Hi there 👋

My name is Eric or Qifan Yan (闫启帆). I am a master’s student under the supervision of Dr. Raouf Boutaba at the University of Waterloo. I am broadly interested in distributed systems, networking, and machine learning (specifically federated learning). Previously, I completed my undergraduate honors thesis with Dr. Ivan Beschastnikh at the University of British Columbia (UBC)’s Systopia Lab. We explored cool ways of addressing the communication bottleneck in cross-device federated learning with techniques like update compression, client sampling, and scheduling. Furthermore, I have industry experience at Amazon, SAP, and Deloitte, where I worked on software and business development projects. Ultimately, I want to design and build novel systems to make machine learning more accessible to the public.

Outside of computer science, I graduated from UBC’s Master of Management Dual Degree Program, where I got to take some eye-opening business courses and interact with many interesting people in other fields. I also love experiencing the outdoors and trying new strategy/simulation/RPG games. A recent hike I enjoyed tremendously is Stawamus Chief in Squamish, BC, Canada. A recent game I had a lot of fun with is Unicorn Overlord.

Feel free to contact me if you are interested in chatting!