Contact

• Mailing Address
  
  Dongfang Zhao
  University of Washington, Box 352350
  185 E Stevens Way NE
  Seattle, WA 98195
• Office hour: Allen Center, CSE 624, by appointment
• Homepage: https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/zhao-dongfang/
• Zoom: washington.zoom.us/j/2066010000
• Email: dzhao@cs.washington.edu

Biography

Since 2025, Dr. Dongfang Zhao has been an adjunct assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle. Before that, he joined the UW Tacoma School of Engineering & Technology as an assistant professor of computer science and the UW eScience Institute as an affiliate faculty of data science. He was previously a postdoc advised by Prof. Magdalena Balazinska.

Prof. Zhao is a U.S. citizen naturalized in California originally relocating from Belgium, where he completed his thesis in the Department of Mathematics van de Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Research

• I founded the High-Performance Data-Intelligence Computing (HPDIC) research lab
• Publications indexed by third-parties: Google Scholar (overestimated due to my popular Chinese name), DBLP (missing some works)
• If you are interested in working on databases/AI/HPC/cryptography, here in the following are some potential topics:
  • [ICDM'25] ProHD: Projection-Based Hausdorff Distance Approximation
  • [ECAI'25] IPBA: Imperceptible Perturbation Backdoor Attack in Federated Self-Supervised Learning
  • [ICWS'24] Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence on Edge Devices: A Homomorphic Encryption Approach
  • [PAKDD'24] Towards Nonparametric Topological Layers in Neural Networks
  • [SIGMOD'23] Toward Efficient Homomorphic Encryption for Outsourced Databases through Parallel Caching
  • [IPDPS'22] Topological Modeling and Parallelization of Multidimensional Data on Microelectrode Arrays
  • [IPDPS'22] DEAN: A Lightweight and Resource-efficient Blockchain Protocol for Reliable Edge Computing
  • [ICDE'21] SciChain: Blockchain-enabled Lightweight and Efficient Data Provenance for Reproducible Scientific Computing
  • [SC'21] BAASH: lightweight, efficient, and reliable blockchain-as-a-service for HPC systems
  • [AAAI'20 oral] HDK: Toward High Performance Deep-Learning-Based Kirchhoff Analysis
  • [NDSS'20] Consortium Blockchain for the Assurance of Supply Chain Security
  • [PPoPP'20] Reflector: A Fine-Grained I/O Tracker for HPC Systems
  • [SC'19] Swift machine learning model serving scheduling: a region based reinforcement learning approach
  • [SC'19] HPChain: An MPI-Based Blockchain Framework for Data Fidelity in High-Performance Computing Systems
  • [VLDB'17] Comparative Evaluation of Big-Data Systems on Scientific Image Analytics Workloads
  • [TPDS'16] Towards Exploring Data-Intensive Scientific Applications at Extreme Scales through Systems and Simulations
  • [IPDPS'13] ZHT: A Light-Weight Reliable Persistent Dynamic Scalable Zero-Hop Distributed Hash Table
  • [TPAMI'09] Incremental Isometric Embedding of High-Dimensional Data Using Connected Neighborhood Graphs
• If you are interested in working on arithmetic geometry, I suggest reading the following texts first:
  • Introduction to Algebraic Geometry, by Brendan Hassett. (Mostly computational perspective)
  • Algebraic Geometry, by Robin Hartshorne. (Basic scheme-theoretic tools, e.g., Chapters II & III)
  • Algebraic Geometry and Arithmetic Curves, by Qing Liu. (More scheme details & arithmetic examples)
  • Étale Cohomology, by James Milne. (Generalized sheaves on finer topology than spectrum)

Teaching

I regularly offer the following courses every year (quarters may vary though):

• CSE 498: Undergraduate Research
• CSE 499: Reading and Research
• TCSS 558: Distributed Computing
• TCSS 590: Database Encryption

Selected Professional Services

• Associate Editor: IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII)
• Associate Editor: Journal of Big Data (Springer)
• Editorial Board: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS)
• Reviewer: zbMATH (European Mathematical Soceity)

Resources

• UW CSE: bicycle.cs.washington.edu
• UW Web: ovid.u.washington.edu
• UW HPC: klone.hyak.uw.edu
• TACC CPU: 129.114.109.34
• TACC GPU: 129.114.109.59
• UChicago GPU: 192.5.87.159