Steven (Fenghao) Dong
Ph.D. student in Electrical & Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University ·
CyLab ·
advised by Prof. Vyas Sekar
Office: RMCIC 2224A
About
I am a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, a member of CyLab, fortunate to be advised by Prof. Vyas Sekar. My current research is on synthetic data: how to make it cheaper to produce and more faithful to the downstream tasks people actually run. Right now I'm focusing on network packets, measurement data, and general time-series data.
Before CMU, I earned my B.S. degrees in computer science and B.S. in mathematics at Peking University, where I worked with Prof. Tong Yang on sketching algorithms and programmable switches.
Outside the lab, I am a serious fan of mathematics (abstract and continuous math only :)), and I LOVE chemistry. I earned a national gold medal in the Chinese Chemistry Olympiad (CCHO) in high school, and I still love organic chemistry. I also travel, hike, spend time outdoors, listen to country music, cook, and make room for cats and dogs.
News
- Won first place in the SIGCOMM’26 Student Research Competition with DeePCAP, and presented it as a poster in Denver, CO.
- Our vision paper ASAP: Reimagining the Data Lifecycle using Application Semantic-Aware Processing is on arXiv.
- TabQueryBench, a query-centric benchmark for synthetic tabular data, is on arXiv.
- PipHeap appeared at ACM IMC’25.
- Spent the summer at Rockfish Data as a machine learning intern, building their synthetic-data fidelity evaluation framework.
- Presented our first results on generative compression of network traces at WOSOC’25, co-located with NDSS.
- Started my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Vyas Sekar.