Tianyin Xu

Tianyin Xu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He leads research in cloud and datacenter systems reliability, security, and configuration management. His work bridges theoretical foundations with practical implementations that have been adopted in real-world systems.

Dr. Xu earned his PhD from UC San Diego and has held positions at Microsoft Research Asia, Facebook, and has collaborated with industry partners including VMware, Intel, and IBM. His research has been published in top-tier systems conferences including OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, ASPLOS, and EuroSys.

His primary research interests focus on making computer systems reliable and secure at cloud and datacenter scale. He investigates approaches to help systems defend against software bugs, configuration errors, and design flaws. His work often combines formal methods with practical systems building to create tools that detect and prevent failures in production environments.

Analysis of his recent publications shows a strong focus on cloud reliability, AI for systems, memory management, and configuration validation. His work increasingly integrates AI techniques with traditional systems approaches, particularly in using large language models for configuration validation and multi-agent systems for reliability engineering. There's also a consistent thread of work on memory systems, particularly with emerging technologies like CXL.

• 2025 Best Paper Award at ASPLOS'25 (cxlfork)
• 2025 Spotlight at ICML'25 (ITBench)
• 2024 Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI'24 (Anvil)
• 2024 C.W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award
• 2022 NSF CAREER Award
• 2021 Facebook Academic of the Month
• 2016 Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI'16 (PCheck)

Dr. Xu actively advises numerous PhD, Master's, and undergraduate students, with many alumni securing positions at top tech companies and academic institutions. He serves on program committees for major systems conferences and co-organizes the UIUC Systems Research Seminar. His research is supported by NSF, VMware, Facebook, IBM, Intel, Boeing, Azure, GCP, and GitHub. He is also a co-lead of Infrastructure for Trusted and Confidential Computing at IIDAI and co-editor of SIGOPS Blog.