I’m a Member of the Technical Staff at Microsoft AI. Before joining Microsoft, I pursued a PhD in AI systems at the UC Berkeley Sky Computing Lab (previously RISELab), where I was advised by Professor Ion Stoica and Professor Joseph Gonzalez.

I’m interested in how techniques from computer systems can make self-driving cars safer and more reliable. To that effect, I’ve co-designed 2 open-source software projects:

• ERDOS is a dataflow system for building self-driving car and robotics applications.
• Pylot is a modular self-driving car platform that runs on both real cars and in simulation.

Previously, I contributed to several successful open-source projects:

• Ray is a popular framework for developing distributed applications.
• Modin scales pandas workflows to terabytes.

I interned at Google Deepmind with the Pathways Team in 2023, where I focused on sparse computation and modularity in language models.

Publications

• Scalable Multi-Domain Adaptation of Language Models using Modular Experts
  Peter Schafhalter*, Shun Liao*, Yanqi Zhou, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Arun Kandoor, James Laudon.
  [website] [paper]
• Bandwidth Allocation for Cloud-Connected Autonomous Driving
  Peter Schafhalter*, Alexander Krentsel*, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica. Under submission, conference paper.
• MoE-Lightning: High-Throughput MoE Inference on Memory-Constrained GPUs
  Shiyi Cao, Shu Liu, Tyler Griggs, Peter Schafhalter, Xiaoxuan Liu, Ying Sheng, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica. ASPLOS 2025.
  [website] [paper] [code]
• Managing Bandwidth: The Key to Cloud-Assisted Autonomous Driving
  Alexander Krentsel*, Peter Schafhalter*, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica.
  [paper]
• The Sky is the Limit: Cloud-Assisted Autonomous Driving via Service Tiers
  Alexander Krentsel, Peter Schafhalter, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica. Compound AI Systems Workshop 2024.
  [extended abstract] [poster]
• Leveraging Cloud Computing to Make Autonomous Vehicles Safer
  Peter Schafhalter, Sukrit Kalra, Le Xu, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica. IROS 2023.
  [website] [paper] [slides] [poster]
• Context-Aware Streaming Perception in Dynamic Environments
  Gur-Eyal Sela, Ionel Gog, Justin Wong, Kumar Krishna Agrawal, Xiangxi Mo, Sukrit Kalra, Peter Schafhalter, Eric Leong, Xin Wang, Bharathan Balaji, Joseph Gonzalez, Ion Stoica.
  [paper] [code]
• D3: A Dynamic Deadline-Driven Approach for Building Autonomous Vehicles
  Ionel Gog, Sukrit Kalra, Peter Schafhalter, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica. EuroSys 2022.
  [website] [paper] [code] [docs | rust] [docs | python]
• Pylot: A Modular Platform for Exploring Latency-Accuracy Tradeoffs in Autonomous Vehicles
  Ionel Gog*, Sukrit Kalra*, Peter Schafhalter*, Matthew A. Wright, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica. ICRA 2021. Best Unmanned Aerial Vehicles paper award finalist.
  [website] [paper] [code] [docs] [video]

* These authors have made equal contributions.

Selected Talks

Towards Cloud-Driven Autonomous Vehicles. Sky 2024 Summer Retreat.
[slides]

Building Autonomous Vehicles: From the Road to the Sky. Sky 2022 Summer Retreat.
[slides]

D3: A Dynamic Deadline-Driven Approach for Building AVs. EuroSys 2022.

D3: A Dynamic Deadline-Driven Approach for Building AVs. RISE/Sky 2022 Winter Retreat.
[slides]

Scaling Emerging AI Applications with Ray. QCon.ai San Francisco 2019.

Service

Reviewer: ICRA 2024, IROS 2024, ICLR 2025.

Co-author of the UC Berkeley EECS Operating Systems Preliminary Exam Syllabus (2023).