Sheng Yao

Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

My name is Sheng Yao. I’m a Computer Science and Engineering Ph.D. student at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). I’m advised by Prof. Wei Wang.

Before that, I spent a wonderful gap year as a Research Assistant at Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems (IPADS) in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, advised by Prof. Zhaoguo Wang.

I enjoyed a three-month research advised by Prof. Cheng Tan from Northeastern University in 2022.

I received my B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering in The Ohio State University. Once a Buckeye, Always a Buckeye. I received The Ganobcik Family/Genesis Endowed Scholarship Award during my undergraduate.

I have broad research interests in distributed system, cloud computing, and other related stuff.

Feel free to drop me an email for any potential collaboration. ^_^

Email: sheng [dot] yao [at] connect [dot] ust [dot] hk

news

Mar 14, 2025	I will serve as a member of MLSys 2025 AE Committee.
Aug 19, 2024	I will serve as a member of SIGMOD’24 ARI Committee.
Jun 18, 2024	Research Intern at Alibaba Cloud.
Nov 23, 2023	WeBridge accpeted by SIGMOD’24.

selected publications

preprint

λScale: Enabling Fast Scaling for Serverless Large Language Model Inference

Minchen Yu, Rui Yang, Chaobo Jia, Zhaoyuan Su, Sheng Yao, Tingfeng Lan, Yuchen Yang, Yue Cheng, Wei Wang, Ao Wang, and Ruichuan Chen

Feb 2025

arXiv
SIGMOD

WeBridge: Synthesizing Stored Procedures for Large-Scale Real-World Web Applications

Gansen Hu, Zhaoguo Wang, Chuzhe Tang, Jiahuan Shen, Zhiyuan Dong, Sheng Yao, and Haibo Chen

in Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Jun 2024

Abs DOI PDF

Modern web applications use databases to store their data. When processing user requests, these applications retrieve and store data in the database server, which incurs network round trips. These round trips significantly increase the application’s latency. Previous approaches have attempted to reduce these round trips by prefetching query results or batching database accesses. However, neither method can efficiently reduce the latency when some queries depend on previous queries’ results. In real-world applications, nearly 50% of the queries depend on the result of other queries.This paper presents WeBridge, the first system capable of synthesizing stored procedures for large-scale real-world web applications. First, WeBridge employs concolic execution technique to analyze the applications and generate stored procedures for hot program paths. Then, it seamlessly integrates the stored procedures into the application by extending the database access library. Finally, it improves the efficiency of the stored procedures with speculative execution. Evaluation using real-world web applications and workloads show that WeBridge achieves up to 79.8% median latency reduction and up to 2\texttimes peak throughput.