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, UK, where I lead the Real-Time and Flexible Cyber-Physical Systems (ReFLEX) Lab, which is a part of the RTDS Research Group. 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 systems. My research has applied to real-world applications including robots, autonomous vehicles, avionics, control systems, 5G base stations, transportation, and many 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.

My current research areas are:

  • Scheduling and timing analysis of real-time systems (RTS) & cyber-physical systems (CPS)
  • Improving scheduling flexibility & adaptability for large scale systems
  • Digital twins for runtime modelling, simulation, optimisation and enhancement
  • Hardware and hardware-software co-designs for safety-critical real-time systems
  • Ensuring operational safety, robustness & resilience for robotics & autonomous systems (RAS)

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. I serve as an external reviewer for UKRI fundings.

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. I maintain a tracking website for real-time, embedded and robotics systems. You can find here my robotics projects. I am an amateur photographer — here is my photography portfolio

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.

News

  • (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 trainning 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 at IEEE Transactions on Computing!
  • (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 of IEEE 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 (Outstanding Paper)! Hope to see you all in Boston in December!
  • (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 virutial 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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