Jie (Jimmy) has recently become my third PhD student to graduate with a dissertation titled “Toward Practical Application-Aware Big Data Systems.” Over the course of his PhD, Jimmy ended up contributing to most of the major projects of our group over the years, and we will miss him going forward. He’s joining Meta.

Jimmy officially started his PhD at Michigan in Fall 2016, but he started working with me from Summer 2017. He started working on one of the first projects of SymbioticLab on geo-distributed analytics that had taken many names over the years (Gaia/Terra/System H). While the core project didn’t go as expected, it created tools and artifacts that helped other projects published in SPAA and NSDI that Jimmy contributed to. After that Jimmy learned that sometimes its better to come up with your idea, and he successfully led end-to-end the Kayak project that provided a middle-ground between KV- and RPC-based systems. This was done in collaboration with Xin and his group. After moving from high-latency to low-latency networks, Jimmy’s final project moved in another very different direction. In Zeus, Jimmy and Jae-Won collaborated on understanding and optimizing the energy consumption of DNN training. I think Zeus is the best of his works and will have a lasting impact. While it was stressful as an advisor to see him change course so many times in a PhD, it was also fun to see him eventually find his footing on his own terms.

Jimmy is very inquisitive, which led to him exploring many different things during his PhD. He is also very good at taking feedback and improving himself, which he’s clearly demonstrated over the past five years. I’m sure he’ll ask many questions and explore many new things in the next chapter(s) of his career.