Yuan Yao

Yuan Yao

Assistant Professor
Computer Architecture
Research group UART
Uppsala University, Sweden

About me

Hi! My name is Yuan Yao, or 姚[1]远[2] in Chinese.

My UU page is here.

Professional Background

I am currently an Assistant Professor at the Uppsala Computer Architecture Research Team (UART), Uppsala University, Sweden, where I obtained my Docent (Habilitation) in Computer Science in 2026.

I lead an independent research line on chiplet-based architecture and physical-layer-aware modeling. I also lead NEAT—Interconnection Networks for Heterogeneous AI Accelerators—a Swedish Research Council (VR) Starting Grant project on interconnects for heterogeneous AI accelerators. [Link]

I was a Postdoc researcher at Uppsala University 2019-2020. Before joining Uppsala University, I earned my PhD in Electronic and Computer Systems (2019) and an M.S. in System-on-Chip Design (2014), both from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Research Interests

My research focuses on:

  • Chiplet-based architecture and physical-layer (PHY) modeling
  • Cache coherence and synchronization
  • Trustworthy architecture simulation (gem5)
  • Network-on-Chip (NoC) design and heterogeneous architectures
  • Energy-efficient accelerators for emerging workloads (AI and big graphs)

Supervised Students

  • Rashid Aligholipour — PhD student; main supervisor (2020–present).
  • Hannah Atmer — co-supervisor (2021–present).
  • Shiming Li — co-supervisor (2021–present).
  • Pavlos Aimoniotis — co-supervisor (2021–present; now at Intel).
  • Weining Song — co-supervisor (2021–present).

I have also supervised over 20 MSc theses, including several industry-linked projects with SambaNova and Ericsson.

Open Source & Personal Projects

Beyond academia, I have my hobbies in open-source projects, particularly in:

  • gem5 (computer architecture simulation)
  • Linux kernel (low-level systems development. And yes, I hate bisects)

I also work on private projects for fun, typically during the summer break. Some of these can be found in the Tools section.

Besides programming languages

Myself speaks:

  • Chinese (Native)
  • English (Fluent)
  • Swedish (Basic communication)

Feel free to connect with me or check out my projects!