Tao LIN

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, PI of LINs Lab at Westlake University.

Employment

• Tenure-Track Assistant Professor (Nov. 2022 - Present)
  School of Engineering,
  Westlake University, P.R. China.

Education

• Doctor of Science (Sep. 2017 - Jul. 2022)
  School of Computer and Communication Sciences,
  École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
  

• Master of Science (Sep. 2014 - Feb. 2017)
  School of Computer and Communication Sciences,
  École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
  

• Bachelor of Engineering (with honors) (Sep. 2010 - Jun. 2014)
  College of Electrical Engineering,
  Zhejiang University (ZJU), P.R. China.

Grants

• Participant: Industries of the Future Research Center Funding Project, Westlake University, 2024
• PI: National Natural Science Foundation of China for Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Overseas) 2023
• Participant (subproject leader): Science and Technology Innovation 2030 - Major Project, 12.2022 - 11.2027.
• co-PI: Algorithm Design for Memory Efficient Localized Model Parallelism, Huawei Munich, 01.2022 - 06.2023.
• Participant: DIGIPREDICT, EU Horizon 2020, 01.2021 - 01.2022.
• Participant: ColTraIn: Co-located DNN Training and Inference, 01.2017 - 12.2019.

Honors and awards

• Doctoral Program Thesis Distinction Award by EPFL, 2022
• Outstanding performance bonus awarded by EPFL, 2021, 2022
• Top reviewer: NeurIPS 2019 (50%), ICML 2020 (33%), AISTATS 2022 (10%)
• Teaching Assistant Award for Machine Learning Course, 2016.
• Zhejiang University Outstanding Graduates, 2014.
• 1st prize of MITSUBISHIELECTRIC Automation Competiton, 2013.
• Excellent Merit Student of Zhejiang University, 2011, 2012, 2013.

Teaching

• Lecturer of Research Methodology of Computer Science and Technology for graduate students at Westlake University, Fall 2023.
• Lecturer of Deep Learning for graduate students at Westlake University, Spring 2023.
• TA of Machine Learning at EPFL, Fall 2016, Fall 2018, Fall 2020, Fall 2021.
• TA of Deep Learning at EPFL, Spring 2018, Spring 2019.
• Other TAs at EPFL: Analysis I, Fall 2019; Signals and Systems, Spring 2020; Systems for data science, Spring 2021.

Invited talks/lectures

• [Talk] Federated Learning and Inference under Non-stationary Heterogeneous Data.
  School of Public Affairs @ Zhejiang University, April 2023; Hangzhou International Conference on Frontiers of Data Science, August 2023; WISE @ Westlake University, September 2023; Swarm Intelligent Unmanned Systems @ 2023 ZJU National Academic Forum for Ph.D. candidates, November 2023; Trustworthy Federated Learning Winter Camp, December 2023.
• [Lecture] Distributed Deep Learning: Introduction & Recent Advances.
  ZJU-CSE SUMMER SCHOOL on Networked Autonomous Systems, 2022.
• [Talk] Algorithms for Distributed Collaborative Learning.
  Westlake University, 2022; Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), 2022.
• [Talk] Accelerating Large-scale Distributed Deep Learning Training.
  Noah's Ark Lab (Shenzhen), Huawei, 2021; The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), 2021; Zhejiang University, 2021; Westlake University, 2021; Alibaba DAMO Academy (Hangzhou), 2021; Sun Yat-sen University, 2021.
• [Talk] Recent Trends in Distributed Training: Sparsified, Compressed and Local SGD.
  Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC). ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2019.

Professional services

• [Area Chair]: NeurIPS workshop on Advancing Neural Network Training (WANT): Computational Efficiency, Scalability, and Resource Optimization '2023.
• [Conference reviewer]: ICML '2019-'2023; NeurIPS '2019-'2023; ICLR '2021-'2024; AISTATS '2022-'2023; AAAI '2020.
• [Journal reviewer]: Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR); IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI); IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS); ACM Computing Surveys; Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT); IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (TSP).
• [Workshop reviewer]: OPT '2020-'2023; KDD Workshop on Federated Learning for Distributed Data Mining '2023; MLSys: Federated Learning Systems Workshop '2023; CLVision: Workshop on Continual Learning in Computer Vision (CVPR 2022); Competition Track NeurIPS 2023.
• [Organizing committee]: EPFL CIS EdgeAI 2022 Summer School.
• [Admission committee]: EPFL EDIC, Fall 2022.
• [Services for Westlake University]: Student Seminar Committee, since July 2023; Academic Exchange Committee, since July 2023.

Outreach and knowledge transfer

• Post-local SGD was integrated into Pytorch as a distributed optimizer.
• Interviewed by EPFL (news appeared on the EPFL front page), regarding our attempts in distributed deep learning to help industries gear up.