Hello! My name is Qifan/Eric and I am currently a computer science 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). I am enthusiastic about creating new systems to facilitate machine learning and applying machine learning to optimise systems with the end goal of improving accessibility of ML to the general public. Previously, I completed my undergraduate honours 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.Outside of research, I have a masters degree in management as well as a variety of industry experiences in software development and technical consulting. Some of the notable projects that I have worked on include Amazon.com's core payment systems and SAP Concur's homepage. The artefacts (code, designs, documentation etc.) that I have created have directly or indirectly impacted millions of real customers. In addition, I have participated in technical consulting projects for the Supreme Court of Canada during my time at Deloitte which benefited major class action lawsuits concerning first nations.