Yi Ding
 |
Yi Ding |
I am an Assistant Professor of the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, where I lead the STYLE (Sustainable and Trustworthy computing sYstems and LEarning) Lab. Previously, I was an NSF Computing Innovation Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate at MIT CSAIL mentored by Michael Carbin. During my postdoc, I also held a visiting position at Meta Infra Data Center to improve server maintenance efficiency in hyperscale datacenters. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Chicago advised by Henry Hoffmann.
I am a Planetary-Aware Computing researcher working at the intersection of AI/ML, computer systems, and human-centered computing. Computing spent decades optimizing performance, then learned to optimize energy and carbon. I believe the next generation of computing systems must understand the physical infrastructure, natural resources, and human systems they depend on. We are working to build that field. My research develops metrics, systems, and evaluation frameworks to make this vision actionable, with applications spanning sustainability and healthcare.
What is New?
2026-09: I gave a talk on Water as a New Constraint for Sustainable Intelligent Computing at the NII Shonan Meeting: Green Intelligence in Japan!
2026-08: BIRDS has been accepted as a Findings paper of EMNLP 2026! This is the first framework for characterizing biodiversity impacts of LLM serving. Congrats to all the authors!
2026-06: I am excited to lead Software Water Intensity project within Green Software Foundation to standardize software's water footprint measurement. See the full announcement and ECE news.
2026-05: Two papers on proactive mental health using smartphone sensing, a full paper and a demo paper featuring our Trivana mobile app, have been accepted to ACM/IEEE CHASE 2026! Congrats to all the authors!
2026-04: I gave an invited talk and joined a panel discussion on AI benchmarking and its environmental impact at the 9Zero Climate Innovation Hub at SF!
2026-03: I gave a webinar talk on Demystifying the Carbon Emissions of AI Datacenters, co-sponsored by the Hoosier Environmental Council and Purdue ISF.
2026-03: Excited to serve as PC Co-Chair for HotCarbon 2026! Consider submitting your best work on sustainable computing!
2026-02: I gave a talk about LLM quantization at the DOE/AFOSR Energy Consequences of Information Workshop at Santa Fe!
2026-01: Our collaborative work on ML for maintenance job scheduling with Meta is accepted to MLSys 2026! Congrats to all the authors!
2026-01: Our work on VLM for solving TSP problems is accepted to ICLR 2026! Congrats to all the authors!
2026-01: I did a podcast with Purdue ECE Engineering Innovation on the topic The Hidden Cost of AI: Making Data Centers Sustainable, which is fun! Also in Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
2026-01: Our work on carbon-aware caching for LLM serving is accepted to ACM SIGMETRICS 2026! Congrats to all the authors!
2025-11: The Manifesto of the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop: Climate Change: What is Computing's Responsibility? is published! My great honor to co-author with Vicki L. Hanson.
2025-10: Our work on carbon-efficient disaggregated speculative decoding is accepted to IEEE Computer Architecture Letters! Congrats to all the authors!
2025-10: Our research on biodiversity impacts of computing is featured on Purdue ECE Webpage!
2025-08: I gave a talk about water consumption impacts from AI and datacenters at the Indiana Water Summit!
2025-06: Two HotCarbon'25 papers accepted! We take a unique perspective by diving into water and biodiversity impacts of computing! Congrats to all the authors!
2025-05: Our paper FUEL on benchmarking environmental impacts of LLM serving is accepted to ACL 2025 Main conference! Congrats to all the authors!
2025-04: Our paper SSL-SE-EEG on robust learning unlabeled EEG data is accepted to IEEE EMBC 2025! Congrats to all the authors!
2025-03: Our paper EnsembleCI is accepted to ACM e-Energy 2025! It is the state-of-the-art average carbon intensity forecasting tool with the best prediction accuracy. Congrats to all the authors!
2025-02: Our paper I-HOPE on personalized mental health prediction for college students is accepted to ACM/IEEE CHASE 2025! Congrats to all the authors!
2025-01: Our paper on exploring college students' well-being through smartphone behaviors is accepted to MOBILESoft 2025! Congrats to all the authors!
2024-12: Congratulations to Gavin Fortwendel for winning 1st Place in Research Talk in CoE at Fall 2024 Undergrad Research Expo with his DUIRI project on sustainable LLM serving!
2024-10: Received the Seed Funding for High-Impact Review Papers (2024) with Inez Hua!
2024-10: One DUIRI undergrad research internship proposal has been accepted! The topic is synthesizing facility-level water consumption datasets in computing. Purdue undergrads are encouraged to apply here!
2024-09: One IGSC'24 paper on sustainable LLM serving accepted!
2024-07: Two HotCarbon'24 papers accepted! One focuses on uncertainty-aware datacenter decarbonization, and the other is about sustainable LLMs.
2024-06: Two DUIRI undergrad research internship proposals have been accepted! One focuses on LCA for sustainable AI computing, and the other examines energy use and carbon emissions in training autonomous vehicles. Purdue undergrads are encouraged to apply here and here!
2024-06: Applications for the NSF Workshop on Sustainable Computing are open. Submit your applications here!
2024-04-18: Inez Hua and I will oragnize an NSF Sustainability in Computing Workshop focusing on AI computing, water, and biodiversity. Thank NSF for the support!
2023-08-14: Joined Purdue ECE as an Assistant Professor.
2022-08-16: Gave a talk at Meta Infrastructure Data Science Faculty Workshop at KDD'22, DC.
2022-06-16: CAFQA accepted to ASPLOS'23. I introduced Bayesian optimization to search the Clifford ansatz efficiently for quantum accuracy.
2022-04-08: Minimax designs for long-term causal effects accepted to Biometrika, a top theoretical statistics journal.
2022-01-14: NURD for online datacenter straggler prediction accepted to MLSys'22.
2021-08-17: Won Meta Research Award on Statistics for Improving Insights, Models, and Decisions.
2021-07-29: Programming with Neural Surrogates of Programs accepted to Onward!'21.
2021-05-20: GIL for generalizable and interpretable configuration extrapolation accepted to ESEC/FSE'21.
2021-03-18: CIFellows Project Spotlight on CCC Blog and CRA Bulletin!
2021-01-04: Start my postdoc at PSG, MIT CSAIL!
2020-11-09: Attended EECS Rising Stars Workshop at UC Berkeley.
2020-11-03: Successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis!
2020-07-21: Selected as a 2020 Computing Innovation Fellow by CRA/CCC!