Yong He

Yong He

I am a principal software engineer at NVIDIA Research working on graphics programming languages. I am currently the tech lead of the Slang shading language project. I received my PhD degree on Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in September 2018. I have benefited in many ways from my advisor, Kayvon Fatahalian. My PhD study was focused on optimizing graphics systems with language mechanisms and compilation techniques.

Before that, I received my bachelor degree in software engineering from South China University of Technology, P.R. China, in 2011.

Work Experience

  • Since 2024 NVIDIA
    Principal Software Engineer
    Tech lead of the Slang Shading Language.
  • 2020 -2024 NVIDIA Research
    Senior Researcher
    Working on graphics programming languages.
  • 2018 - 2020 Google
    Software Engineer
    Launched Stadia.
  • Summer 2015 - Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA)
    Research Intern (mentored by Todd Mytkowicz and Kathryn McKinley)
    Studied probabilistic inference and approximate compilation.
  • Summer 2014 - NVIDIA Research (Redmond, WA)
    Research Intern (mentored by Aaron Lefohn)
    Studied reactive shading systems.
  • Summer 2013 - NVIDIA Research (Santa Clara, CA)
    Research Intern (mentored by Aaron Lefohn and Eric Enderton)
    Studied various anti-aliasing techniques. Investigated integrating adaptive shading into graphics pipeline.
  • 2011 - 2012 - Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing, China)
    Research Intern, Systems Research Group (mentored by Zhengping Qian and Zheng Zhang)
    Bulit a distributed system for real-time stream processing with light-weight fault tolerance.

PhD Dissertation

Slang – A Shader Compilation System for Extensible, Real-Time Shading
Dissertation Committee: Kayvon Fatahalian (Chair), Jonathan Aldrich, Jim McCann, Theresa Foley
PDF (38 MB)

Publications

SLANG.D: Fast, Modular and Differentiable Shader Programming
Sai Bangaru, Lifan Wu, Tzu-Mao Li, Jacob Munkberg, Gilbert Bernstein, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Fredo Durand, Aaron Lefohn, Yong He.
SIGGRAPH Asia 2023
Project Page     Paper     Code on GitHub

Slang: Language Mechanisms for Building Extensible Real-Time Shading Systems
Yong He, Kayvon Fatahalian, Theresa Foley.
SIGGRAPH 2018
Project Page     Paper     Slides     Code on GitHub

Shader Components: Modular and High Performance Shader Development
Yong He, Theresa Foley, Teguh Hofstee, Haomin Long, Kayvon Fatahalian.
SIGGRAPH 2017
Project Page     Paper     Slides    Code on GitHub

A System for Rapid Exploration of Shader Optimization Choices
Yong He, Theresa Foley, Kayvon Fatahalian.
SIGGRAPH 2016
Project Page     Paper     Code on GitHub

A System for Rapid, Automatic Shader Level-of-Detail
Yong He, Theresa Foley, Natalya Tatarchuk, Kayvon Fatahalian.
SIGGRAPH Asia 2015
Project Page     Paper

Ray Specialized Contraction on Bounding Volume Hierarchy
Yan Gu, Yong He, Guy Blelloch.
Pacific Graphics 2015
Paper

Decoupled Coverage Anti-Aliasing
Yuxiang Wang, Chris Wyman, Yong He, Pradeep Sen.
High Performance Graphics 2015
Project Page     Paper

Extending the Graphics Pipeline with Adaptive, Multi-Rate Shading
Yong He, Yan Gu, Kayvon Fatahalian.
SIGGRAPH 2014
Project Page     Paper

Efficient BVH Construction via Approximate Agglomerative Clustering
Yan Gu, Yong He, Kayvon Fatahalian, Guy Blelloch.
High Performance Graphics 2013
Project Page     Paper

TimeStream: Scalable Real-time Computation in the Cloud
Zhengping Qian, Yong He, Chunzhi Su, Zhuojie Wu, Hongyu Zhu, Taizhi Zhang, Lidong Zhou, Yuan Yu, Zheng Zhang.
Eurosys 2013
Paper

Visit "Projects" page for a list of my previous projects.

Awards

  • NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship (2016-2017)