Sustainable computing · Purdue University

Tianyao Shi 史天尧

I study the environmental impact of computing—from energy and carbon to biodiversity.

I am a PhD student at Purdue University, where I joined Prof. Yi Ding's STYLE group in August 2024. My research focuses on sustainable computing systems and LLM serving.

Curriculum vitae Scholar Email GitHub

Selected research

I connect life-cycle assessment and ecological modeling with computer architecture and systems research to quantify computing’s broader environmental impact, including biodiversity loss. My work explores energy- and carbon-efficient data center operation and LLM serving.

01 / LLM serving & biodiversity

BIRDS

The biodiversity footprint of LLM serving

Characterizing and understanding how serving large language models affects biodiversity, extending the view beyond energy and carbon.

EMNLP 2026 · Findings

Paper Project Code

02 / Life-cycle environmental impact

When Servers Meet Species

A fab-to-grave lens on computing

Examining computing's biodiversity impact across its life cycle, connecting life-cycle assessment and ecological modeling to systems research.

HotCarbon 2025

Paper FABRIC code

Preprints

Beyond Energy: When Sustainability Dimensions Reshape LLM Serving Decisions

ArXiv 2026 Tianyao Shi, Xipeng Shen, Yi Ding

Sustainability of Computing Systems: A Survey from Environmental Impact Perspectives

TechRxiv 2026 Tianyao Shi, Yanran Wu, Inez Hua, Yi Ding

Systematic Characterization of LLM Quantization: A Performance, Energy, and Quality Perspective

ArXiv 2025 Tianyao Shi, Yi Ding

Publications

BIRDS: Characterizing and Understanding Biodiversity Impact of Large Language Model Serving

EMNLP 2026 Findings Tianyao Shi, Yi Ding

Project Code Summary

Disaggregated Speculative Decoding for Carbon-Efficient LLM Serving

CAL 2025 Tianyao Shi*, Yanran Wu*, Sihang Liu, Yi Ding, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters 24 (2), 369-372.

Full-length preprint

When Servers Meet Species: A Fab-to-Grave Lens on Computing's Biodiversity Impact

HotCarbon 2025 Tianyao Shi, Ritbik Kumar, Inez Hua, Yi Ding, ACM SIGEnergy Energy Informatics Review (EIR), Volume 5 Issue 2, pp. 34-40.

Code

Sustainable LLM Serving: Environmental Implications, Challenges, and Opportunities

IGSC 2024 Yi Ding, Tianyao Shi, pp. 37-38.

Alioth: A Machine Learning Based Interference-Aware Performance Monitor for Multi-Tenancy Applications in Public Cloud

IPDPS 2023 Tianyao Shi, Yingxuan Yang, Yunlong Cheng, Xiaofeng Gao, Zhen Fang, Yongqiang Yang, pp. 908-917.

Code

FORM: Following the Online Regularized Meta-Leader for Cold-Start Recommendation

SIGIR 2021 Xuehan Sun, Tianyao Shi, Xiaofeng Gao, Yanrong Kang, Guihai Chen, pp. 1177-1186.

GCAN: A Group-Wise Collaborative Adversarial Networks for Item Recommendation

DASFAA 2021 Xuehan Sun, Tianyao Shi, Xiaofeng Gao, Xiang Li, Guihai Chen, pp. 330-338.

Education

Purdue University · PhD student, August 2024–present
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Master’s degree in Electronic and Information Engineering, March 2024
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, June 2021

Honors & awards

2025.03 ISF Research Award of Purdue
2023.11 Excellent Graduate Scholarship of SJTU
2021 ~ 2023 First-Class Graduate Grant of SJTU
2021.06 Outstanding Graduate of SJTU [Certificate]
2021.06 Excellent Bachelor’s Thesis of SJTU
2020.10 No. 95 of LeetCode Cup Team Coding Contest (LCCUP’2020) (top 3.6% of 2575 teams) [Result Screenshot]
2018.05 Meritorious Winner of Mathematical Contest In Modeling (MCM) (top 9.7% of 26062 teams) [Certificate]

Experience

2026.01 - 2026.05, Teaching Assistant of ECE20875: Python for Data Science at Purdue University
2022.03 – 2022.09, Teaching Assistant of Introduction to Computer Science (“Xuesen Challenge Program”) at SJTU
2020.09 - 2020.12, Teaching Assistant of Algorithm Design and Analysis (CS7310) at SJTU
2019.09 - 2021.01, Managing Assistant of Office of Instructional Operations Management in SJTU Academic Affairs Office

Academic service

Reviewer of IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TII, ACM TOMPECS
External Reviewer of IEEE TNSE, IEEE TNSM, AAAI 2022, ICDM 2023

Beyond research

I have always been a soccer fan, as a life-long supporter of Taishan FC and a supporter of FC Barcelona since 2011. I was a referee of SJTU Football Association during my undergraduate years and Vice Chairman of SJTUFA during 2019-2020. (See this certificate of appointment and report in Chinese)