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PhD Computer Engineering

Purdue University - West Lafayette

• Currently pursuing
• Research in computer network systems, security and privacy, network intrusion detection systems, and caching.
• Completed coursework in datacenter and cloud networks, big data reliability and security, ML driven computer networking, computation models, and convex and stochastic optimization.

B.S. Computer Engineering

Purdue University - West Lafayette

• 3.83 GPA
• Completed coursework in computer networks, artificial intelligence, ASIC design, cybersecurity, operating systems, and more.

Graduate Research Assistant

Purdue University

• Collaborated with Microsoft Research and Princeton University to develop a novel ruleset and probe selection scheme, and \ cost-performance optimizer for datacenter intrusion detection systems.
• Demonstrated performance improvements of up to 76% compared to baselines, with performance within 7% of optimal, while processing \ network traffic across thousands of edges within seconds.
• Created and evaluated novel network cache prediction technique, producing up to 180% better cache performance and up to 75% \ reduction in flow completion time compared to state-of-the-art, with 0% performance loss in worst cases.
• Presented design in clear, concise, and understandable way to a crowd of academic and industry researchers at NSDI 2024. \ Presentation is publicly viewable online at www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi24/presentation/lei.

Research Intern, Network Research Group

Microsoft Research

• Designed, implemented, and evaluated highly efficient and explainable network flow matcher for datacenter traffic, \ lowering costs by 99.98%, speeding up slow-path verification by 1700%, and reducing table memory overhead by 93% \ compared to state-of-the-art.
• Collaborated with other researchers, interns, and professors across Microsoft Research, Purdue University, Princeton \ University, UIUC, and beyond to solve research and design challenges in large-scale security pipeline.
• Exhibited designs and findings in digestible and comprehensible manner at a poster session and two presentations to employees \ and interns across Microsoft.

Research Scientist Intern

Riverside Research, Secure and Resilient Systems

• Developed isolation system to prevent 100% of direct-map attacks between shared operating systems on the Xen hypervisor for ARM architecture.
• Led group of 4+ interns in the design, implementation, and testing of secure car fob firmware using a variety of security and encryption \ techniques such as AES 256, hash salting, and spoof prevention during eCTF competition with MITRE.
• Debugged open-source Xen Imagebuilder repository by resolving issue which would crash compilation when direct mapped memory was disabled. \ Collaborated with employees, interns, and Xen developers to push and merge fix.

Undergrad Research Assistant

Purdue University

• Created software simulation for stateful multi-pipelined programmable dataplane network switch prototype.

Software Engineer Intern, Core Tech Engines

Nuance Communications

• Automated upgrade policies, commit tagging, and issue resolution pipelines, creating a more streamlined code review and issue tracking \ process for engineers, researchers, and IT.
• Expanded test coverage for Dragon NaturallySpeaking product by adding over 50 new unit tests across multiple components of the NLP engine \ using C++, Python, and Lua.
• Resolved over 100 memory-related security vulnerabilities in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 and 15 products.

• Ross Fellowship

• Dean's List and Semester Honors

• National Merit Scholar