About Me

Currently, I am a Software Engineer at Google.

Before that, I acquired my Ph.D. degree from The University of New South Wales (UNSW), supervised by Dr. Xin Cao and Prof. Wenjie Zhang. Additionally, I was fortunate to work under the guidance of esteemed supervisors, Dr. Kaiqi Zhao (HIT-ShenZhen) and Prof. Yixiang Fang (CUHK-ShenZhen) from diverse institutions. Their expertise and support have been invaluable to my research. Additionally, I obtained the M.Sc. degree in Information Technology from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and the B.Eng. degree in Software Engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU).

Experience

2025.09 - now: Software Engineer at Google
2025.06 - 2025.08: Postdoctoral Writing Fellow at UNSW
2021.02 - 2025.06: Ph.D. Student at Data and Knowledge Research Group, UNSW
2021.04 - 2021.12: Research Assistant at CUHK-SZ. Supervisor: Prof. Yixiang Fang
2018.08 - 2021.01: Research Assistant at MTrec Lab, HKUST. Supervisor: Prof. Shueng-Han Gary Chan
2017.09 - 2018.07: M.Sc. in Information Technology, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST
2013.09 - 2017.07: B.Eng. in Software Engineering, School of Software, NWPU

Project

• “Geo-fencing Home Quarantine”, 2020.
  Task: Develop home quarantine detection application.

• “Wherami: Client-based Indoor Localization Technology”, 2018 - 2020.
  Task: Develop indoor localization system.

Publication

• “ACE: A Cardinality Estimator for Set-Valued Queries” [Paper]
  Yufan Sheng, Xin Cao, Kaiqi Zhao, Yixiang Fang, Jianzhong Qi, Wenjie Zhang, and Christian S. Jensen. The 2025 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. (VLDB 2025)

• “WISK: A Workload-aware Learned Index for Spatial Keyword Queries” [Paper]
  Yufan Sheng, Xin Cao, Yixiang Fang, Kaiqi Zhao, Jianzhong Qi, Gao Cong, and Wenjie Zhang. The 2023 ACM International Conference on Management of Data. (SIGMOD 2023)

• “KS-GNN: Keywords Search over Incomplete Graphs via Graphs Neural Network” [Paper]
  Yu Hao, Xin Cao, Yufan Sheng, Yixiang Fang, and Wei Wang. The 2021 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021)

• “Context-aware Location Search on Maps” [Paper]
  Yufan Sheng and Yu Hao. The 2020 ACM Turing Celebration Conference (ACM TURC 2020)

Teaching and Service

Teaching Assistant

• COMP9313: Big Data Management, UNSW. (2022 T2, 2022 T3, 2023 T2, 2023 T3, 2025 T2)
• ZZEN9313: Big Data Management, Online. (2022 Hexa2)

Service

• PC Memeber: IEEE BigData 2023
• External Reviewer: APWeb-WAIM 2025, VLDB 2023, MDM 2022
• Journal Reviewer: TDKE 2025, TODS 2024, TSAS 2023
• Student Volunteer: SIGMOD 2023, VLDB 2022

Award

• Student Travel Award: SIGMOD 2023
• Development and Research Training Grant (DRTG): UNSW 2023
• University International Postgraduate Award (UIPA): UNSW 2021 - 2025
• The Second Prize Scholarship: NWPU 2016