I am a third-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 am working under the guidance of my Principal Investigator, Prof. Sadoghi. My research primarily focuses on Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols, with a particular interest in rotational consensus, concurrent consensus, DAG-based protocols and fairness in consensus.
Research
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.
The latest research works are:
- SpotLess (Accepted by ICDE 2024): A high-throughput Practical Rotational Consensus Protocol with a practical Rapid View Synchronization Mechanism. SpotLess has been implemented and tested in the legacy version of ResilientDB.
- HotStuff-1 (Accepted by SIGMOD 2025): A consensus protocol with low latency boosted by speculation and robust Byzantine fault tolerance, supported by a slotting mechanism. HotStuff-1 is implemented and tested in the new version of ResilientDB.
- Fides (Under Submission): An asynchronous DAG-based BFT consensus protocol that leverages Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to achieve a smaller required quorum size, low cryptographic overhead, and resistance to censorship. Fides is implemented and tested in the new version of ResilientDB.
- FairDAG (In Progress): A set of consensus protocols that aim to improve the fairness of transaction ordering in BFT consensus. FairDAG runs fair-ordering protocols on top of DAG-based consensus protocols, leveraging the properties of DAG-based consensus protocols to further enhance fair transaction ordering.
Publications
[1] 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.
[2] Kang, D., Gupta, S., Malkhi, D., & Sadoghi, M. HotStuff-1: Linear Consensus with One-Phase Speculation. In SIGMOD ’25: International Conference on Management of Data. ACM. Preprint.
[3] 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.
Awards
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GGCS Spring Quarter Fellowship Award, UC Davis (2023, 2024)
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GGCS Summer Ph.D. Fellowship (2023, 2024)
Teaching
- ECS165A, Databases, UC Davis, Winter 2023, Teaching Assistant
- ECS189F, Special Topics: Databases, UC Davis, Fall 2023, Teaching Assistant
- ECS265, Distributed Database Systems, UC Davis, Fall 2024, Teaching Assistant
Educational Experiences
- Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering, Zhejiang University, 2022.
- Research Assistant, Global Research Experience In Advanced Technologies [GREAT Program], UC Davis, 2021.
Professional Experiences
- Intern Software Engineer, Hangzhou Zhuxing Information Technology Co., Ltd, Hangzhou, 2020.
- Research Intern, Mysten Labs, Palo Alto, Staring in Jun 2025.
Other Personal Links
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.