Chang Lou
Assistant Professor, University of Virginia

mail chlou [AT] virginia [DOT] edu

Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia
Rice Hall 304, 85 Engineer’s Way
Charlottesville, VA 22904


We are hiring! Our lab has Ph.D. student positions starting from Fall 2025. If you are interested in building/hacking systems, we should talk. [Link]
Update: we are currently looking for research interns on a collaboration project with Microsoft (location based in China) to improve cloud reliability. Applicants with system background are preferred. Schedule a chat with us if you are interested.

About

I am a tenure-track assistant professor in Department of Computer Science at University of Virginia. My research centers on building robust and highly available systems. One major focus is to enhance the capabilities of distributed systems to detect, localize, and react to complex failures at runtime. I am also interested in solving reliability challenges in real-world systems from other domains, such as deep learning systems.

Our recent work includes developing principled approaches to deal with:


News

  • 2024/10: Congratulations to Tseganesh (Grace) for being selected to present her work at SOSP SRC, see you at Austin!
  • 2024/10: Zhenyu, Dimas and Kahfi received SOSP travel grants. Thanks to sponsors for the generous support!
  • 2024/10: Will be serving on SOSP’25 Program Committee.
  • 2024/5: Co-organizing a SIGCOMM workshop on Formal Methods x Networked Systems. Welcome to submit your work!
  • 2024/4: Received grants from 4-VA Collaborative Program. Thanks to 4-VA!
  • 2024/3: Invited to give a talk at the University of Chicago System Seminar.
  • 2024/3: Will be serving on NSDI’25 Program Committee.
  • 2023/12: Gave a talk to student interns in Alibaba on graduate school advice.
  • 2023/10: I’m honored that my Ph.D. thesis titled “Enhancing Cloud System Runtime to Address Complex Failures” has been recognized with an Honorable Mention for ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award. A heartfelt thank you to Ryan, the best Ph.D. advisor ever, as well as my wonderful collaborators Suman and Ding!
  • 2023/10: Will be serving on EuroSys’25 Program Committee.
  • 2023/10: Did a talk on 2023 UVA CS Research Symposium, Securing A Bad Career In Ph.D. Program, revealing three most common pitfalls for junior Ph.D. students. (Chinese ver.)
  • 2023/9: Will be teaching CS4740: Cloud Computing with a new syllabus in Spring 2024. UVA undergraduates: if you are interested in principles and concepts behind cloud systems, this course is for you.
  • 2023/9: Received Google Cloud Computing Research Grants. Thank you Google!
  • 2023/8: A new chapter at UVA started.

Publication (selected)

Enhancing Cloud System Runtime to Address Complex Failures
Chang Lou
Ph.D. Dissertation (2023) The Dennis M. Ritchie Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention)

Demystifying and Checking Silent Semantic Violations in Large Distributed Systems
Chang Lou, Yuzhuo Jing, Peng Huang.
OSDI’22 [ slides, code, talk ]

RESIN: A Holistic Service for Dealing with Memory Leaks in Production Cloud Infrastructure
Chang Lou, Cong Chen, Peng Huang, Yingnong Dang, Si Qin, Xinsheng Yang, Xukun Li, Qingwei Lin, Murali Chintalapati.
OSDI’22 Deployed on Microsoft Azure [ slides, talk ]

Understanding, Detecting and Localizing Partial Failures in Large System Software
Chang Lou, Peng Huang, Scott Smith.
NSDI’20 Best Paper Award [ slides, talk ]
(A TL;DR version from Morning Paper)

Comprehensive and Efficient Runtime Checking in System Software through Watchdogs
Chang Lou, Peng Huang, Scott Smith.
HotOS’19 [ slides ]

Fast and Concurrent Distributed RDF Queries using RDMA-assisted GPU Graph Exploration
Siyuan Wang, Chang Lou, Rong Chen, Haibo Chen.
USENIX ATC’18 [ slides, code, poster ]


Students

I am very fortunate to work with these students:


Teaching


Academic Service

Program Committee

  • 2025: SOSP, NSDI, EuroSys
  • 2024: ATC, SIGCOMM FMANO

Misc.

  • Reviewer: ACM TOCS, IEEE TMC
  • Shadow PC: EuroSys’23
  • AEC: EuroSys’23
  • Web Chair: HAOC’21 (in conjunction with EuroSys’21)

Work Experience

  • Data Scientist Intern (part-time), Microsoft Azure, Nov 2021 - Jan 2022
  • Data Scientist Intern, Microsoft Azure, Jun 2021 - Aug 2021
  • Data Scientist Intern, Microsoft Azure, Jun 2020 - Sept 2020
  • Research Intern, Microsoft Research Asia, Oct 2015 - Jun 2016

Misc.


Bio

I received my Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in May 2023, advised by Prof. Ryan (Peng) Huang. I obtained my B.S. degree in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in June 2016 and spent one gap year at IPADS working with Prof. Haibo Chen and Prof. Rong Chen.