Yuan Tang

Education

Georgia Institute of Technology Aug 2019

Master of Science in Computer Science

The Pennsylvania State University Aug 2012 - May 2015

Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with Honors [thesis]

Work Experience

Founding Engineer Sep 2021 - current

Akuity, Inc.

- Maintained Argo Workflows and Argo CD, the container-native workflow engine and declarative continuous delivery tools for Kubernetes;

- Designed and implemented major components of the Akuity Platform, an enterprise-ready and fully-managed DevOps platform that is scalable, reliable, and secure;

- Led the efforts to successful SOC 2 Type II compliance certification and hardened our engineering operation and security best practices.

Senior Software Engineer / Engineering Manager June 2018 - Aug 2021

Alibaba Group

- Built AI infrastructure and AutoML platform on Kubernetes; served as the co-chair of Kubeflow and led the development of various distributed training operators;

- Designed and implemented major components of ElasticDL to support fault-tolerance and elastic scheduling for deep learning workloads; co-inventor of the patent for the underlying system and method for distributed task execution; integrated with SQLFlow to enable machine learning with extended SQL dialect;

- Led the design and development of Couler and Argo Workflows to provide scalable cloud-native workflow orchestration for data science teams.

Senior Platform Engineer Dec 2017 - May 2018

H2O.ai, Inc.

- Contributed to the open source machine learning platform H2O;

- Built the model management component of Driverless AI that automates the end-to-end data science workflows.

Data Science Lead Sep 2015 - Nov 2017

Uptake Technologies, Inc.

- Led a team that built our scalable data science platform to monitor the condition of industry assets such as trains, airplanes, and wind turbines to avoid machine failures and reduce downtime;

- Built intelligent monitoring platform from the ground up to automatically monitor internal microservices in real-time at scale and was the lead inventor of the patent for the underlying anomaly detection algorithm;

- Led all the open source initiatives within data science team.

Selected Projects [full list]

TensorFlow [link] Committer

End-to-end open source platform for machine learning. Co-author of TensorFlow Estimators and maintainer of TensorFlow I/O

XGBoost [link] Committer & PMC

General-purpose gradient boosting library

Apache MXNet [link] Committer & PMC

Flexible and efficient deep learning library on heterogeneous distributed systems

Kubeflow [link] Co-chair and Technical Lead

Machine learning toolkits on Kubernetes. Co-chair of Distributed Training Working Group and maintainer of various Kubernetes operators

Argo [link] Maintainer

Maintainer of Argo Workflows and Argo CD, the container-native workflow engine and declarative continuous delivery tools for Kubernetes

Couler [link] Technical Lead

Unified interface for constructing and managing workflows on various cloud-native workflow orchestration engines

ElasticDL [link] Maintainer

Kubernetes-native deep learning framework with fault-tolerance and elastic scheduling

TensorFlow in R [link] Author

R interfaces to core TensorFlow components, including Estimators, Keras, and Datasets API

reticulate [link] Author

R interface to Python - comprehensive set of tools for interoperability between Python and R

ggfortify [link] Author

Unified interface to visualize popular statistical results with ggplot2 style

metric-learn [link] Author

Python package for state-of-art metric learning algorithms

Selected Services

Chaintool [link] 2022 - current

Technical Advisor on Distributed Graph Database and Machine Learning Systems [project]

Moises [link] 2021

Technical Advisor on Machine Learning Infrastructure

Maven Wave [link] 2020

Technical Advisor on MLOps and Open Source Strategy [project]

Kubeflow [link] 2020 - current

Co-chair of Distributed Training Working Group

XGBoost [link] 2019 - current

Project Management Committee Member

Synced 机器之心 [link] 2019 - 2020

Insight Partner on AI Technology & Industry Review

Computer Science Proficiency Assessment [link] 2019

Technical Steering Committee Member, Open Source Representative

Journal of Open Source Software [link] 2018 - 2022

- Editor on Machine Learning, Distributed Systems, and Cloud Computing, 2019 - 2022

- Reviewer, 2018

Apache MXNet [link] 2017 - current

Project Management Committee Member

Google Summer of Code [link] 2016 - 2022

- Mentor, Argo, 2022 [project]

- Mentor, Kubeflow, 2020 [project] [certificate]

- Mentor, TensorFlow, 2019 [project] [certificate]

- Mentor, R Project for Statistical Computing, 2016 [project] [certificate]

Selected Talks [full list]

[Keynote] Building for the Road Ahead: An Ode to Maintainers, the Life Blood of Our Ecosystem Oct 26th, 2022

Invited Keynote Speaker, KubeCon North America [link]

Data Science in the Cloud-Native Era April 19th, 2022

Invited Speaker, Open Data Science Conference [link]

[Keynote] When Machine Learning Toolkit for Kubernetes Meets PaddlePaddle Dec 12th, 2021

Invited Keynote Speaker, Wave Summit [link]

Unveil The Secret Ingredients for Argo CD at Enterprise Scale Dec 9th, 2021

Invited Speaker, KubeCon China [link]

Bridging into Python Ecosystem with Cloud-Native Distributed Machine Learning Pipelines Dec 8th, 2021

Speaker, ArgoCon [link]

Towards Cloud-Native Distributed Machine Learning Pipelines at Scale Oct 29th, 2021

Speaker, PyData Global [link]

Large Scale Distributed Deep Learning with Kubernetes Operators May 22nd, 2019

Invited Speaker and AI Media Roundtable Panelist, KubeCon Europe [link]

