Yao is a final-year PhD student at The University of Edinburgh, advised by Professor Luo Mai. His research focuses on distributed machine learning systems, with a specific interest in building efficient and cost-effective systems for large-scale AI model deployment. His work has appeared in top-tier venues such as OSDI and JMLR. He is the founder of the ServerlessLLM open-source community, which has drawn significant attention from academia, industry, and the open-source ecosystem. In 2024, he was recognized as one of the Rising Stars in ML and Systems.