About Me

This is William. I am currently a Research Intern at Microsoft Research Asia. I recently graduated from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign(B.S. in Computer Science and Statistics, Minor in Mathematics).

I have a broad interest in networked systems research. I enjoy building new systems for emerging workloads and computing environments with equal attention to systems and networking optimizations.

At UIUC, I work closely with Prof. Deepak Vasisht and Prof. Ramesh Sitaraman on space networks and content delivery, and Prof. Tianyin Xu on cloud systems. I also collaborate with Akamai in my CDN research. Currently, I’m working with Prof. Francis Yan and Prof. Ravi Netravali on real-time communications and ML inference infrastructures.

News

2025.11: I will be joining Microsoft Research Asia: System Research Group as a research intern until my PhD begins!
2025.07: 🎉 Oat is accepted to NSDI2026.
2025.05: 🎉 Received Jeffrey P. Blahut Memorial Scholarship.
2025.04: 🎉 StarCDN is accepted to SIGCOMM 2025. Deepest thanks to everyone supporting me on this journey.

Publications

Who Watches the Watchers? On the Reliability of Softwarizing Cloud Application Management
Jiawei Tyler Gu, Zhen Tang, Yiming Su, Bogdan Alexandru Stoica, Xudong Sun, William X. Zheng, Yue Zhang, Akond Rahman, Chen Wang, Tianyin Xu
To appear in NSDI 2026
[paper]

StarCDN: Moving Content Delivery Networks to Space
William X. Zheng, Aryan Taneja, Maleeha Masood, Anirudh Sabnis, Ramesh Sitaraman, Deepak Vasisht
SIGCOMM 2025
[paper][talk][slides]

Fidelity of Cloud Emulators: The Imitation Game of Testing Cloud-based Software
Anna Mazhar, Saad Sher Alam, William X. Zheng, Yinfang Chen, Suman Nath, Tianyin Xu
ICSE 2025
[paper]

Research Experience

• Real-time communication systems for online vision language models
  • Profiled and measured state-of-the-art vision language models to understand their network stacks.
  • Dissecting the challenges in serving vision models with multi-tenant sessions.
  • Integrating WebRTC with inference systems.
• Multi-party video conferencing (May 2025 - Aug 2025, with Prof. Francis)
  • Understood the challenges in auto-scaling the selective forwarding unit (SFU) in the cloud.
  • Prototyped a Jitsi-based, regional traffic-aware auto-scaling framework.
  • The vision for cloud-native autoscaling has been made into an open-sourced engineering project at Pion (welcome to join us to build the modern auto-scaling modular SFU!).
• Satellite-based CDNs (May 2024 - May 2025, with Prof. Deepak and Prof. Ramesh)
  • Built a theoretically provable high-fidelity CDN traffic generator for geographically diverse traces that achieves < 1% difference in hit rate curve and requests distribution with real traces.
  • Designed and evaluated a satellite-based CDN system that can reduce current space networks’ uplink usage by up to 80% and latency by 50% as compared to current space networks.
• Cloud Management System Interaction (May 2024 - May 2025, with Prof. Tianyin)
  • Studied the interaction and failure patterns between the cloud management system, operator, and the applications.
  • Wrote a static-analysis tool to uncover application-specific in the cloud controller’s custom resources.
  • Found 70+ new bugs with a tool implemented based on the findings in the study.
• Cloud Storage System Emulator Fidelity (May 2023 - March 2024, with Prof. Tianyin)
  • Built a fuzzing tool that identifies 94 API discrepancies between the emulator and actual services.
  • Presented a detailed study on discrepancies.
  • Built a testing framework that selectively runs unit tests against the cloud and emulator to ensure testing fidelity while minimizing the cost.