Considerations for Large Scale Analytics in Production Nov 28th, 2018

Invited Lecturer, Production Scale Implementation of Data Analytics, School of Management, Purdue University [link]

TensorFlow Overview - Why Should Statisticians Care? Oct 18th, 2017

Invited Lecturer, Advanced Machine Learning, Department of Statistics, Purdue University [link]

Introduction to TensorFlow Mar 3rd, 2017

Invited Speaker, American Statistical Association Conference on Recent Advances in Machine Learning [link]

Publications and Patents [Google Scholar]

[Book] Distributed Machine Learning Patterns 2021

Yuan Tang

Manning Publications

[Link] [GitHub]

[Book] Dive into Deep Learning (with TensorFlow)《动手学深度学习》 2020

Aston Zhang,

Zachary C. Lipton,

Mu Li,

Alexander J. Smola,

Anirudh Dagar,

Yuan Tang

[Link] [GitHub]

[Patent] System and Method for Distributed Task Execution 2020

Yi Wang,

Wei Yan,

Yuan Tang,

Haitao Zhang,

Chunyang Wen,

Minghao Li,

Jun Qi,

Yongfeng Liu

China Patent CN110609749A and Hong Kong Patent HK40019539

[PDF]

[Journal] metric-learn: Metric Learning Algorithms in Python 2020

William de Vazelhes,

CJ Carey,

Yuan Tang,

Nathalie Vauquier,

Aurélien Bellet

Journal of Machine Learning Research

[PDF] [bibtex] [GitHub]

[Preprint] A Scalable and Cloud-Native Hyperparameter Tuning System 2020

Johnu George,

Ce Gao,

Richard Liu,

Hou Gang Liu,

Yuan Tang,

Ramdoot Pydipaty,

Amit Kumar Saha

arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.02085

[PDF] [bibtex] [GitHub]

[Patent] Systems and Methods for Detecting and Remedying Software Anomalies 2020

Yuan Tang,

Tuo Li,

James Herzog

United States Patent US10635519B1

[PDF]

[Preprint] SQLFlow: A Bridge between SQL and Machine Learning 2020

Yi Wang,

Yang Yang,

Weiguo Zhu,

Yi Wu,

Xu Yan,

Yongfeng Liu,

Yu Wang,

Liang Xie,

Ziyao Gao,

Wenjing Zhu,

Xiang Chen,

Wei Yan,

Mingjie Tang,

Yuan Tang

arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.06846

[PDF] [bibtex] [GitHub]

[Journal] lfda: Local Fisher Discriminant Analysis in R 2019

Yuan Tang,

Wenxuan Li

Journal of Open Source Software

[PDF] [bibtex] [GitHub]

[Journal] dml: Distance Metric Learning in R 2018

Yuan Tang,

Tao Gao,

Nan Xiao

Journal of Open Source Software

[PDF] [bibtex] [GitHub]

[Journal] autoplotly: An R Package for Automatic Generation of Interactive Visualizations for Statistical Results 2018

Yuan Tang

Journal of Open Source Software

[PDF] [bibtex] [GitHub]

[Conference] TensorFlow Estimators: Managing Simplicity vs. Flexibility in High-Level Machine Learning Frameworks 2017

Heng-Tze Cheng,

Lichan Hong,

Mustafa Ispir,

Clemens Mewald,

Zakaria Haque,

Illia Polosukhin,

Georgios Roumpos,

D Sculley,

Jamie Smith,

David Soergel,

Yuan Tang,

Philipp Tucker,

Martin Wicke,

Cassandra Xia,

Jianwei Xie

Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

[PDF] [bibtex] [GitHub]

[Book] TensorFlow in Practice《TensorFlow实战》 2017

Wenjian Huang,

Yuan Tang

Beijing Publishing House of Electronics Industry

[Link] [bibtex] [GitHub]

[Journal] ggfortify: Unified Interface to Visualize Statistical Result of Popular R Packages 2016

Yuan Tang,

Masaaki Horikoshi,

Wenxuan Li

The R Journal

[PDF] [bibtex] [GitHub]

[Preprint] Incorporating Hierarchical Structure into Dynamic Systems: An Application of Estimating HIV Epidemics at Sub-National and Sub-Population Level 2016

Le Bao,

Ben Sheng,

Xiaoyue Niu,

Yuan Tang,

Tim Brown,

Peter D. Ghys,

Jeff W. Eaton

arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.05665

[PDF] [bibtex]

Awards

Multiple Awards by Teams at Alibaba Group 2020 - 2021

- Inner Source Pioneer, April 17th, 2021 [certificate]

- Top Open Source Contributor of the Year, Jan 20th, 2020

- Best Pull Request of the Week, May 3rd, 2020

The Publishers Association of China

Outstanding Author 2017

Beijing Publishing House of Electronics Industry

[certificate]

Open Source Peer Bonus Award 2016

Google Inc.

[announcement] [letter]

Multiple Awards to DataNovo Startup Team 2015 - 2016

- Top 3 Finalist by SXSW Interactive, 2016

- Top Startup Winner by TiE50, 2016

- Trial Support Software Innovation Award by Legaltech News, The Recorder, 2016

- B2B Finalist by Launch Festival, 2015

Best Virtual Reality Hack at HackRPI 2014

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

[announcement] [project]

Multiple Awards by Schreyer Honors College at Penn State 2014

- Pre-Eminence in Honors Education Fund ($5,000)

- Summer Research Grants ($1,200)

- NSF MCTP Grant and PMASS Fellowship ($12,800)

- John K. Tsui Honors Scholarship ($5,300)