Zhizhen Cai

About

My lovely photo

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

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