Zili Meng (孟子立)

Assistant Professor
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Room 2441, Academic Building, HKUST.
Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong, China.
Email: email

[Curriculum Vitae] [Research Statement] [Teaching Statement]
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I'm looking for self-motivated and rational students to work with as PhDs or RAs. Please email me your resume if you are interested. Take a look at my research statement (it's only 3 pages!) and come up with a research problem that you want to work on in the email.

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. 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

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.
Bridging the Gap between QoE and QoS in Congestion Control: A Large-scale Mobile Web Service Perspective. USENIX ATC 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.
WiseTrans: Adaptive Transport Protocol Selection for Mobile Web Service. WWW 2021.
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.