Zhaoheng (Billy) Li
CS Ph.D. Student @ University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Thomas M. Siebel Center, Room 2119
201 N. Goodwin Ave.
Urbana, IL 61801
I am a fourth-year CS PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) advised by Prof. Yongjoo Park. I am a member of CreateLab and DAIS. My research interests are Systems for AI and ML, Interactive data analytics, Vector databases, and Graph algorithms.
I currently work extensively with computational notebooks and vector indexing; my work aims to bridge established database principles with these emerging technologies used extensively in exploratory AI to enhance user experience.
I dedicate my summers to internships. I have recently interned in ByteDance’s System Infrastructure Lab and worked on indexing for filtered vector search. I have also interned four times at Google, working on efficient group by for structs in Google BigQuery, SQL profiling with BPF in Google S2Infra, ads ranking algorithms in Google Local Services, and ad request monitoring pipelines in Google ContentAds.
During my undergraduate study at UIUC, I was fortunate to get early exposure to research, starting with a fun side project of DOTA2 match outcome prediction in the Esports Analytics Lab. I then proceeded with involved works: Deep Steerable Graph Generation with Prof. Carl Yang, and my bachelor’s thesis “REFORM: Fast and Adaptive Solution for Subteam Replacement” advised by Prof. Hanghang Tong.
News
May 16, 2025 | I gave a talk at PyCon 2025 titled “World’s First Undoable Notebook” for my ongoing research project, Kishu. →Slides← |
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Jan 15, 2025 | I will be returning to ByteDance’s System Infrastructure Lab as a Research Intern for Summer 2025. |