About
I'm Zhizhen (Cathy) Cai, first-year PhD student in UIUC CS. Before that I got my B.E. in Computer Science at University of Science and Technology of China.
Currently I'm focusing on correct & verifible software systems, working with Xudong, Cody and Tianyin.
Improving tools we use daily is my biggest motivation.
Contact: cathyc5 AT illinois.edu
Publications
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VBASE: Unifying Online Vector Similarity Search and Relational Queries via Relaxed Monotonicity
Q. Zhang, S. Xu, Qi Chen, Guxin Sui, Jiadong Xie, Zhizhen Cai, et al.
17th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'23)My work focused on design & implementation of planning subsystem for queries over high-dimensional indices: To estimate and compare the cost of different query execution path and choose the optimal one to minify latency. I also helped on misc stuffs including profiling & tackling with hotspots in code and etc.
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Unified Cost Abstraction for High dimensional Queries
My bachelor degree's thesis, summarizes and extends my work in VBASE
Research Experience
2024-current: I'm working with Tianyin in verifying kubernetes controller. Publication may be available before 2026.
2022-2023: I had my internship at Systems and Networking Research Group of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), co-advised by Qi Chen and Qianxi Zhang. I had my best time in undergrad there. Their ☕ and 🍪 were really enjoyable. This experience changed my mind and I decided to study further in system area.
My work in MSRA mainly focused on investigating existing high-dimensional indices and providing a good runtime query-planning subsystem for our high-dimensional queries. Details can be found in publications section.
Misc
- Vice President of USTC Linux User Group (2021-2022)
- My PhD interview slides
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Photographing aurora, taken by Nicholas Wang