Chaoyang He
Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
Founder of FedML.ai and DistML.ai
R&D Manager and Staff Engineer at Tencent (2014-2018)
Senior Software Engineer at Baidu (2012-2014)
A lifelong learner with a strong passion and interest in scientific research, engineering, production, R&D team management, and entrepreneurship.
Chaoyang He is Ph.D. Candidate in the CS department at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA. He is advised by Salman Avestimehr (USC), Professor Mahdi Soltanolkotabi (USC), Professor Murali Annavaram (USC), and Professor Tong Zhang (HKUST). He also works closely with researchers/engineers at Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Tencent. Previously, He was an R&D Team Manager and Principal Software Engineer at Tencent (2014-2018), a Team Leader and Senior Software Engineer at Baidu (2012-2014), and a Software Engineer at Huawei (2011-2012). His research focuses on distributed/federated machine learning algorithms, systems, and applications. [Biography] [CV]
Chaoyang He has received a number of awards in academia and industry, including Amazon ML Fellowship (2021-2022), Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2021-2022), Tencent Outstanding Staff Award (2015-2016), WeChat Special Award for Innovation (2016), Baidu LBS Group Star Awards (2013), and Huawei Golden Network Award (2012). During his Ph.D. study, he has published papers at ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICLR, AAAI, MLSys, among others. Besides pure research, he also has R&D experience for Internet products and businesses such as Tencent Cloud, Tencent WeChat Automotive / AI in Car, Tencent Games, Tencent Maps, Baidu Maps, and Huawei Smartphone. He obtained three years of experience in R&D team management at Tencent between 2016-2018. With his advisors, he also co-founds FedML.ai, built based on a paper that won Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2020 FL workshop. [Production, Awards]
His long-term research goal is to develop Internet-scale networked and trustworthy AI/ML, which enables billion-level ML agent/workload to solve complex problems in a collaborative, scalable, secure, automated, sequential, sustainable, and ubiquitous manner in the networked system that involves the cloud, the communication channel, and the edge device.
To achieve such an ambitious goal, as a first step, he is now focusing on:
1. FedML.ai: Federated learning algorithms, models, systems, and their applications in CV, NLP, Data Mining (GCN/GNN), and IoT.
2. DistML.ai: Large-scale distributed training algorithms and systems for massive-scale DNN models (Transformers, ViT, BERT, MoE, Pathways, etc.)
3. Automated machine learning (AutoML) with Neural Architecture Search
4. Blockchain
5. Web 3 (decentralized Internet)
and exploring general research areas including: Machine Learning, Distributed Systems, Artificial Intelligence (CV/NLP/Data Mining/Robotics, etc.), Operating System (Mobile, IoT, Autonomous Driving, etc.), Security/Privacy.
Funding and Research Platform in Our Lab:
(For researchers in Machine Learning/CV/NLP/Data Mining/Large-scale Distributed Training System, if you would like to apply PhD/Post Doc position in the United States, please consider applying to our lab. We have many related findings as follows)
USC-Amazon Center on Trusted AI! (large-scale distributed learning, privacy, security, etc)
https://www.avestimehr.com/post/usc-amazon-center-on-trusted-ai
https://trustedai.usc.edu
FedCV! Funded by Konica Minolta.inc, to develop FedML for diverse computer vision applications.
https://www.avestimehr.com/news-spotlight/konica-minolta-sponsors-fedcv
Frontiers of Distributed Machine Learning: distributed pre-training of large-scale models (e.g., Transformers) for Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing
https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2020/04/usc-viterbi-researchers-win-2-million-darpa-grant/
Open, Programmable, and Secure 5G
https://www.darpa.mil/program/open-programmable-secure-5g
Intel/NSF Project on Machine Learning at the Wireless Edge!
https://www.avestimehr.com/post/intel-nsf-project-on-machine-learning-at-the-wireless-edge
FedML.ai
https://fedml.ai
News
- 11/21/2021: FL4NLP Workshop Proposal (Federated Learning for Natural Language Processing) has been accepted to ACL 2022. Welcome to submit your excellent works! Check this PDF for more details (topics, speaker, organizer, etc). You can read our FedNLP paper to find some interesting topics. We will release the next step soon.
- 08/05/2021: Invited Talked at Stanford MLSys [youtube recording] about Distributed ML System and Federated Learning [slides].
- 04/20/2021: Released FedML.ai, a federated learning research ecosystem (LinkedIn, Tweet)
- 06/01/2020: Congratulations to my wife! She got her 2nd master’s degree in the US (from USC; yes, we are alumni for the 2nd time) and started to work around Greater Los Angeles.
- 8/2/2018: Joined USC in August 2018
- 12/1/2017: [Tencent] I started to lead a Data Mining and data platform team at Tencent Cloud
- 04/15/2017: I received PhD offers from CMU, USC, Georgia Tech, and UCSB.
- 6/1/2015: [Tencent] I was promoted to Team Manager(L1-2) to manage a software development team including 10+ engineers.