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 fifth-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, Computational Notebooks, and Vector Search & Databases.
My research targets building systems for emerging AI and Data Science applications with robustness and scalability guarantees; I am currently working on data infrastuctures for Agentic Data Science Frameworks. My research has been generously funded by the NCSA for the Fall 2023 semester.
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.
I dedicate my summers to internships; My previous internships and projects include:
Summer 2025: System Infrastructure Lab @ ByteDance, Cloud-Native Vector Indexes
@article{li2026cloud,title={Cloud-Native Vector Search: A Comprehensive Performance Analysis},author={Li, Zhaoheng and Ding, Wei and Huang, Silu and Wang, Zikang and Lin, Yuanjin and Wu, Ke and Park, Yongjoo and Chen, Jianjun},year={2026},}
@article{chockchowwat2026chipmink,title={Chipmink: Efficient Delta Identification for Massive Object Graph},author={Chockchowwat, Supawit and Thakurdesai, Sumay and Li, Zhaoheng and Krafczyk, Matthew and Park, Yongjoo},journal={Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment},year={2026},publisher={VLDB Endowment},}
@inproceedings{huang2026mojoframe,title={MojoFrame: Dataframe Library in Mojo Language},author={Huang, Shengya and Li, Zhaoheng and Werner, Derek and Park, Yongjoo},booktitle={42nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2026},year={2026},organization={IEEE Computer Society},}
@article{shah2026qstore,title={QStore: Quantization-Aware Compressed Model Storage},author={Shah, Raunak and Li, Zhaoheng and Park, Yongjoo},journal={Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment},year={2026},publisher={VLDB Endowment},}
@article{li2025sieve,title={SIEVE: Effective Filtered Vector Search with Collection of Indexes},author={Li, Zhaoheng and Huang, Silu and Ding, Wei and Park, Yongjoo and Chen, Jianjun},journal={Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment},year={2025},publisher={VLDB Endowment},}
@article{li2024kishu,title={Kishu: Time-Traveling for Computational Notebooks},author={Li, Zhaoheng and Chockchowwat, Supawit and Sahu, Ribhav and Sheth, Areet and Park, Yongjoo},journal={Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment},volume={18},number={4},pages={970 - 985},year={2024},publisher={VLDB Endowment},}
demo
Demonstration of Kishu: Time-Traveling for Computational Notebooks (SIGMOD 2025 Best Demo)
Zhaoheng Li, Supawit Chockchowwat, Hanxi Fang, and Yongjoo Park
In Companion of the 2025 International Conference on Management of Data, 2025
@inproceedings{li2024demonstration,title={Demonstration of Kishu: Time-Traveling for Computational Notebooks (SIGMOD 2025 Best Demo)},author={Li, Zhaoheng and Chockchowwat, Supawit and Fang, Hanxi and Park, Yongjoo},booktitle={Companion of the 2025 International Conference on Management of Data},year={2025},}
@article{li2023elasticnotebook,title={ElasticNotebook: Enabling Live Migration for Computational Notebooks},author={Li, Zhaoheng and Gor, Pranav and Prabhu, Rahul and Yu, Hui and Mao, Yuzhou and Park, Yongjoo},journal={Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment},volume={17},number={2},pages={119--133},year={2023},publisher={VLDB Endowment},}
@inproceedings{li2023s,title={S/C: Speeding up Data Materialization with Bounded Memory},author={Li, Zhaoheng and Pi, Xinyu and Park, Yongjoo},booktitle={39th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2023},pages={1981--1994},year={2023},organization={IEEE Computer Society},}
Research Projects
Here are some projects I built that I conveniently have demos for:
Kishu: Versioned and Undoable Notebook System
Motivated by my frustrations with using Colab for research when I was an undergrad, Kishu is a Jupyter-based notebook system where users can undo cell executions to 'un-drop' dataframe columns, restore overwritten models, etc.
Hobbies
Badminton, Biking, Competitive DOTA2 (proud member of the UIUC DOTA2 varsity team during the 2017-2018 academic year), Rhythm Games.