Billy Li
Research Assistant at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBilly Li is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at UIUC with eight years of engineering and research experience focused on systems for AI/ML, computational notebooks, and vector databases. He combines academic rigor from CreateLab and IDEA Lab with industry impact through internships at Google (BigQuery, Ads, performance tooling) and ByteDance, where his work on composite indexes for filtered vector search led to a VLDB 2025 paper. Billy ships low-level C++ systems (query semantics, BPF pipelines) and designs cloud-native vector database features, bridging theory and production. Based in Urbana, he brings a track record of turning database and storage research into practical, scalable implementations and a knack for improving tooling that surfaces hard-to-see performance bottlenecks.
8 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
High School, High School at Shenzhen College of International EducationDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Chinese, English, ChineseProgramming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
BillyZhaohengLi/BillyZhaohengLi.github.io
Nov 2017 - Nov 2020
Contributions:111 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years
illinoisdata/kishu
Dec 2024 - Mar 2025
Contributions:6 reviews, 10 PRs, 63 pushes in 3 months
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