Yifan Xu
Hi! I’m Yifan Xu, a senior at Rice University majoring in Operations Research, Computer Science and Mathematics. I am currently working with Professor Shiqian Ma on a GPU-accelerated first order method for the (Kantorovich) Discrete Optimal Transport problem, and with Professor Sungho Shin on general-kernel augmented Lagrangian methods for large-scale, degenerate nonlinear programming on GPUs. I also work with Professor César A. Uribe on optimization-based modeling and analysis of large-scale networked systems, with applications on ecological networks, occupation taxonomies, and epidemics.
research
My research designs optimization methods — especially optimal transport and GPU-accelerated algorithms — and applies them across machine learning and the sciences. A full list is on my research projects page; current and past projects include:
- General-Kernel Augmented Lagrangian Methods for GPU-Accelerated Nonlinear Programming — GPU-friendly augmented-Lagrangian methods for large-scale, degenerate NLPs.
- GPU-Accelerated Bregman Douglas–Rachford Splitting for Discrete Optimal Transport — a scalable first-order optimal-transport solver in fused CUDA.
- Enabling Workforce Intelligence through Occupational Taxonomy Alignment — aligning occupations across taxonomies via Fused Gromov–Wasserstein.
- Wasserstein Motifs: Optimal Transport for Ecological Network Alignment — a rigorous, scalable framework for aligning food webs.
- Networked Competitive Bivirus SIS Models — equilibrium analysis of two competing epidemics spreading over networks.
Outside of research, I’m a TA and Peer Educator in both Math and CS departments and love helping others understand mathematical ideas. I also enjoy playing basketball, Go, and all sorts of board games. More recently, I am trying to learn how to play the electric guitar, as well as learning concepts in knot theory. My favorite result in knot theory is that every knot or link has a petal projection, whose minimal number of petals is itself a knot invariant.
news
October 5th, 2026 My work GPU-Accelerated Bregman Douglas–Rachford Splitting for Discrete Optimal Transport is now available as a preprint on arXiv!
September 17th, 2026 My blog post about my experience growing up as an East Asian is up!
September 1st, 2026 Our paper Networked Competitive Bivirus SIS Model: Analysis of the Discrete-Time Case has been accepted to the Open Journal of Control Systems (OJ-CSYS)!
August 2nd, 2026 I am traveling to Saarbrücken, Germany to attend the Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School in Computer Science! Can’t wait to meet the peers and mentors there!
July 21st, 2026 I gave a virtual oral presentation on my work Enabling Workforce Intelligence through Occupational Taxonomy Alignment at the 12th International Conference on computational Social Science!
June 2nd, 2026 I gave an in-person oral presentation on my work Enabling Workforce Intelligence through Occupational Taxonomy Alignment in the FinEcoNets Workshop at the Internation School & Conference on Network Science 2026 in Boston, MA!
May 18th, 2026 I started my summer research internship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Professor Sungho Shin on GPU-accelerated Method of Multipliers for Nonlinear Programming problems!
April 11th, 2026 I gave an in-person poster presentation on my work Enabling Workforce Intelligence through Occupational Taxonomy Alignment at the 2026 Network Science and Economics Conference in Miami, FL!
March 20th, 2026 I gave an in-person oral presentation on my work Wasserstein Motifs: Non-deterministic Alignment of Ecological Networks at the 2026 INFORMS Optimization Society Conference in Atlanta, GA!
March 2, 2026 My paper Wasserstein Motifs: Non-deterministic Alignment of Ecological Networks has been accepted as an oral presentation at the Learning Meaningful Representations of Life (LMRL) Workshop at ICLR 2026!
Feb 14, 2026 My blog post about vibe writing is up!
Jan 17, 2026 My paper Identifying common backbones of interactions underlying food webs via non-deterministic alignments has been accepted at ICASSP 2026! Can’t wait to visit Barcelona for the first time!
May 17, 2025 My second blog post about my journey studying Go is up!
May 11, 2025 This site is created, and my first blog post is up!