Peng (Ryan) Huang

Ryan (Peng) Huang, an assistant professor of computer science, is known for his work on the reliability of next-generation operating systems and distributed systems.

The overarching goal of Huang’s research is to enable the construction of reliable, efficient, and defensible systems in emerging computing platforms, such as cloud, mobile, and IoT devices. His team works to identify system issues such as gray failure, misconfiguration, and energy misbehavior in an effort to ensure computer systems provide high-quality experiences to users and developers.

His projects often employ techniques from system design, program languages, program analysis, software engineering, and machine learning. Real-world applications of his research include preventing service outages in production cloud services, enhancing the performance of commercial data warehouse systems, and improving the behavior of mobile apps. He directs Johns Hopkins’ Ordered Systems Lab, which has released half a dozen open-source software programs to date.

Huang’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. He has received best paper awards from ASPLOS (Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems) and OSDI (Operating Systems Design and Implementation). He is also the recipient of JHU’s Professor Joel Dean Excellence in Teaching Award, which recognizes faculty members who exhibit extraordinary performance in teaching undergraduates. He has served as a program committee member for the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys), ASPLOS Student Research Competition, and the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 

Huang earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Peking University in 2010 and his PhD from the University of California San Diego in 2016. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor in 2017, he was a post-doctoral researcher for Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.