Vic Shihang Li

shli[at]cs[dot]uw[dot]edu

Hello there! I'm Vic, a third-year CS PhD student at the University of Washington. I am a part of the Computer Systems Lab, advised by Simon Peter and Tom Anderson. I also collaborate with faculty across the lab, including Arvind Krishnamurthy and Ratul Mahajan.

I take a full-stack approach to building systems for datacenter applications—from hardware abstractions to OS kernels and application runtimes. My latest work focuses on HW/SW co-design for memory management, microservice SLOs, and LLM agents.

Before UW, I worked with Malte Schwarzkopf and Adam Belay as a master student at the ETOS group at Brown. Before that, I studied Finance and CS as an undergraduate at NYU Stern School of Business.

News

2025-07Loom has been accepted to SOSP '25. Stay tuned for more detail!

2025-06I have started my internship at Microsoft Research Redmond this summer. Excited to work on LLM agents!

2025-04I presented our work Quicksand, a new programming framework that unstrands datacenter resources, at NSDI '25 and at Brown.

2024-11I presented our ongoing work Masa, a new RPC system designed for improving microservice SLO compliance, at the SySDW '24 workshop.

Publications

Loom: Efficient Capture and Querying of High-Frequency Telemetry

Franco Solleza, Shihang Li, William Sun, Richard Tang, Malte Schwarzkopf, Nesime Tatbul, Andrew Crotty, David Cohen, Stan Zdonik

The 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '25)

[Code]

Quicksand: Harnessing Stranded Datacenter Resources with Granular Computing

Zhenyuan Ruan, Shihang Li, Kaiyan Fan, Marcos K. Aguilera, Adam Belay, Seo Jin Park, Malte Schwarzkopf

22nd USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '25)

[Code] [Slides]

Mach: Firefighting Time-Critical Issues in Complex Systems Using High-Frequency Telemetry

Franco Solleza, Shihang Li, William Sun, Richard Tang, Malte Schwarzkopf, Nesime Tatbul, Andrew Crotty, David Cohen, Stan Zdonik

50th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB '24, Demo Track)

Unleashing True Utility Computing with Quicksand

Zhenyuan Ruan, Shihang Li, Kaiyan Fan, Marcos K. Aguilera, Adam Belay, Seo Jin Park, Malte Schwarzkopf

The 19th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS '23)

Professional Experience

Microsoft ResearchRedmond, WA

June 2025 to Sept 2025

Mentors: Landon Cox, Pedro Henrique Penna, Rodrigo Fonseca

Services

Co-organizer of the first-year PhD mentor-mentee program at UW CSE.
Pre-PhD applicant mentor for the 2024 cycle, via the PAMS program at UW CSE.
Mentor for first-year PhD students in the 2024-25 academic year.
Member of EuroSys '25 Shadow PC.

Teaching

I find teaching deeply rewarding. I have TAed for the following courses:

CSCI 0300: Fundamentals of Computer Systems @ Brown
CSCI 1760: Multiprocessor Synchronization @ Brown
STAT-GB.2308.10: Stochastic Processes @ NYU

I am also an instructor for CSE 492R @ UW, a program designed to make research more accessible to undergraduates. In this class, I teach and mentor undergraduate students on a project closely related to my research.