Hi! I'm Alan (Zaoxing) Liu, a computer systems and networking enthusiast. More professionally, I'm an Assistant Professor at Boston University ECE. My research has won USENIX FAST Best Paper Award, USENIX ATC "Best of Rest", and ACM STOC "Best of Rest" plenary talk. Prior to BU, I did a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University working with Prof. Vyas Sekar and Prof. Minlan Yu. I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, advised by Prof. Vladimir Braverman. [Email] [Bio]

I'm looking for self-motivated students who are interested in systems and networking research. If you are interested in joining forces with me, feel free to drop me an email with your CV. May the force be with you! [Useful Links] [CE PhD Program] [How-to-apply]

Updates

08/2020    Joltik work to appear in MobiCom'20. Congrats to the team!

05/2020    TEA work to appear in SIGCOMM'20. Congrats to the team. See you online!

10/2019    Lean algorithms to appear in APOCS'20 (held with SODA'20). See you in Salt Lake City!

10/2019    Interval-query work to appear in SIGMETRICS'20. Congrats to the team!

07/2019    Give an invited talk at USENIX ATC'19. See you in Seattle!

05/2019    NitroSketch work to appear in SIGCOMM'19. See you in Beijing!

12/2018    DistCache work to appear in FAST'19. (Update: Best Paper Award)

10/2018    Successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation.

07/2018    Joining CMU/Harvard as a postdoctoral researcher (with Vyas Sekar and Minlan Yu).

07/2018    ASAP work to appear in OSDI'18.

More...

06/2018    Summer internship at SF bay area, let's meet up!

04/2018    Attend NSDI'18, Renton, WA. Thanks a lot USENIX for the travel grant!

08/2016    Attend and present at SIGCOMM'16, Florianopolis, Brazil.

06/2016    Give an invited talk at NSF Algorithm in the Field Workshop for Software-defined Networking

05/2016    CS@JHU and UMD are hosting 2016 Capital Area Theory Day, please register to attend.

05/2016    UnivMon work to appear in SIGCOMM'16.

04/2016    Attend AT&T Research Academic Summit. Rethinking Network Flow Monitoring. (Update: Best Poster Award)

Research

I'm broadly interested in systems and networking. I design, implement, evaluate systems and algorithmic tools for telemetry, in-network computing, ML/analytics, and network security.

- Network Telemetry and Management
- Programmable Networks / In-Network Computing
- Data Analytics Systems

More...

Technical Reports / White Papers

Sketchy With a Chance of Adoption: Can Sketch-Based Telemetry Be Ready for Prime Time?
Zaoxing Liu, Hun Namkung, Anup Agarwal, Antonis Manousis, Peter Steenkiste, Srinivasan Seshan, Vyas Sekar
[arXiv]


Enhancing the Privacy of Federated Learning with Sketching
Zaoxing Liu, Tian Li, Virginia Smith, Vyas Sekar
[arXiv]


Unleashing In-network Computing on Scientific Workloads
Daehyeok Kim, Ankush Jain, Zaoxing Liu, George Amvrosiadis, Damian Hazen, Bradley Settlemyer, Vyas Sekar
[arXiv]


Publications

[IoTDI'21] SecDeep: Secure and Performant Deep Learning Inference Framework for Mobile and IoT Devices
Renju Liu, Luis Garcia, Zaoxing Liu, Botong Ou, Mani Srivastava
to appear in IoTDI 2021.
[PDF]


[SIGCOMM'20] TEA: Enabling State-Intensive Network Functions on Programmable Switches
Daehyeok Kim, Zaoxing Liu, Yibo Zhu, Changhoon Kim, Jeongkeun Lee, Vyas Sekar, Srinivasan Seshan
in ACM SIGCOMM 2020.
[PDF]


[MobiCom'20] Joltik: Enabling Energy-Efficient "Future-Proof" Analytics on Low-Power Wide-Area Networks
Mingran Yang, Junbo Zhang, Akshay Gadre, Zaoxing Liu, Swarun Kumar, Vyas Sekar
in ACM MobiCom 2020.
[PDF]


[APoCS'20] Memory-Efficient Performance Monitoring on Programmable Switches with Lean Algorithms
Zaoxing Liu, Samson Zhou, Ori Rottenstreich, Vladimir Braverman, Jennifer Rexford
in SIAM ACM APoCS 2020 (Co-held with SODA 2020).
[PDF] [Slides]


[SIGMETRICS'20] I Know What You Did Last Summer: Network Monitoring using Interval Queries
Nikita Ivkin, Ran Ben Basat, Zaoxing Liu, Gil Einziger, Roy Friedman, Vladimir Braverman
in ACM SIGMETRICS 2020.
[PDF]


