (QEC).
Xiang Fang
Jixuan Ruan is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), working with Professor Yufei Ding. She earned her B.S. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China. Her current research focuses on quantum computing system designs, especially on accelerating and scaling quantum computing through innovative algorithms.
Jixuan Ruan
Zaifeng Pan is a first-year PhD student at UCSD, working with Prof. Yufei Ding. He received his MS from Renmin University of China and his BE from Shanghai Jiaotong University. His current research interests include machine learning systems and compilers.
Zhongkai Yu is a first-year PhD student at University of California, San Diego, working with Prof. Yufei Ding. He received his M.S. degree from Institute of Computing Technology Chinese Academy of Sciences and his B.S. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His current research focuses on computer architecture and machine learning systems..
Zhongkai Yu
Alumni
Anbang joined Shanghai Jiaotong University as an assistant professor in the Department of Department of Computer Science and Engineering starting in fall 2024. Anbang graduated from the group in 2022 with a Ph.D. His research interest covers various quantum computing paradigms, e.g., analog quantum computing, measurement-based quantum computing, and gate-based quantum computing. He has built efficient quantum compilers and novel architecture designs for both near-term quantum hardware and future fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures built upon quantum error correction codes.
Guyue graduated from the group in 2024 and joined Nvidia. She earned her PhD in the ECE department at UCSB, where she was advised by Prof. Yufei Ding and Prof. Yuan Xie. Her research interests are GPU sparse matrix kernels and deep learning compilers. Previously she received her B.E. from Tsinghua University in 2020.
Yuke Wang will join Rice University as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science starting in fall 2025. Yuke graduated from the group in 2024 with a Ph.D. Yuke's research interests include high-performance computing and deep learning algorithms. His current projects include graph neural network (GNN) optimization and its acceleration on GPUs. Yuke is also the recipient of the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship for 2022 - 2023.
Gushu joined the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science starting in Jan 2023. Gushu Li is a Ph.D. candidate co-advised with Prof. Yufei Ding and Prof. Yuan Xie. His research interests include but are not limited to Computer Architecture, Compilers, and Programming Languages for Quantum Computing.
Boyuan Feng graduated from the group in 2022 with a Ph.D. He joined Meta to work on Pytorch compiler. His Ph.D. research resides at the intersection of deep learning (DL) and computer systems, with a focus on building robust and efficient DL systems.
Liu Liu joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as an Assistant Professor in Fall, 2022. He is a PhD co-advised by Dr. Yufei Ding and Dr. Yuan Xie. His research interests reside in the intersection between computer architecture and machine learning, towards high-performance, energy-efficient, and robust machine intelligence.
Carina Quan graduated from the group with a master's degree in 2024. She joined Arista Networks as a software engineer. Her master’s research focuses on the reusable and extensible deep learning compiler infrastructure.
Carina Quan
Shu Yang joined Google as a software engineer in Spring, 2022. She graduated from the group with a master's degree in 2022. Her master's research focuses on deep learning and computer systems.
Shu Yang
Huake He
Huake He graduated from the group in 2022 with a MS. He joined Oracle to work on In-Memory database. His MS research focuses on machine learning and computer vision, more specifically on adversarial attack and defense on neural networks and investigation on their robustness.