About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at City Universtiy of Hong Kong (CityU). Prior to that, I received my Ph.D. in computer science from University of Pennsylvania in December 2024, advised by Prof. Boon Thau Loo. I also work closely with Prof. Dahlia Malkhi (Chainlink Labs & UCSB), Prof. Ryan Marcus (UPenn) and Prof. Mohammad Javad Amiri (Stony Brook University). My research interest mainly lies in blockchains and AI-driven systems. I am especially interested in using machine learning to build the next generation of decentralized systems that are adaptive and smart. In pursuit of this goal, I have researched and published across the system stack, from adaptive transaction management to adaptive Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus and their underlying infrastructure.

🔥 I am looking for strongly motivated PhD students, research assistants, and summer interns. Interested applicants please email me with your CV and transcript at chenyuan.wu@cityu.edu.hk.

Publications

BFTBrain: Adaptive BFT Consensus with Reinforcement Learning
Chenyuan Wu, Haoyun Qin, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Boon Thau Loo, Dahlia Malkhi, Ryan Marcus
22nd USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), April 2025.

Towards Full Stack Adaptivity in Permissioned Blockchains
Chenyuan Wu, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Haoyun Qin, Bhavana Mehta, Ryan Marcus, Boon Thau Loo
50th conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), Aug 2024.

BFTGym: An Interactive Playground for BFT Protocols
Haoyun Qin, Chenyuan Wu*, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Ryan Marcus, Boon Thau Loo
*Corresponding author. Mentored and supervised the first author.
50th conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), Aug 2024.

The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocols Analysis, Implementation, and Experimentation
Mohammad Javad Amiri, Chenyuan Wu, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, Boon Thau Loo, and Mohammad Sadoghi
21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), April 2024.
🏆Outstanding Paper Award.

Towards Truly Adaptive Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Consensus
Chenyuan Wu, Haoyun Qin, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Boon Thau Loo, Dahlia Malkhi, Ryan Marcus
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Aug 2024.

AdaChain: A Learned Adaptive Blockchain
Chenyuan Wu, Bhavana Mehta, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Ryan Marcus, and Boon Thau Loo
49th conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), Aug 2023.

FlexChain: An Elastic Disaggregated Blockchain
Chenyuan Wu, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Jared Asch, Heena Nagda, Qizhen Zhang, and Boon Thau Loo
49th conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), Aug 2023.

Synthesizing Formal Network Specifications from Input-Output Examples
Haoxian Chen, Chenyuan Wu, Andrew Zhao, Mukund Raghothaman, Mayur Naik, and Boon Thau Loo
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), 2022.

Provenance for Probabilistic Logic Programs
Shaobo Wang, Hui Lyu, Jiachi Zhang, Chenyuan Wu, Xinyi Chen, Wenchao Zhou, Boon Thau Loo, Susan B. Davidson, and Chen Chen
23rd International Conference on Extending Database Technology, (EDBT), Apr 2020.
🏆Best Paper Award.

Preprints

On Orchestrating Parallel Broadcasts for Distributed Ledgers
Peiyao Sheng*, Chenyuan Wu*, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K. Reiter, Chrysoula Stathakopoulou, Michael Wei, Maofan Yin
*Both authors contributed equally.

Professional Experience

Chainlink Labs, May 2023 - Dec. 2023
Research Intern
Mentor: Dahlia Malkhi

Huawei, Central Research Institute, Nov. 2019 – Jan. 2020
Research Intern, Network Technology Lab

Teaching

Course Designer and Teaching Assistant
CIS 553 online: Networked Systems, Fall 2021, Spring 2022

Talks

AI-driven Adaptive Distributed Systems in Untrusted Environments
Job talk, October - December 2024
NUS(invited), NTU, CityU HK, HKUST(GZ), CUHK(SZ), SUTD, ShanghaiTech

On Orchestrating Parallel Broadcasts for Distributed Ledgers
Invited talk, UC Davis, Virtual, November 2023

AdaChain: A Learned Adaptive Blockchain
VLDB 2023, Vancouver, August 2023

FlexChain: An Elastic Disaggregated Blockchain
VLDB 2023, Vancouver, August 2023

Service

Conference Reviewer: aiDM @ SIGMOD 2025
Journal Reviewer: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (CCF-A), Transactions on Storage (CCF-A), Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (CCF-A), Transactions on Computers (CCF-A)
External Reviewer: CIKM 2022, WORDS 2021, CoNEXT 2020
Organizer: Distributed Systems Laboratory Seminar at UPenn, Fall 2022, Spring 2023

Awards

NSDI Outstanding Paper Award, 2024
VLDB Travel Award, 2023
EDBT Best Paper Award, 2020
Ph.D. Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2020
President’s Scholarship, 10 out of 15,000 in Beijing Jiaotong University, ranked #1, 2019
Chinese National Scholarship, highest honor for undergraduates, top 0.2% nation wide, 2019 & 2017
Second Prize in the National College Physics Competition, 2017