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 2026. If you are interested in building/hacking systems, we should talk. [Link]
Update: GRE and application fee are waived for all 2026 applications.Update: Read mentoring principles in our group.
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 ongoing research efforts focus on:
- runtime assurance via reasoning/enforcing system semantics/dynamics: [NSF abstract]
- enable in-place dry-runs for distributed system recovery: [Pilot, NSDI’26]
- synthesize runtime checkers to detect silent failures: [T2C, OSDI’25]
- a generative verification approach to prevent cloud regressions: [HotNets’25]
- formal verification techniques to uncover silent errors in ML models: [EuroMLSys’25]
- incident management in production cloud infrastructure:
- automated outage declaration [BRAIN, NSDI’27]
- systematic anomaly mitigation [AIOps’25]
My earlier dissertation works include runtime solutions to handle:
- silent semantic violations: [OKLib, OSDI’22]
- memory leaks in production cloud infrastructure: [RESIN, OSDI’22]
- partial failures: [OmegaGen, NSDI’20 Best Paper Award] [Watchdog, HotOS’19]
News
- 2026/7: BRAIN is accepted by NSDI’27. Congratulations to the team!
- 2026/7: Co-organizing the Symposium on Rigorous LLM Systems (RigoLLM), a workshop co-located with ACM SIGOPS ATC’26. Welcome to submit your work!
- 2026/4: Honored to receive the ACM@UVA Rising Star Faculty Award, presented by the UVA student chapter of ACM. Many thanks to our students for this meaningful recognition!
- 2026/4: Our undergrad intern Julian Sutadi will attend The Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School this summer at Saarbrücken, Germany.
- 2025/12: Pilot is accepted by NSDI’26. Congratulations to Zhenyu and Angting!
- 2025/10: Interviewed by NPR (Jaclyn Diaz) and ABC News Australia (James Glenday and Emma Rebellato) to discuss the global AWS outage.
screenshots
- 2025/4: Our proposal on low-level semantics inference is awarded by Accelerating Foundation Models Research. Big thanks to Microsoft and our collaborators!
- 2025/3: T2C is accepted by OSDI’25!
- 2024/12: Awarded NSF CAREER for my proposal “Low-Effort Runtime Assurance for Robust Cloud Systems.” Thank you NSF!
More news
- 2025/9: Our position paper on preventing cloud regressions via inferred low-level semantics is accepted to appear at HotNets’25. Congrats Dimas!
- 2025/4: Congratulations to Zhenyu winning UVA CS Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award for his excellent service in CS4740 Cloud Computing!
- 2025/2: Our workshop paper on Verifying Large ML Models has been accepted by EuroMLSys ‘25.
- 2025/1: Will be serving on the NSDI’26 Program Committee.
- 2024/12: Will present our position paper on host anomaly detection and mitigation at AIOps’25.
- 2024/10: Congratulations to Tseganesh (Grace) for being selected to present her work at SOSP SRC!
- 2024/10: Zhenyu, Dimas, and Kahfi received SOSP travel grants. Thanks to the sponsors!
- 2024/10: Will be serving on the SOSP’25 Program Committee.
- 2024/5: Co-organizing a SIGCOMM workshop on Formal Methods × Networked Systems.
- 2024/4: Received grants from the 4-VA Collaborative Program.
- 2024/3: Invited to give a talk at the University of Chicago Systems Seminar.
- 2024/3: Will be serving on the NSDI’25 Program Committee.
- 2023/12: Gave a talk to student interns at Alibaba on graduate school advice.
- 2023/10: My Ph.D. thesis received an Honorable Mention for the ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.
- 2023/10: Will be serving on the EuroSys’25 Program Committee.
- 2023/9: Will be teaching CS4740: Cloud Computing with a new syllabus in Spring 2024.
- 2023/9: Received Google Cloud Computing Research Credits.
- 2023/8: A new chapter at UVA started.
Publications
Cong Chen, Youjiang Wu,
Zhenyu Li, Angting Cai,
Dimas Shidqi Parikesit,
Kahfi S. Zulkifli*, Wenbo Qian* (co-first author), Shaowei Zhu, Yuan Zhou, Zhen Zhang,
Ze Li,
(A TL;DR version from Morning Paper)
Students
I am very fortunate to work with these students:
- Zhenyu Li, Ph.D. student, 2024 - now
- Dimas Shidqi Parikesit, Ph.D. student, 2024 - now
- Kahfi Soobhan Zulkifli, Ph.D. student, 2024 - now
- Haoran Zhang, Incoming Ph.D. student (2026)
We are always actively looking for enthusiastic undergrad/graduate interns. Are you one of them? Send us an email if you are interested!
Teaching
- CS6501: Cloud System Reliability, Spring 2026, University of Virginia
- CS4740: Cloud Computing, Fall 2025, University of Virginia
- CS6501: Cloud System Reliability, Fall 2024, University of Virginia
- CS4740: Cloud Computing, Spring 2024, University of Virginia [course eval]
- CS6501: Cloud System Reliability, Fall 2023, University of Virginia [course eval]
- LiftLab Reading Group
Academic Service
Program Committee
- 2027: OSDI, NSDI
- 2026: SOSP, NSDI
- 2025: SOSP, NSDI, EuroSys, APSys, SIGCOMM FMANO
- 2024: ATC, SIGCOMM FMANO
Misc.
- Reviewer: ACM TOCS, IEEE TMC, ACM TOPS, IEEE TCC, ACM TACO
- 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.
- My favorite proverb is “The unexamined life is not worth living“ from Socrates. A related comics.
- I like to spend my leisure time reading or playing sports (mostly basketball). I play guitar sometimes [Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Eva Cassidy].
- My first name is Chang (畅). This sometimes causes confusion since Chang is also a common last name.
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.