James Pan @ Tsinghua

James Pan

Room 1-826, Building 1
Ziqiang Science and Technology Building
Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Email: jpan@tsinghua.edu.cn

I am an Assistant Researcher in the Database Group at Tsinghua University, led by Guoliang Li. I obtained my PhD from Tsinghua University. Before coming to computer science, I studied bioengineering. I obtained my B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Bioengineering from the University of Maryland, College Park. During my masters, I spent time in the Human Performance Laboratory under Prof. Arthur Johnson and worked on medical devices for personal healthcare. Before starting the PhD, I was an Associate Consultant and then a Product Support Manager at Microstrategy (now just Strategy).

Research

LLM Inference Systems. I am currently working on an easy-to-use serving system for running LLMs on any computing environment. The autoregressive nature of transformer-based language models raises new challenges from a systems perspective, touching on fundamental areas such as scheduling, load balancing, and memory management. These challenges are made worse when powerful GPUs are not available. I am investigating how DB and ML techniques can be used to design high-performance inference systems for LLMs that optimally manage the limited compute and memory resources and automatically adapt to hardware and workload conditions, without the need for expert tuning.

Vector Databases. I am also involved in developing techniques and systems to support large-scale high-dimensional vector similarity queries that are used to power semantic search applications, such as RAG. Similarity search has a long history, but these modern workloads are leading to new questions, such as how to efficiently support new query types like filtered and cross-modal queries, as well as how to support efficient disk-based search.

I am looking for masters and PhD students to help me with these projects.

Living and Working in Beijing. Tsinghua University is located in the Haidian district of Beijing, China, near the Summer Palace (and the Old Summer Palace). The international community is small but growing. Beijing itself is very huge and vibrant. If you would like a taste of the city from an international perspective, or are already in the city and just looking for things to explore, I recommend checking out The Beijinger. P.S. If you are interested in cycling, Beijing is flanked by mountains to the north and west that offer excellent cycling routes.

Publications