Rate My Professor Jia Rao

Jia Rao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Wuhan University in 2004, an M.S. in Computer Science from Wuhan University in 2006, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Wayne State University in 2011. Prior to his current role, Rao served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs from 2012 to 2016.

His research centers on operating systems, distributed systems, parallel computing, virtualization, multicore architecture, tiered memory management, and system support for machine learning. Rao investigates resource management and scheduling in cloud environments to deliver adaptive systems, scalable platforms, quality-of-service guarantees, performance isolation, and efficiency through techniques like reinforcement learning and feedback control. In 2019, he received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a four-year grant of $498,000, to redesign abstractions in virtualized systems, improving efficiency for cloud computing, scientific computing, and big-data analytics. Rao's prolific publications appear in top venues such as OSDI, SOSP, EuroSys, HPDC, and INFOCOM. Key works include "Nomad: Non-exclusive Memory Tiering via Transactional Page Migration" (OSDI 2024), "PVM: Efficient Shadow Paging for Deploying Secure Containers in Cloud-native Environments" (SOSP 2023), "SwitchFlow: Preemptive Multitasking for Deep Learning" (Middleware 2021, Best Paper Award), "Time Capsule: Tracing Packet Latency across Different Layers in Virtualized Systems" (APSys 2016, Best Paper Award), "iShuffle: Improving Hadoop Performance with Shuffle-on-Write" (ICAC 2013, Best Paper Award), and the highly cited "VCONF: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Virtual Machines Auto-configuration" (2009). Additional honors include best paper nominations at HPDC 2013 and HPCA 2013. His research has amassed over 3,500 citations on Google Scholar, underscoring its impact on cloud and distributed systems.