Yihan Sun

Yihan Sun is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) since January 2020. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), advised by Guy Blelloch, and holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University.

Research Interests: Yihan Sun focuses on the theory and practice of parallel computing, including

• Parallel algorithms and data structures
• Write-efficient algorithms for Non-Volatile Memory (NVM)
• Computational geometry (range trees, Delaunay triangulations)
• Graph algorithms (SSSP, SCC, cluster-based BFS)
• Concurrent and persistent data structures
• Multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) with garbage collection
• Applications in databases, transactional systems, and computational biology

Recent Research Trends: His work on join-based parallel balanced trees has been foundational, supporting four balancing schemes (AVL, red-black, weight-balanced, treaps) and enabling efficient implementations in graph analytics, spatial queries, and dynamic programming. Recent publications focus on output-sensitive algorithms, scalable graph libraries (PASGAL), and pedagogical approaches to teaching parallel algorithms.

Teaching: He teaches CS260 (Parallel Algorithms) at UCR and has served as a guest lecturer for MIT 6.886 (Algorithm Engineering) and CMU 15-859 (Algorithms in the real world). He also contributed to algorithm education through a tutorial at the ACM Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP 2019).

Labs & Collaborations: Yihan is a core contributor to the PAM (Parallel Augmented Maps) library, which has been integrated into systems like Aspen (graph-streaming) and C-trees. He collaborates with teams at CMU-Parlay, PBBS, and Ligra, with his code available on Github for community feedback.