My research interest mainly falls in system reliability and GPU architecture. I received a Ph.D. degree in the Department of Computer Science at William & Mary in 2022, under the supervision of Prof. Evgenia Smirni. Before coming to W&M, I got my bachelor's degree in computer science from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2016. Check my CV here

• I am looking for several highly-motivated students who are interested in system research to join my group. In particular, I am looking for a student interested in Reliability of Autonomous Driving Systems. Ph.D. students will be fully funded. If you are interested: Click here for more details or send your CV and transcript to my email (lyang28 AT gmu.edu).

• I am honoured to receive the Best Reviewer Award from ICPE 2024.

Publications

GPU Reliability Assessment: Insights Across the Abstraction Layers
CLUSTER 2024 (Acceptance rate: 28.2%, Best Paper Finalist) [PDF]
Lishan Yang, George Papadimitriou, Dimitrios Sartzetakis, Adwait Jog, Evgenia Smirni, Dimitris Gizopoulos

Aspis: Lightweight Neural Network Protection Against Soft Errors
ISSRE 2024 [PDF]
Anna Schmedding, Lishan Yang, Adwait Jog, Evgenia Smirni

Strategic Resilience Evaluation of Neural Networks within Autonomous Vehicle Software
SafeComp 2024 (Acceptance rate: 23.5%)
Anna Schmedding, Philip Schowitz, Xugui Zhou, Yiyang Lu, Lishan Yang, Homa Alemzadeh, Evgenia Smirni

Investigating the Impact of High-Level Software Design on Low-Level Hardware Fault Resilience
DSN 2023, Disrupt23 track
Bohan Zhang, Lishan Yang, Hui Xu, Guanpeng Li

Epidemic Spread Modeling for COVID-19 Using Cross-fertilization of Mobility Data
IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD), 2023
Anna Schmedding, Riccardo Pinciroli, Lishan Yang, Evgenia Smirni

GeoSpread: an Epidemic Spread Modeling Tool for COVID-19 Using Mobility Data
GoodIT 2022
Anna Schmedding, Lishan Yang, Riccardo Pinciroli, Evgenia Smirni

Strategic Safety-Critical Attacks Against an Advanced Driver Assistance System
DSN 2022, Practice Experience Report
Xugui Zhou, Anna Schmedding, Haotian Ren, Lishan Yang, Philip Schowitz, Evgenia Smirni, Homa Alemzadeh

Lifespan and Failures of SSDs and HDDs: Similarities, Differences, and Prediction Models
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2022
Riccardo Pinciroli, Lishan Yang, Jacob Alter, Evgenia Smirni

SUGAR: Speeding Up GPGPU Application Resilience Estimation with Input Sizing
Sigmetrics 2021 (Fall Deadline, Acceptance Rate: 12%) [PDF] [video] [Slides]
Lishan Yang, Bin Nie, Adwait Jog, Evgenia Smirni

Enabling Software Resilience in GPGPU Applications via Partial Thread Protection
ICSE 2021 (Acceptance Rate: 22%) [PDF] [Video] [Slides]
Lishan Yang, Bin Nie, Adwait Jog, Evgenia Smirni

Practical Resilience Analysis of GPGPU Applications in the Presence of Single- and Multi-bit Faults
IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 70, no. 1, pp. 30-44, 1 Jan. 2021 [PDF]
Lishan Yang, Bin Nie, Adwait Jog, Evgenia Smirni

Fault Site Pruning for Practical Reliability Analysis of GPGPU Applications
MICRO 2018: 749-761 (Acceptance Rate: 21%) [PDF] [Lightening Video] [Slides] [Poster]
Bin Nie, Lishan Yang, Adwait Jog, Evgenia Smirni

Evaluating Scalability and Performance of a Security Management Solution in Large Virtualized Environments
ICPE 2018: 168-175 [PDF] [Slides]
Lishan Yang, Ludmila Cherkasova, Rajeev Badgujar, Jack Blancaflor, Rahul Konde, Jason Mills, Evgenia Smirni

G-NET: Effective GPU Sharing in NFV Systems
NSDI 2018: 187-200 (Acceptance Rate: 16%) [PDF]
Kai Zhang, Bingsheng He, Jiayu Hu, Zeke Wang, Bei Hua, Jiayi Meng, Lishan Yang

Refereed Posters

Probing Weaknesses in GPU Reliability Assessment: A Cross-Layer Approach
ISPASS 2021, Poster [PDF]
Lishan Yang, George Papadimitriou, Dimitrios Sartzetakis, Adwait Jog, Evgenia Smirni, Dimitris Gizopoulos

Typhoon: Enabling GPGPU Application Resilience Estimation with Different Input Types
ACM Sigmetrics Student Research Competition (SRC) 2021 [PDF]
Lishan Yang

Simulating COVID-19 Containment Measures Using the South Korean Patient Data
Sensys 2020, COVID-19 Pandemic Research Poster Session [PDF] [Slides] [Demo]
Lishan Yang, Anna Schmedding, Riccardo Pinciroli, Evgenia Smirni

