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I recently completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton Univerisity where I was a member of the Princeton Network Systems (SNS) group and advised by Amit Levy. Previously, I received my B.S.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a minor in Mathematics from Duke University.

I am broadly interested in systems, with about 8 years of experience in software development. My most recent research focuses on serverless computing problems such as orchestrating large-scale serverless applications and speeding up lightweight virtual machines. Previously, I worked on information flow control, first for the Android operating system and later for IoT applications. Even earlier I worked on Linux kernel drivers for storage servers when I occasionally debugged by looking at how the LEDs on the motherboard lit up.

Papers

• Doing More with Less: Orchestrating Serverless Applications without an Orchestrator
  David H. Liu, Amit Levy, Shadi Noghabi, Sebastian Burckhardt
  Proc. 20th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
  (NSDI ‘23) Boston, MA. April 2023.
  [paper] [slides] [code] [video]

• How Low Can You Go? Practical cold-start performance limits in FaaS
  Yue Tan, David H. Liu, Nanqinqin Li, Amit Levy
  ArXiv Technical Report:2109.13319, Sept. 2021
  [paper]

• Pyronia: Intra-Process Access Control for IoT Applications
  Marcela S. Melara, David H. Liu, Michael J. Freedman
  ArXiv Technical Report:1903.01950, March 2019
  [paper] [poster]

• Sandtrap: Tracking information flows on demand with parallel permissions
  Ali Razeen, David H. Liu, Alvin R. Lebeck, Alexander Meijer, Valentin Pistol, Landon P. Cox
  Proc. 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
  (MobiSys ‘18) Munich, Germany, June 2018
  [paper]

Personal

When I’m not working on a computer, I enjoy music, singing, gardening, and playing a few rounds of board games with friends and family. My wife and I currently live in Dallas.