Dakai Kang

A seeker after Freedom, Democracy and Truth.


I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at ExpoLab, UC Davis, where I became a Ph.D. candidate in November 2024 after passing the Qualifying Examination. I conduct my research under the supervision of Prof. Sadoghi. My work focuses on designing and building high-performance, fault-tolerant distributed systems that operate reliably under adversarial conditions. My recent research interests include high-performance Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, fair transaction ordering, transaction scheduling, and parallel transaction execution in adversarial environments. I earned my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Zhejiang University in 2022.

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Publications

[1] Kang, D., Chen, J., Dinh, T. T. A., & Sadoghi, M. (2025). FairDAG: Consensus Fairness over Concurrent Causal Design. In Proceedings of VLDB 2026. Preprint.

[2] Gupta, S., Kang, D., Malkhi, D., & Sadoghi, M. (2025). Brief Announcement: Carry the Tail in Consensus Protocols. 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), 2025. Preprint, Blog.

[3] Kang, D., Gupta, S., Malkhi, D., & Sadoghi, M. (2025). Hotstuff-1: Linear consensus with one-phase speculation. Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 3(3), 1-29. Preprint, Paper, Blog.

[4] Kang, D., Rahnama, S., Hellings, J., & Sadoghi, M. (2024, May). Spotless: Concurrent rotational consensus made practical through rapid view synchronization. In 2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)(pp. 1916-1929). IEEE. Preprint, Paper.

Preprints

[5] Xie, S., Kang, D., Lyu, H., Niu, J., & Sadoghi, M. (2025). Fides: Scalable Censorship-Resistant DAG Consensus via Trusted Components. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.01062. Preprint.

Professional Experiences

● Research Intern, Mysten Labs, Palo Alto, June 2025 - September 2025.

Conducting research on transaction scheduling for parallel execution in multi-proposer Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols.

● Intern Software Engineer, Hangzhou Zhuxing Information Technology Co., Ltd, Hangzhou, 2020.

Full-stack software development.

Peer Review Service

Invited Reviewer

● IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (T-IFS), 2025
● IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2025
● ACM SIGMOD ARI (Availability & Reproducibility Initiative), 2025
● European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) Shadow PC program, 2026

External Reviewer

● ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2025
● International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2023-2025
● ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2024-2025
● IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2024
● ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware), 2024

Open-Source Project

I conduct my research on our resilient data platform ResilientDB [blog, codebase], a distributed ledger that centers around a democratic and decentralized computational model, with the goal of unifying secure transactional and real-time analytical processing. ResilientDB is currently under Apache Incubation. Since 2022, alongside my talented peer Junchao, we have re-architected and re-imagined its modular system design from the ground up. Our design embeds parallelism and deep pipelining at every layer to fully harness modern hardware and cloud infrastructure globally.

Awards and Fellowships

● GGCS Spring Quarter Fellowship Award, UC Davis (2023, 2024)
● GGCS Summer Ph.D. Fellowship (2023, 2024)

Teaching Assistant Experience

ECS265, Distributed Database Systems, UC Davis, Fall 2024, Fall 2025
ECS189F, Special Topics: Databases, UC Davis, Fall 2023
ECS165A, Databases, UC Davis, Winter 2023
ECS188, Ethics in an Age of Technology, UC Davis, Spring 2025

Google Scholar, LinkedIn

Science is for Human Development

The purpose of scientific research is to bring a better life to the human beings. I fully support any action that is conducive to the spread of universal values and the development of human civilization, and firmly stand with the oppressed weak around the world.