Yao Du is a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. He received his B.S. in Information Engineering from China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China, in 2017, and his M.S. in Information and Communication Engineering from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China, in 2020. His Ph.D. research focuses on secure and collaborative edge intelligence with blockchain as a key enabler. He is broadly interested in distributed computing, decentralized systems, and combinatorial optimization.