portrait

Dr. Xiaotian (Steven) Dai

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Lecturer (~Assistant Professor)
Director of ReFLEX Lab
Real-Time and Distributed Systems Group
Department of Computer Science
University of York, UK

Office: CSE/136
Email: xiaotian.dai (at) york.ac.uk

About Me

I am a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York, where I lead the Real-Time and Flexible Cyber-Physical Systems (ReFLEX) Lab within the RTDS Research Group.

My research focuses on the scheduling and verification of cyber-physical systems, with particular emphasis on timing analysis and on improving flexibility and adaptability in safety-critical systems. This work has been applied to a wide range of real-world domains, including robotics, autonomous vehicles, avionics, control systems, 5G base stations, and transportation systems.

Expertise: My work spans modelling, scheduling, simulation, and analysis techniques for cyber-physical systems, as well as digital twins for feedback-driven runtime improvement and specialised hardware designs for safety-critical real-time and embedded systems. Many of these advances have been adopted in industry. I am also active in the robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) community, with a focus on operational safety, robustness, and resilience.

Track record: I have published over 30 peer-reviewed papers, with more than 500 citations and an H-index of 13. I regularly serve as a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member and reviewer for leading conferences and journals in real-time embedded systems, robotics, and design automation, and I also act as an external reviewer for UKRI funding.

You can find more about my research interests and projects on the research page. Information about joining my group is available on PhD opportunities. I also maintain a tracking website for real-time, embedded, and robotics systems, share robotics projects, and keep an amateur photography portfolio.

Background

I started as a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of York in 2023, joining the Real-Time and Distributed Systems Research Group.

From 2019 to 2023, I worked as a Research Associate on the MOCHA research project (funded by Huawei), under the supervision of Prof. Iain Bate and Prof. Alan Burns in the Real-Time and Distributed Systems Research Group (RTDS). MOCHA addressed complex many-core architectures with demanding performance and timing requirements, using digital twins and cache-aware scheduling to develop techniques for next-generation 5G/6G communication base stations.

Before MOCHA, I contributed to the EU H2020 DEIS project in 2019, working with Prof. Tim Kelly and Prof. Ibrahim Habli. DEIS focused on model-based safety assurance, built around the Structured Assurance Case Metamodel (SACM) standard, and developed supporting tools for autonomous and cyber-physical systems in collaboration with AVL, Siemens, General Motors, and Fraunhofer.

I first joined the Real-Time Systems Group at York in 2015 as a PhD student under Prof. Alan Burns, and completed my PhD in 2019 with a Best Thesis award. Before that, I received an MSc with distinction in Automatic Control and Systems Engineering from the University of Sheffield in 2014, following a BSc with First Class Honours in Automatic Control in 2011.

News

  • (paper) Mar 2026: Our paper “Beyond Exact: Tight WCET Analysis of GPU Kernels with Branch Divergence” is accepted at DAC 2026!
  • (service) Feb 2026: Invited as a TPC member of RTCSA 2026.
  • (service) Jan 2026: Invited as a TPC member of EMSOFT 2026.
  • (service) Jan 2026: Invited as a TPC member of RTNS 2026.
  • (paper) Dec 2025: Our paper “LEFT-RS: A Lock-Free Fault-Tolerant Resource Sharing Protocol for Multicore Real-Time Systems” is accepted at RTSS 2025 (Outstanding Paper)!
  • (service) Nov 2025: Invited as a TPC member of ECRTS 2026.
  • (service) Nov 2025: Invited as a TPC member of Ada Europe 2026.
  • (project) Oct 2025: Our proposal to use a humanoid robot for virtual production (RAVEN-G1) was granted (£48k).
  • (project) Oct 2025: Our proposal on imitation training of humanoid robots for filming was granted via Google Cloud Research Credits Program (£3,731).
  • (paper) Sep 2025: Our paper “A Hybrid Approach to Refine WCRT Bounds for DAG Scheduling Using Anomaly Classification” is published in IEEE Transactions on Computers!
  • (talk) Aug 2025: Invited Talk, “Digital Twin for Real-Time Cyber-Physical Systems”, on the Systron Lab Research and Demo day.
  • (service) Aug 2025: Invited as a TPC member of IEEE RTSS 2025 (AE and BP sessions).
  • (service) Aug 2025: Invited as the Publication Chair of IEEE RTAS 2026.
  • (paper) July 2025: Our poster “Criticality-aware Scheduling and Path Planning for Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems” is published at TAROS'25!
  • (service) July 2025: Invited as a TPC member of IEEE MOST 2026.
  • (project) July 2025: Our resident programme proposal was accepted by XR Stories, which will focus on robots and digital twins for virtual production (details can be found here).
  • (paper) Mar 2025: Our paper, “A cache-aware DAG scheduling method on multicores: Exploiting node affinity and deferred executions”, is published in Journal of Systems Architecture [Paper].

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