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.
I'm interested in system verification and want to make it a bit easier for everyone to use verified systems.
I'm open to interesting discussions at [email protected]
Publications
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Welder:: Compositional Liveness Verification of Cluster Control Planes
Zhizhen Cathy Cai, Nikhil Data, Jiawei Tyler Gu, Cody Rivera, Tej Chajed, Oded Padon, Tianyin Xu, Xudong Sun
The 32nd Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'26)My talk slides at Verus Retreat (2026), code available at Github.
Past Present Future
- 2026–now Work with AWS Automated Reasoning Group to verify production systems, mentored by Jenny and Mariana. I realized verification alone may not be enough for industrial systems. I'm exploring practical verification pipelines for systems in production.
- 2024–now Work with Tianyin, Xudong and Nikhil in System Verification. I published my first first-author paper (Welder) with their help, and gained a lot of experiences in system verification.
- 2022–2023 Worked with Systems and Networking Research Group of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). I was mentored by Qi and Qianxi. I had my best time in undergrad there hacking PostgreSQL and made my first publication. I decided to try research after that.
- 2019–2023 Spent 4 years to get my Bachelor's degree in USTC. It was not very fun and I was fed up with the crazy Physics curriculum there. But also I met my best friends in USTC Linux User Group (LUG). I served as a Vice President of USTC LUG during 2021-2022. It's the pivot of my life.
Misc
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Enjoying my trip to Bainbridge Island, Seattle