Yuan Luo

Data Architect · Computer Scientist · Entrepreneur
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Software Engineering, Google
Former Data Engineering Lead, Facebook
Former Head of Data Engineering, Edmodo Inc.

Industry Experience

Software Engineering

Google

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2018 - Present

Data Engineering Lead

Facebook

Headed data engineering and analytics effort in the following areas:

  • Development of early stage products in “mission impossible” emerging markets; Built data-aware product release process that made data availability a first-class citizen in the product development cycle;
  • All inbound traffic to Facebook (direct visits, referrals from search engines, paid marketing, emails, etc) and their downstream actions (registration, confirmation, login, resurrection, etc).

2017 - 2018

Head of Data Engineering

Edmodo
At Edmodo, I am honored to work directly with a group of excellent people (engineering, product, data, marketing, support), where I enjoy building platforms, developing products, hacking growth, and mentoring engineers and analysts.

1) Product, User Acquisition and Engagement:
  • Initiated and led "data to action" project and built a systems (Datacow) that consumes massive data and triggers actions such as email. The system has been widely used in Edmodo, from user onboarding and content digests, to user reactivation and marketing. Datacow has been reached out to 80+ million users and contributed greatly to the growth of active users. Datacow is the central engine to trigger all the non-transactional emails and push notifications.
  • Initiated and led the development of Edmodo's social recommendation system (PYMK), to increase user acquisition and engagement: a) user acquisition: recommend users to invite people from their contacts list, and b) user engagement: recommend users to connect with peers on Edmodo. Tests show that PYMK achieved the highest user acquisition rate among all our viral invite loop.
2) Data Platform:
  • Completed redesigned the entire data platform, including architected and led the development of data pipeline workflow management system, ETL process, and hybrid data stores. The new data platform (Redmodo), eases and expedites the consumption of 70 million user data for internal use (eg, Datacow) and for various product (eg, PYMK), while significantly increased the reliability and reduced the maintenance cost. Prior to Redmodo, data engineers performed adhoc fix literally daily. Now most maintenance tasks can be performed by data analysts and DevOps).
3) Email, Push Notification and SMS Platform:
  • Enhanced the platform to handle recipients and contents preparation and delivery with personalized user experience for millions of users on regular basis (tens of millions of deliveries per day).
2015 - 2017

Academia

Overview

He is most known for the Hierarchical MapReduce research which inspired 10+ US patents. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Indiana University in 2015. He was recipient of the K. Jon Barwise Fellowship in School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. His research committee members were Prof. Beth Plale, Prof. Geoffrey Fox, Prof. Judy Qiu, Prof. Yuqing Wu from IU, and Dr. Philip Papadopoulos from UCSD. He was a researcher at Data to Insight Center where he was tech lead of multiple NSF/NASA funded projects. He was a research intern at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in 2012, an research intern in Center for Research in Biological Systems (CRBS) at UCSD in 2009. He was member of Extreme Computing Lab at IUCS under Dr. Dennis Gannon.

Yuan Luo received his BS and MS degree in computer science from Jilin University in 2005 and 2008 respectively. He was a visiting scholar of University of California, San Diego.

He is affiliated researcher of Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA), and co-founder and co-chair emeritus of PRAGMA Students. He served as poster session Chair of the 23rd,24th and 25th PRAGMA Workshop, program committee member of PRAGMA24 and PRAGMA25, and demonstration session chair of PRAGMA27.

He was instructor of National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR) Summer Institute in 2006 and 2009.

Luo has been on the technical program committee of IEEE CloudNet conference since 2013.

Research Projects

Available here

Publications

Available here

Services

Membership

Hosted Research Workshops
  • Workshop Co-chair, The 1st - 4th PRAGMA Students Workshop, 10/2012, 03/2013, 10/2013 and 04/2014
  • Session Chair and Program Committee Member, The 23rd - 27th PRAGMA Workshop at Seoul, Korea; Bangkok, Thailand; Beijing, China; Tainan, Taiwan; Bloomington, Indiana, USA, 10/2012, 03/2013, 10/2013, 04/2014 and 10/2014
    (Reviewed over 100 abstract submissions for workshop posters and demonstrations over the years.)

Invited Paper Reviews

Entrepreneurship

Yuan Luo lost 40 lbs of fat in a 4-month period. He shares fitness experience with hundreds of thousands of followers on weibo.com. His body transformation story and diet recipes have received hundreds of millions of cumulative views on internet and impacted millions of people to keep fit and stay healthy. He co-founded in 2013 a stealth startup which later became the well-known FitTime即刻运动, led the startup grow user base, architect web platform, launch mobile apps, define and implement product and marketing strategies. He then left the startup to finish his PhD.

Education

Indiana University

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Major: Computer Science
Ph.D. Dissertation: Virtual Cluster Management for Analysis of Geographically Distributed and Immovable Data

Contact

Email: yuan AT yuanluo DOT net