Zhaoheng (Billy) Li

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. 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; I am currently interning in ByteDance’s System Infrastructure Lab and doing research on on-cloud vector databases. My previous internships and projects include:

Summer 2024: System Infrastructure Lab @ ByteDance, Filtered Vector Search Indexing
Summer 2023: Google BigQuery @ Google, Efficient GROUP BY for Structs
Summer 2022: Google S2Infra @ Google, SQL Profiling with BPF
Summer 2020: Google Local Services @ Google, Ads Ranking Algorithms
Summer 2019: Google ContentAds @ Google, Monitoring Pipeline for Ad Requests

News

May 19, 2025	I have returned to ByteDance’s System Infrastructure Lab as a Research Intern for Summer 2025.
May 16, 2025	I gave a talk at PyCon 2025 titled “World’s First Undoable Notebook” for my ongoing research project, Kishu. →Slides, Talk←

Selected Publications

VLDB

Kishu: Time-Traveling for Computational Notebooks

Zhaoheng Li, Supawit Chockchowwat, Ribhav Sahu, Areet Sheth, and Yongjoo Park

Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2024

arXiv Bib Code

@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},
}

VLDB

ElasticNotebook: Enabling Live Migration for Computational Notebooks

Zhaoheng Li, Pranav Gor, Rahul Prabhu, Hui Yu, Yuzhou Mao, and Yongjoo Park

Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2023

Bib HTML Code

@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},
}

ICDE

S/C: Speeding up Data Materialization with Bounded Memory

Zhaoheng Li, Xinyu Pi, and Yongjoo Park

In 39th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2023, 2023

Bib HTML Code

@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.