Zili Meng (孟子立)
Incoming Assistant Professor
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Email: 
[Curriculum Vitae] [Research Statement] [Teaching Statement]
Also find me at:
I'm looking for self-motivated graduate and undergraduate students to work with in Spring 2024 or Fall 2024. I have several openings for PhDs and RAs. Please drop me an email with your resume if you are interested. Take a look at my research statement before sending the email (it's only 3 pages!).
[06/2023] (Service) I'll serve as the PC for SIGCOMM Posters and emerging multimedia system workshop in 2023. Please consider to submit!
[05/2023] (Career) I've defended my thesis and will join HKUST as an assistant professor in Fall 2023!
[10/2022] (Award) Honored with ByteDance Scholar.
[07/2022] (Paper) AFR accepted to NSDI’23.
About
Zili is currently a 4th-year PhD student in Routing Group, with Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Mingwei Xu.
He received his B.Eng. (Hons) in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Jun Bi (late).
His research received Gold Medal of SIGCOMM 2018 SRC and Best Paper Awards from IWQoS 2021 and ICC 2020.
He is also the recipient of Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship (Asia), ByteDance Scholar, and Tsinghua Top Grade Scholarship.
Besides, he is also fortunate to be advised or mentored by Prof. Hongxin Hu (University at Buffalo), Prof. Mohammad Alizadeh (MIT), Dr. Chen Sun (Alibaba), and Prof. Justine Sherry (CMU).
He loves honest feedback. Please tell him something anonymously. (inspired by Stewart Grant).
Recent Publication Highlights
Enabling High Quality Real-Time Communications with Adaptive Frame-Rate. USENIX NSDI 2023.
Achieving Consistent Low Latency for Wireless Real-Time Communications with the Shortest Control Loop. ACM SIGCOMM 2022.
Detecting Ephemeral Optical Events with OpTel. USENIX NSDI 2022.
Interpreting Deep Learning-Based Networking Systems. ACM SIGCOMM 2020.
Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters. ACM SIGCOMM 2019.
PiTree: Practical Implementation of ABR Algorithms Using Decision Trees. ACM Multimedia 2019.
Research Interests
My main research interest lies in the computer network and systems, with intersection over multimedia, human-computer interaction, and machine learning.
Now we are closer to next-generation real-time interactive multimedia streaming systems (e.g., metaverse, cloud gaming, virtual reality, or videoconferencing) than anytime in the history.
However, the underlying network is still not enough to provide a consistent low latency and support a satisfactory experience for users.
I proposed several networked systems to provide consistent low latency for real-time interactive multimedia streaming systems, across all network stacks to reduce end-to-end latency fluctuations.
Going forward, my plan is to enable real-time interactive multimedia streaming systems to be a part of real life with more consistent low latency.
Real-Time Multimedia Streaming (RTC)
AFR [NSDI’23], Zhuge [SIGCOMM’22], PiTree [MM’19, ToN’21], etc.
Machine Learning for Networking Systems (NetAI)
Metis [SIGCOMM’20], Decima [SIGCOMM’19], Floo [ATC’23], WiseTrans [WWW’21], etc.
Network Management