Dr. Xiaotian (Steven) Dai
[ Google Scholar | ResearchGate | LinkedIn | Twitter | GitHub ]
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, UK, where I lead the Real-Time and Flexible Cyber-Physical Systems (ReFLEX) Lab. My research focuses on the scheduling and verification of cyber-physical systems, with a particular emphasis on timing analysis and on improving scheduling flexibility and adaptability in safety-critical applications. The applications of my interest include robotics, autonomous vehicles, avionic systems and other cyber-physical systems that must meet strict timing constraints.
Expertise: My work has contributed to innovative modeling, scheduling, simulation, and analysis techniques; digital twins for runtime improvement; and specialized hardware designs for safety-critical embedded systems. Many of these advancements have been adopted by industry. I am also actively involved in the robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) community, concentrating on ensuring operational safety, robustness, and resilience.
Track-record: To date, I have published over 30 papers with 500+ citations and an H-index of 12. I am regularly serve as a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member and reviewer for prominent conferences and journals spanning real-time embedded systems, robotics, and design automation.
You can find more about my research interests and projects in the research page. If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in real-time systems or cyber-physical systems, you can find more information on PhD opportunities.
Background
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), which is the top real-time research group in the UK. The MOCHA project targets complex many-core architectures with demanding performance and timing requirements, leveraging digital twins and cache-aware scheduling to develop key techniques for next-generation 5G/6G communication base stations.
Prior to MOCHA, I contributed to the EU H2020 DEIS project in 2019, collaborating with Prof. Tim Kelly and Prof. Ibrahim Habli. DEIS focused on model-based safety assurance — using the Structured Assurance Case Metamodel (SACM) (now an OMG standard) — and developed corresponding tools for model-based autonomous and cyber-physical systems in partnership 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, earning my PhD in 2019 with a Best Thesis award. Before that, I completed an MSc (with distinction) in Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield in 2014, following a BSc (with a first) in Automatic Control in 2011.
Research Expertise
- Scheduling and verification of cyber-physical systems
- Timing analysis
- Improving scheduling flexibility & adaptability for safety-critical applications
- Modeling, simulation & analysis techniques
- Digital twins for runtime improvement
- Specialized hardware designs for safety-critical embedded systems
- Ensuring operational safety, robustness & resilience within robotics & autonomous systems
Personal and Misc
News
- (paper) Sep 2025: Our paper “A Hybrid Approach to Refine WCRT Bounds for DAG Scheduling Using Anomaly Classification” is published at IEEE TC!
- (talk) Aug 2025: I am giving a talk on digital twin for real-time cyber-physical systems at Systron Lab Research and Demo day.
- (service) Aug 2025: I am invited as a TPC of RTSS 2025 (AE and BP sessions).
- (paper) Aug 2025: Our paper “LEFT-RS: A Lock-Free Fault-Tolerant Resource Sharing Protocol for Multicore Real-Time Systems” is accepted at RTSS 2025! Hope to see you all in Boston in December!
- (service) Aug 2025: Invited as the publication chair of 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 MOST 2026.
- (project) July 2025: Our resident programme proposal was accepted by XR Stories, which will focus on robots and digital twins for virutial production (see details here).
- (paper) Mar 2025: Our paper, “A cache-aware DAG scheduling method on multicores: Exploiting node affinity and deferred executions”, is published in JSA [Paper].
Please visit News for more news.