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

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.

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 Projcects

Recommendation System

[SOSP’23] Oboe: Accelerating Deep Recommendation Model Training [arxiv preprint]
Saurabh Agarwal, Chengpo Yan, Ziyi Zhang, Shivaram Venkataraman

Recommendation models are 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 by using a look-ahead algorithm.

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.