Sean Nian

I am an incoming Computer Science PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I will be advised by Dr. Fan Lai. Currently, I am an R&D Software Engineer Intern at the PACCAR Innovation Center, where I develop edge-to-cloud data pipelines for commercial vehicle systems. I am very fortunate to be a recipient of the 2025 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

My research interests are broadly in the intersection of distributed systems, computer networks, and machine learning.

Before that, I graduated from San Jose State University (SJSU), where I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with Honors. I had the privilege of being advised by Dr. Genya Ishigaki and Dr. Ben Reed. Additionally, I conducted research with Dr. Arthi Padmanabhan at Harvey Mudd College as part of an NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates.

Publications

K. Hollingsworth, S. Nian, A. Gutierrez, and A. Padmanabhan. An Analysis of Network Overhead in Distributed TinyML. [Short Paper]. IEEE/ACM Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC), Rome, Italy, 2024, pp. 449-455. [Paper]

Thank you to the NSF Student Travel Grant for supporting my travel to present this work at SEC 2024 in Rome.
S. Nian and G. Ishigaki. Autoscaling in Knative for Serverless Computing Using Deep Reinforcement Learning. [Short Paper]. IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Taipei, Taiwan, 2025. (Under Review).

Other

S. Nian, A. Huang, and B. Reed. Building a Mastodon Compatible Java Server for ActivityPub. [Preprint]. arXiv:2412.09011 [cs.SI], 2024. [Paper]
S. Qi, X. I. Quan, T. Park, and B. Makani. The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Enhancing Scholarly Research – AI Tools Evaluation. [Acknowledged Research Assistance: S. Nian]. Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines, vol. 11, no. 3/4, Feb. 2025, pp. 90-114. [Paper]