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 advised by Simon Peter and Tom Anderson, and I am affiliated with SysLab, FOCI and SyFI.

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

Before UW, I worked with Malte Schwarzkopf as a MS 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!

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

F. Solleza, S. Li, W. Sun, R. Tang, M. Schwarzkopf, N. Tatbul, A. Crotty, D. Cohen, S. Zdonik. SOSP '25

[Code]

Quicksand: Harnessing Stranded Datacenter Resources with Granular Computing

Z. Ruan, S. Li, K. Fan, M. Aguilera, A. Belay, S. Park, M. Schwarzkopf. NSDI '25

[Code] [Slides]

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

F. Solleza, S. Li, W. Sun, R. Tang, M. Schwarzkopf, N. Tatbul, A. Crotty, D. Cohen, S. Zdonik. VLDB '24 Demo

Unleashing True Utility Computing with Quicksand

Z. Ruan, S. Li, K. Fan, M. Aguilera, A. Belay, S. Park, M. Schwarzkopf. 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.