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. 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:
@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.
