Zili Meng (孟子立)
Assistant Professor
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering
Department of Computer Science and Engineering (by courtesy)
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Room 2441, Academic Building, HKUST.
Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong, China.
Email: 
[Curriculum Vitae]. Also find me at:
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[04/2025] (Paper) ACE accepted to SIGCOMM’25. Congratulations to Xiangjie and Jiayang!
[12/2024] (Paper) Tooth accepted to NSDI’25. Congrats!
[08/2024] (Award) Congrats to Hyun Hu for his work awarded the gold medal in the SIGCOMM’24 SRC!
[05/2024] (Paper) Prudentia accepted to SIGCOMM’24. Congratulations!
About
Zili is currently an Assistant Professor in HKUST ECE. He is leading the Streaming Platform and Real-time networK (SPARK) Lab.
He received his Ph.D. (Hons) in Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Mingwei Xu, and 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. His PhD dissertation received the doctoral dissertation awards from ACM China, Chinese Institute of Electronics (中国电子学会), and Tsinghua University. He is also the recipient of Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship (Asia), ByteDance Scholar, and Tsinghua Top Grade Scholarship during his student life. Besides, he is also fortunate to be advised or mentored by Prof. Justine Sherry (CMU), Prof. Mohammad Alizadeh (MIT), Dr. Chen Sun (Alibaba), and Prof. Hongxin Hu (University at Buffalo).
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Recent Publication Highlights
ACE: Sending Burstiness Control for High-Quality Real-time Communication. ACM SIGCOMM 2025.
Tooth: Toward Optimal Balance of Video QoE and Redundancy Cost by Fine-Grained FEC in Cloud Gaming Streaming. USENIX NSDI 2025.
Prudentia: Findings of an Internet Fairness Watchdog. ACM SIGCOMM 2024.
Hairpin: Rethinking Packet Loss Recovery in Edge-based Interactive Video Streaming. USENIX NSDI 2024.
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.
Interpreting Deep Learning-Based Networking Systems. ACM SIGCOMM 2020.
Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters. ACM SIGCOMM 2019.
Research Interests
He aims at building networked systems for interactive multimedia streaming.
For applications from videoconferencing, cloud gaming to virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR), users interact with the application all the time and multimedia contents are streamed in real-time. The key to enable these applications in the real life is to provide a consistent ultra-low latency. This involves the latency optimization across the entire network stack, from the application layer to the physical layer, and the intersection over multimedia, human-computer interaction, and machine learning. Going forward, his plan is to enable interactive multimedia streaming systems to be a part of real life. This will enable a series of future applications in the world of AR-assisted everything.