Zhaoheng “Billy” Li

I am a fourth-year CS PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am a member of CreateLab advised by Prof. Yongjoo Park. My research interests lie within Database Systems on the topics of Data management and Support for ML/AI.

My current work:

• Workload-aware Composite Vector Indexing
• Kishu: fast incremental checkpointing and versioning for machine learning and EDA notebook workloads

My previous research projects:

• Kishu: Time-Traveling for Computational Notebooks (VLDB 2025, with Supawit Chockchowwat, Ribhav Sahu, Areet Sheth, Prof. Yongjoo Park)
• ElasticNotebook: Enabling Live Migration for Computational Notebooks (VLDB 2024, with Pranav Gor, Rahul Prabhu, Hui Yu, Yuzhou Mao, and Prof. Yongjoo Park)
• Transactional Python for Durable Machine Learning: Vision, Challenges, and Feasibility (SIGMOD DEEM 2023, with Supawit Chockchowaat and Prof. Yongjoo Park)
• S/C: Speeding up Data Materialization with Bounded Memory (ICDE 2023, with Xinyu Pi, and Prof. Yongjoo Park)
• REFORM: Fast and Adaptive Solution for Subteam Replacement (IEEE BigData 2022, with Xinyu Pi, Mingyuan Wu, and Prof. Hanghang Tong)
• Deep Steerable Graph Generation with Xinyu Pi, Yuheng Chang, and Prof. Carl Yang

I have recently interned in Bytedance’s Infrastructure System Lab under supervision of Dr. Silu Huang and Dr. Wei Ding. I worked on designing novel composite vector indexes for filtered vector search and submitted a research paper to SIGMOD 2025.

I am a four-time software engineer intern at Google:

• Summer 2023: Google Cloud, Google BigQuery, Group by Struct with Xueping Weng and Joel Wasserman
• Summer 2022: Google Cloud, DAS-Performance, SQL query profiling with BPF with Tengyu Sun and Hao Luo
• Summer 2020: Google Ads, Google Local Services, improved ranking algorithms for Home Services Ads with Dr. Bharath Pattabiraman
• Summer 2019: Google Ads, ContentAds Team, monitoring service for ContentAds requests with Dr. Darek Yung