Sichang He (Steven) sichangh@usc.edu

Ph.D. Student in Computer Science GitHub & YouTube @SichangHe

Networked Systems Lab, University of Southern California sichanghe.github.io

Education

University of Southern California (USC) Aug. 2024 – present Los Angeles, USA

Ph.D. student in Computer Science Advisor: Dr. Harsha V. Madhyastha

– Research focus: User-facing measurements and enhancements of the Web.

– Selected courses with projects:

∗ Advanced Computer Networking (A+): JSphere: measure webpages’ browser API calls to classify JavaScript.

Duke Kunshan University (DKU) & Duke University Dual Degree Aug. 2020 – May 2024

B.S. in Data Science (by DKU) & Kunshan, China &

B.S. in Interdisciplinary Studies (Subplan: Data Science, by Duke) Durham, NC

– In addition to studies in Data Science, completed many courses in Computer Science and Mathematics, effectively

emulating a triple major.

– Selected courses with projects:

∗ Computer Network Architecture (A+): async TCP server and client in Elixir and CLI REPL shell in Rust.

∗ Data Acquisition and Visualization (A): Poster using D3.js, Svelte, and TypeScript.

∗ Computer Organization and Programming (A+, at Duke): Binary search tree in MIPS assembly and ring buffer

in C; fifth place in PizzaCalc assembly length optimization competition (68 lines).

∗ Numerical Analysis (A+); Intro Abstract Algebra (at Duke), Complex Analysis (A).

– Achieved full grade on all five courses at Duke University in the Fall 2022 semester.

Zhixin High School Aug. 2017 – Jun. 2020 Guangzhou, China

– Chemistry Olympiad competition team; Biology Olympiad competition team.

Publications

[1] Sichang “Steven” He, Ramesh Govindan, and Madhyastha V. Harsha. “Did I Just Browse A Website

Written by LLMs?” In: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Internet Measurement Conference Student Workshop.

Oct. 2025. url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13933.

[2] Sichang He, Italo Cunha, and Ethan Katz-Bassett. “RPSLyzer: Characterization and Verification of

Policies in Internet Routing Registries”. In: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Internet Measurement Conference.

Nov. 2024. url: https://github.com/SichangHe/internet_route_verification/releases/tag/imc-

camera-ready.

[3] Sichang He, Beilong Tang, Boyan Zhang, Jiaqi Shao, Xiaomin Ouyang, Daniel Nata Nugraha, and

Bing Luo. “FedKit: Enabling Cross-Platform Federated Learning for Android and iOS”. In: IEEE INFOCOM

2024-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS). May 2024. url:

http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2402.10464.

Research Experience

Research Assistant Aug. 2024 – present

Networked Systems Lab, USC Advisor: Dr. Harsha V. Madhyastha

– Surveyed usage, weakness, and extensions of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).

– Detect, understand, and respond to AI-generated contents on the Web, their characteristics, cause, and effects.

Independent Researcher on Internet Route Verification Apr. 2023 – May 2024

Independent research, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil (Remote) Advisor: Dr. Italo Cunha

Sichang He (Steven) - University of Southern California Page 1 of 3

– Designed and implemented an efficient and comprehensive parser for the Routing Policy Specification Language

(RPSL), a language used in the Internet Routing Registry to document public interdomain routing policies, guide

public peering, and aid routing issue troubleshooting.

∗ Studied and complied with RPSL semantics in RFCs, covering over 99% of all real-world RPSL use cases.

∗ Optimized the parser to interpret and verify hundreds of millions of routes per hour.

∗ Found RPSL usage varied widely among autonomous systems (ASes).

– Employed the RPSL parser to verify observed interdomain routes; analyzed verification reports and identified com-

mon RPSL usage patterns and usage mistakes.

∗ Provided tooling to verify routes against the RPSL, helping improve interdomain routing security.

∗ Identified and implemented checks for 6 major explanations to why routes fail to match the relevant RPSL.

