Francis Y. Yan

Senior Researcher
Microsoft Research Redmond

(starting spring 2025)
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

14820 NE 36th St, 99/2711
Redmond, WA 98052
About me

I am a Senior Researcher in the Intelligent Networked Systems Group at Microsoft Research Redmond. In the spring of 2025, I will be joining the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, with an affiliate appointment in Electrical & Computer Engineering.

My research builds and optimizes networked systems with practical machine learning (ML), ranging from developing large-scale systems and research platforms that lay the foundation for applying ML, to devising practical ML algorithms with mechanisms that improve their real-world deployability in systems and networks.

ML-enhanced video systems are a major thrust of my work. I am the creator of Puffer, a live TV service with over 360,000 real users, and a video research platform that has aided researchers in publishing top-tier and award-winning papers.

My vision is to enable a future of self-evolving systems, which intelligently and autonomously adapt their design (architectures and algorithms) and implementation (code and configuration) in response to changing environments and user behaviors. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has allowed us to take a first step toward this vision.

Prior to Microsoft Research, I received my Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, where I was advised by Keith Winstein and Philip Levis. Before that, I did my undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University (Yao Class) and MIT. I am a recipient of the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize, the USENIX NSDI Community Award, the USENIX NSDI Outstanding Paper Award, the USENIX ATC Best Paper Award, and the APNet Best Paper Award.

Prospective students

I will be recruiting multiple Ph.D. students for Fall 2025 to establish my research group at UIUC! Please apply to the CS Ph.D. program by December 15, 2024. Starting Spring 2025, I will also be looking for self-motivated master’s and undergraduate students to work with me. Please kindly read this page first before reaching out.

Recent news
Apr 2024
Very proud and excited that Autothrottle received the NSDI ’24 Outstanding Paper Award (formerly the Best Paper Award)! Read my post for details.
Mar 2024
Diffy was accepted at PLDI ’24!
Sep 2023
My former intern Zhiying Xu presented our work Teal at SIGCOMM ’23! Read my post for details.
Jul 2023
Co-chaired the ACM/IRTF Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW) ’23. Find video recordings and links to papers in my post.
More
Active workstreams
ML-assisted cloud applications
Self-evolving systems (LLM-based)

Please visit my research page for more details.