Jianan, Yao
Assistant Professor

Biography

Jianan Yao is a tenure stream assistant professor at the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Toronto. He previously worked as an applied scientist at the Automated Reasoning Group of Amazon Web Services (AWS). He obtained his B.Eng. from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia University, advised by Professor Ronghui Gu.

Jianan Yao‘s research spans the fields of programming languages, distributed systems, and machine learning, with the overarching goal of ensuring the correctness and security of safety-critical systems software through formal verification. He is particularly interested in automating the verification process, reducing the proof burden and specialized expertise required, thus facilitating its broader real-world application. To achieve higher automation, his research involves a combination of new verification pipelines, classical algorithms, and machine learning models, and has proven effective across various domains, including sequential programs, distributed protocols, and blockchain systems.

Awards

• Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award, OSDI 2021