I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate student in the College of Information & Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I am working with Prof. Prashant Shenoy and funded by the NSF CoDec Project to work computational decarbonization of computing and societal infrastructures. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in May 2025. I also hold a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from Helwan University, Egypt, and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the same university. Before Joining UMass I worked as a Researcher and as an R&D engineer in multiple Universities. I also worked as a software engineer for many years.

My research interests include cloud computing, sustainable computing, and building large scale distributed systems. My recent research has focused on reducing cloud computing systems' carbon footprint and designing failure resilient machine learning systems for the edge. The work spans edge computing, energy informatics, and machine learning systems. My work has been published in top-tier conferences, e.g., ASPLOS, INFOCOM, SIGMETRICS, e-Energy, SoCC, IoTDI, SEC, and IWQOS. For more details please checkout my CV.

• May 2025: I am starting as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in UMass Amherst.
• April 2025: I have successfully defended my PhD thesis
• March 2025: Our Paper CarbonEdge was accepted in HPDC'25 (Link)
• March 2025: I gave a guest lecture in UMass COMPSCI 677 — Distributed and Operating Systems (Video)
• March 2025: Our Paper GreenThrift was accepted in COMPASS 2025
• Feb. 2025 I gave talks in NESysDay 2025

MS/PhD Student, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA	(2020 - 2025)
Thesis Title: Carbon-aware resource management for cloud computing platforms. I was advised by Prof. Prashant Shenoy
MS in Computer Engineering, Helwan University, Egypt	(2015 - 2018)
Thesis Title: Container Type Virtualization Management in Cloud Computing.
BS in Computer Engineering, Helwan University, Egypt (Class Valedictorian)	(2006 - 2011)
Thesis Title: Assistive Drive System: Driver Behavior Monitoring using computer vision and ultrasonic sensors.

1. Li Wu, Walid A. Hanafy, Abel Souza, Khai Nguyen, Jan Harkes, David Irwin, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, and Prashant Shenoy. CarbonEdge: Leveraging Mesoscale Spatial Carbon-Intensity Variations for Low Carbon Edge Computing. In Proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC '25), 2025.
2. Walid A. Hanafy, Qianlin Liang, Noman Bashir, Abel Souza, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy. Going Green for Less Green: Optimizing the Cost of Reducing Cloud Carbon Emissions. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 3 (ASPLOS '24), April 27-May 1, 2024, La Jolla, CA, USA, 2024.
3. Walid A. Hanafy, Qianlin Liang, Noman Bashir, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy. CarbonScaler: Leveraging Cloud Workload Elasticity for Optimizing Carbon-Efficiency. Proc. ACM Meas. Anal. Comput. Syst., volume 7, 3, dec 2023 (Best Student Paper Award).
4. Qianlin Liang, Walid A. Hanafy, Noman Bashir, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy. Energy Time Fairness: Balancing Fair Allocation of Energy and Time for GPU Workloads. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC), 12 2023.
5. Walid A. Hanafy, Li Wu, Tarek Abdelzaher, Suhas Diggavi, and Prashant Shenoy. Failure-Resilient ML Inference at the Edge through Graceful Service Degradation. In Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM) workshop on Internet of Things for Adversarial Environments, 10 2023.
6. Walid A. Hanafy, Roozbeh Bostandoost, Noman Bashir, David Irwin, Mohammad Hajiesmaili, and Prashant Shenoy. War of the Efficiencies: Understanding the Tension between Carbon and Energy Optimization. In Proc. 2nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Sustainable Computing Systems (HotCarbon'23), July 2023.

University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

• COMPSCI 577: Operating Systems Design and Implementation
• COMPSCI 677: Distributed and Operating Systems

Helwan University, Egypt

• Software Engineering
• Operating Systems
• Cloud Computing
• Distributed Systems
• Database Systems