Students

I am fortunated to work with the following students:

  • Yu Sun (PhD student, since 2023 Fall)
  • Zhu Zhu (PhD student, since 2023 Fall)
  • Daehyun Lee (MS student, since 2024 Fall)
  • Dhatri Parakal (Undergrad from UIUC, since 2024 Spring, recruited from ASSIP)
  • Cherish Mulpuru, George Mason University, since 2024 Fall (Undergrad, supported by CCI NoVA-node URA program)
  • Sofia Francisco Skamnelos (High school student from Holton-Arms School, since Nov 2024, through an initiative of "Directed Reading" program with Holton-Arms School)
  • Grace Xiao (High school student from Holton-Arms School, since Nov 2024, through an initiative of "Directed Reading" program with Holton-Arms School)
  • Lucia M. Noto (High school student from Holton-Arms School, 2024 May-Sep, through an initiative of "Directed Reading" program with Holton-Arms School)
  • Weilon Price, George Mason University, 2022-2023 (Undergrad)

Research Funding

My research group is supported by the following research grants:

  • NSF, #CCF-2402940, 2024-2027
Collaborative Research: SHF: Medium: End-to-End Resilience in Autonomous Driving Systems: Strategic Vulnerability Assessment and Mitigation
Role: lead-PI
With Dr. Homa Alemzadeh (University of Virginia) and Dr. Evgenia Smirni (William & Mary)

  • NSF, #OAC-2410856, 2024-2027
Collaborative Research: Elements: MELIOREM: An Integrated Evaluation Cyberinfrastructure towards Safe and Dependable Autonomous Driving Systems
Role: co-PI
With Dr. Guanpeng Li (lead-PI, University of Iowa)

  • NSF, #OAC-2417718, 2024-2028
Collaborative Research: CyberTraining: Implementation: Medium: AI4EDU: Cloud Infrastructure-Enabled Training for AI in Educational Research and Assessment
Role: co-PI
With Dr. Ningfang Mi (lead-PI, Northeastern University), Yu Wang (Temple University), Chiu C. Tan (Temple University), Chuang Wang (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

  • Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI), #HC‐3Q24‐047, Research in Supply Chain Cybersecurity, 2024.
Securing the Machine Learning Components of Autonomous Systems: Risk Assessment and Mitigation
Role: co-PI
With Dr. Evgenia Smirni (lead-PI, William & Mary)

  • George Mason University startup fund.

Teaching

CS692 Special Topics: Reliability in Computer Systems, 2024 Fall
CS692 Special Topics: Advanced Computer Architecture, 2024 Spring
CS475 Concurrent & Distributed Systems, 2023 Fall
CS695 Special Topics: Advanced Computer Architecture, 2023 Spring
CS475 Concurrent & Distributed Systems, 2022 Fall

Services

Program Committees
PPoPP 2025, DSN 2025, Sigmetrics 2025, ICPE 2025, ICDCS 2025, EDCC 2025, U-SPACE 2025, Sigmetrics 2024, DSN 2024, ICPE 2024, CLUSTER 2024, SAC 2024, HiPC 2024, Cluster 2024 Poster Track, CCGrid 2024 Doctoral Symposium and Early Career Track, DSN 2023, SC 2023, IPDPS 2023, HPDC 2023, SRDS 2023, AIPerf 2023, LADC 2023 Student Forum, ESANN 2023 special session

Organizing Committees
Sigmetrics 2025 (SRC Chair), ICPE 2025 (Industry Chair), DSN 2025 (Artifact Chair), Sigmetrics 2024 (SRC Chair), DSN 2024 (Posters Track Chair), HPDC 2024 (Social Media Chair), ICPE 2024 (Vision and WiP Track Chair), DSML 2023 (General and PC Chair), Sigmetrics 2023 (Publicity Chair), HPDC 2023 (Social Media Chair), HotStorage 2023 (Virtual Conference Chair)

Steering Committee
DSML (Workshop of Dependable and Secure Machine Learning)

Panelist
ISSRE 2024 Doctoral Symposium Discussion Panel
W&M Symposium for Graduate Studies 2022

Journal Reviewing
IEEE TC (Transactions On Computers)
ACM TACO (Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization)
ACM TOMPECS (Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems)
IEEE TDSC (Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing)
Computers and Electrical Engineering (ScienceDirect)


Faculty Advisor of GMU CS-GSA (Graduate Student Association)

Session Chair & Poster Judge
ACM Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC) 2021 and 2022

Sub-reviewer
Sigmetrics 2022, DSN 2022, DSN 2021, Sigmetrics 2021, Sigmetrics 2020, Performance 2020, ICPE 2020, Sigmetrics 2019, DSN 2019

Member
WHPC-Virginia (Women in High Performance Computing in Virginia)
SWC-WM (Society of Women in Computing in William & Mary)

Volunteer
HPDC 2019 Program Committee Meeting

Mentor
HackViolet 2022