Xiaofan Yu

[Photo credit: Hui Shi]

Xiaofan Yu (于晓凡)

Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering
University of California, Merced

E-mail: xiaofanyu@ucmerced.edu
Office: Science and Engineering Building 2 (SE2) #382

Education:
Ph.D., UC San Diego, 2025, advised by Prof. Tajana Šimunić Rosing
B.S., Peking University, China, 2018

Awards:
ML&Systems Rising Star, 2024
CPS Rising Star, 2023
EECS Rising Star, 2022

More Information: My CV, Group's Website

Research Interests

Edge AI and energy-efficient computing
Embedded system design for real-world cyber-physical applications
Neuro-symbolic computing for continual (lifelong) learning tasks

I am broadly interested in building intelligent and autonomous embedded systems. Much of my work involves collaborations with academia and industry partners (full collaboration list).

Selected Publications

For the full publication list, see YuCCA Lab's publication or google scholar.

IMWUT'25

SensorChat: Answering Qualitative and Quantative Questions during Long-Term Multimodal Sensor Interactions

X. Yu, L. Hu, B. Reichman, D. Chu, R. Chandrupatla, X. Zhang, L. Heck, T. Rosing

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologie (IMWUT), 2025

Code Slides

SenSys'25

SensorQA: A Question Answering Benchmark for Daily-Life Monitoring

B. Reichman^*, X. Yu^*, L. Hu, J. Truxal, A. Jain, R. Chandrupatla, T. Rosing, L. Heck

ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2025

Code Slides

IPSN'24

Lifelong Intelligence beyond the Edge using Hyperdimensional Computing

X. Yu, A. Thomas, I. Gomez Moreno, L. Gutierrez, T. Rosing

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), 2024

Code Slides

IoTDI'23

Async-HFL: Efficient and Robust Asynchronous Federated Learning in Hierarchical IoT Networks

X. Yu, L. Cherkasova, H. Vardhan, Q. Zhao, E. Ekaireb, X. Zhang, A. Mazumdar, T. Rosing

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI), 2023

Code Slides

TCAD'20

Optimizing Sensor Deployment and Maintenance Cost for Large-Scale Environmental Monitoring

X. Yu, K. Ergun, L. Cherkasova, T. Rosing

IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design of Integrated Circuits & Systems (TCAD), 2020

Code Slides

Teaching

EECS 290 (Fall'26), EECS Seminar
EE 060 (Spring'26), Boolean Algebra and Digital Circuits

Mentorship

Since 2020, I have mentored approximately 50 students across high school, undergraduate, master's, and doctoral levels, supporting their research and professional development.
For the full student list, see YuCCA Lab's members or My CV.

Miscellaneous

Since 2021, I have been organizing paper reading groups to help students in:

reading papers accurately and efficiently,
designing and conducting research schedules,
discussing research effectively with other people.

Throughout this process, I have found that using a template I created is very helpful. You can explore a repository of all the papers we have reviewed here.