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:

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