[SIGCOMM'19] NitroSketch: Robust and General Sketch-based Monitoring in Software Switches
Zaoxing Liu, Ran Ben-Basat, Gil Einziger, Yaron Kassner, Vladimir Braverman, Roy Friedman, Vyas Sekar
in ACM SIGCOMM 2019.
[PDF] [Slides] [Talk]


[FAST'19] DistCache: Provable Load Balancing for Large-Scale Storage Systems with Distributed Caching
Zaoxing Liu, Zhihao Bai, Zhenming Liu, Xiaozhou Li, Changhoon Kim, Vladimir Braverman, Xin Jin, Ion Stoica
in USENIX FAST 2019.
[PDF] [Extended Version] [Slides] [Talk] [Invited Talk]
 Best Paper Award


[OSDI'18] ASAP: Fast, Approximate Pattern Mining at Scale
Anand Iyer*, Zaoxing Liu*, Xin Jin, Shivaram Venkataraman, Vladimir Braverman, Ion Stoica
in USENIX OSDI 2018.
(*Co-leading author)
[PDF][Blog:the morning paper]


[HotCloud'18] Towards Fast and Scalable Graph Pattern Mining
Anand Iyer*, Zaoxing Liu*, Xin Jin, Shivaram Venkataraman, Vladimir Braverman, Ion Stoica
in USENIX HotCloud 2018.
(*Co-leading author)
[PDF]


[SIGCOMM'16] One Sketch to Rule Them All: Rethinking Network Flow Monitoring with UnivMon
Zaoxing Liu, Antonis Manousis, Greg Vorsanger, Vyas Sekar, Vladimir Braverman
in ACM SIGCOMM 2016.
[PDF] [Slides] [Talk] [Invited Talk]
Selected as Plenary Talk ("Best of Theory") at STOC 2018.


[HotNets'15] Enabling a "RISC" Approach for Software-Defined Monitoring using Universal Streaming
Zaoxing Liu, Greg Vorsanger, Vladimir Braverman, Vyas Sekar
in ACM HotNets 2015.
[PDF] [Slides]
Best Poster Award at AT&T Research Summit 2016.


[eScience'15] Streaming Algorithms for Halo Finders
Zaoxing Liu, Nikita Ivkin, Lin F. Yang, Mark Neyrinck, Gerard Lemson, Alexander S. Szalay, Vladimir Braverman, Tamas Budavari, Randal Burns, and Xin Wang
in IEEE eScience 2015.
[PDF]


[MFCS'15] New Bounds for the CLIQUE-GAP Problem using Graph Decomposition Theory
Vladimir Braverman, Zaoxing Liu*, Tejasvam Singh, N.V. Vinodchandran and Lin Yang (Alphabetical)
in MFCS 2015.
[PDF]


[Astro. & Comp.] Scalable Streaming Tools for Analyzing N-body Simulations: Finding Halos and Investigating Excursion Sets in One Pass
Nikita Ivkin, Zaoxing Liu, Lin F. Yang, Srinivas Suresh Kumara, Gerard Lemsona, Mark Neyrinckc, Alexander S. Szalay, Vladimir Bravermana, Tamas Budavari
in Astronomy and Computing 2018.
[PDF]


[Algorithmica] New Bounds for the CLIQUE-GAP Problem using Graph Decomposition Theory
Vladimir Braverman, Zaoxing Liu*, Tejasvam Singh, N.V. Vinodchandran and Lin Yang (Alphabetical)
in Algorithmica 2017.
[PDF]

Teaching

Boston University

Instructor, ENG EC 441, Introduction to Computer Networking (Spring 2021)

Johns Hopkins University

Guest Lecturer, EN600.463/663, Algorithms I (Spring 2017, 2018)

Teaching Assistant, EN600.463/663, Algorithms I (Spring 2017, 2018)

Teaching Assistant, EN600.363/463, Introduction to Algorithms (Spring 2015)

Teaching Assistant, EN600.464/664, Randomized Algorithms (Fall 2014)

Recent Talks

SIGCOMM'20-Network Telemetry Preview


SIGCOMM'19


ATC'19


FAST'19


DIMACS Networking Workshop

Bio

Dr. Alan (Zaoxing) Liu is a tenure-track assistant professor at Boston University ECE. His research interests are in systems and networking, and his group at BU will be focusing on building next-generation networked systems. Prior to BU, Dr. Liu was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and obtain his PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. His research papers have been published in top-tier venues such as ACM SIGCOMM, MobiCom, USENIX FAST, and OSDI. He is a recipient of the best paper award at USENIX FAST'19 for his work on large-scale distributed load balancing. His work received multiple recognitions, including ACM STOC "Best-of-Theory" plenary talk and USENIX ATC "Best-of-Rest".

Contact

Email: zaoxing AT bu.edu >> GPG key

Address:

PHO 335, College of Engineering

Boston University

8 St Marys St

Boston, MA 02215