Zijin Wan

Phone: (951) 548-4355
Email: zijin.wan@email.ucr.edu
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/zijin-wan-5ab6b2216

Education

University of California, Riverside
Ph.D. in Computer Science, Expected August 2027
Cumulative GPA: 3.89/4.0
Advisors: Prof. Yan Gu and Prof. Yihan Sun

Xidian University
Bachelor in Software Engineering, 2018 – 2022
Cumulative GPA: 3.7/4.0

Project and Research Experience

University of California, Riverside
Research Assistant, Dec 2021 – Present

• Parallel Contraction Hierarchies: Proposed a parallel algorithm for constructing contraction hierarchies, one of the most widely used shortest path algorithms. Implemented the algorithm, achieving an average 10x speedup over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) parallel baseline while maintaining competitive query performance. To be appeared in ICS’25.
  GitHub Repo arXiv

• Parallel Longest Increasing Subsequence: Developed a parallel algorithm for LIS with optimal work and non-trivial parallelism. Its implementation achieves a 2.5x speedup over the SOTA parallel baseline. Published in SPAA’23.
  GitHub Repo arXiv

• Parallel Huffman Tree: Studied and implemented the first publicly available parallel algorithm for constructing huffman tree using C++, achieving 10–20x speedups compared to the SOTA sequential baseline. Published in SPAA’22. GitHub Repo arXiv

Skills

• Programming: C, C++, Bash, Python, Java
• Systems: Multithreaded Programming, Distributed Systems, GPU Programming
• Web: HTML5, PHP, Typescript, CSS, Angular, JavaScript
• Misc: Git, CMake, gdb, Docker, OpenMP, Pandas, Matplotlib, LaTeX
• Databases: SQL, MySQL
• Languages: English (fluent), Mandarin (native), Japanese (intermediate)

Honors and Awards

• Best Paper Award, ICS’25
• UCR GSA Travel Grants, SPAA’22 and SPAA’23
• Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship, UCR
• First Prize (Sole Winner), Xidian Exchange Student Scholarship
• Second Prize Scholarship (Top 10%), Xidian University
• National Scholarship (Top 1%)

Publications

• Parallel Contraction Hierarchies Can Be Efficient and Scalable
  Zijin Wan, Xiaojun Dong, Letong Wang, Enzuo Zhu, Yan Gu, Yihan Sun
  Proceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2025)

• Parallel Longest Increasing Subsequence and van Emde Boas Trees
  Yan Gu, Ziyang Men, Zheqi Shen, Yihan Sun, Zijin Wan (alphabetical order)
  Proceedings of the 35th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2023)

• Many Sequential Iterative Algorithms Can Be Parallel and (Nearly) Work-efficient
  Zheqi Shen, Zijin Wan, Yan Gu, Yihan Sun
  Proceedings of the 34th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2022)

Teaching Assistantship

• CS141: Intermediate Data Structures and Algorithms (Fall 2024)
• CS214: Parallel Algorithms (Winter 2025)
• CS218: Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Spring 2023, Winter 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2025)

Professional Services

• External Reviewer, ALENEX’24
• External Reviewer, SPAA’23