I am Ziyi Zhang, a first-year PhD student at University of Chicago, where I am advised by Prof. Junchen Jiang.

I went to my undergrad at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I majored in Computer Sciences and Mathematics . It is my pleasure to be advised by Prof. Shivaram Venkataraman on system research and by Prof. Dieter van Melkebeek on competitive programming.

My research interests lie in distributed systems and machine learning systems. The projects I worked on include low-level DNN operator accelerations, high-level ML system pipeline optimizations, and video processing system development. I am particularly interested in designing high-performance ML/Big Data Systems.

Refer to my CV for things that I have done.

News

[2022/05] My teammates and I won the third place at ICPC North American Championship!
[2022/04] I am going to UChicago for my PhD this fall!

Research Projects

Recommendation System

Recommendation models is prevalent these days for click rate prediction in big companies where they could be used to find the short videos/advertisement that users might be interested to see. We re-investigated the training process of recommendation system and make the training faster and less memory intensive for GPUs. Arxiv preprint

Competitive Programming

A (crazy) lot of time in my undergrad was devoted to competitive programming (also known as programming contests).

View my stories here.

Teaching/Mentoring Experience

I love teaching and mentoring students. I have taken several related roles including ICPC coach, peer mentor, and 1-on-1 mentor. Check this out for more information.