Research Assistant for Mobile Federated Learning (FL) Project Mar. 2023 – May. 2024

The FedCampus Team, EdgeIntelligence Lab, DKU Advisor: Dr. Bing Luo

– Authored FedKit, open-source SDKs to streamline real-world FL experiments across Android and iOS devices,

enabling training shared ML models collaboratively without sharing private data on smartphones.

∗ Contributed to the Flower FL framework: revamped the Android example; helped correct the iOS example.

– Led and managed the systems development for the FedCampus Android/iOS app, leveraging personal health data

from over 100 participants to conduct real-world FL and federated analytics experiments on DKU campus.

∗ Supervised and mentored four undergrads and one M. Eng. student in mobile and web development.

∗ Investigated and led core technology adoption, including Flower, Kotlin, and Flutter, facilitating development.

Research Assistant for Search Engine Research Project Dec. 2021 – May 2023

The Search So Team, DKU Advisor: Dr. Jiang Long

– Developed a feature-rich open source web scraper in async Rust to scrape DKU sites, intranet, and Duke sites.

– Improved backend HTML processing, frontend interface, and version control.

Presentation

[1] Bing Luo and Sichang He. FedCampus: a Privacy-preserving Data Platform for Smart Campus with

Federated Learning and Analytics. Flower AI Summit, 2024. Mar. 2024. url: https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=K7yu2jvu_t8.

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Programming, DKU Nov. 2021 – Mar. 2022

– Hosted weekly lab sessions; created the course’s first video tutorial on development environment setup.

Math & CompSci. Tutor, Academic Resource Center, DKU May 2021 – May 2022

– Obtained CRLA’s International Tutor Training Program Certification, Level I .

Awards

• Senior Scholar-Athlete Award through the Running Club, DKU Athletics (Apr. 2024)

• Silver Medal, International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) 2022 DKU Team (Oct. 2022)

Developed the team wiki independently; helped non-technical members adopt Git; validated protein designs with

modeling software.

• Dean’s List (Spring 2021) & Dean’s List with Distinction (Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Spring 2023), DKU

• Chancellor’s Scholarship & UGRD Entrance Scholarship, DKU (merit-based, Fall 2020 – Spring 2024)

Sichang He (Steven) - University of Southern California Page 2 of 3

Side Projects

Open Source Developer & Maintainer of Rust Crates Nov. 2022 – present

– mdBook-KaTeX, a math expression preprocessor for mdBook with over 90,000+ downloads on crates.io.

∗ Took over maintainership by publishing a fork when it was unmaintained.

∗ Fixed numerous bugs and developed new features, resolving more than 20 GitHub issues others had opened.

∗ Improved speed by over 10 times by adopting parallelism and avoiding repeated rendering.

– mdBook Language Server for instantaneous live previews. Diff-friendly plain-text and Markdown formatters.

Author of Open Source Web Forum Using Ruby on Rails Jun. 2022 – Aug. 2022

– Featured infinitely nested comments; deployed on Heroku.

Outreach

• Chinese Editor & Translator at DKU Intersections Journal Jun. 2021 – Aug. 2021

Co-translated three English articles into Chinese; reviewed and edited multiple articles and Intersections’ website.

Skills

Natural Language Mandarin (native), Cantonese (fluent).

Programming Language

– Invested and proficient: Rust, Python, Elixir, JavaScript.

– Used in projects: Kotlin, Dart, Swift, Ruby, Java, Lua, TypeScript, Svelte, HTML, CSS, C, SQL, Racket, L

– Familiar: C++, Fish, Bash, Julia, Go, Erlang, Gleam, VimScript, Elisp, Mathematica, MATLAB, Scala, R.

Computer Software

– Selected frameworks/libraries: Playwright, Django, Phoenix Framework, Tokio, Tailwindcss, D3.js.

– Selected development experience: SSH, Tmux, Neovim, Docker, Kubernetes, Evcxr, Arch Linux, Hackintosh.

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