Zhijia Zhao

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Professor
RIPLE Research Group
Computer Science and Engineering, UC Riverside

Short Bio: I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Xipeng Shen. In the same year, I joined UC Riverside as an assistant professor, later becoming an associate professor in 2020 and a full professor in 2026. I am fortunate and grateful to be a recipient of NSF CAREER Award (2018), Regents Faculty Fellowship (2018), Hellman Fellowship (2018), Best Paper Runner-up Award at MobiSys'18, and Best Paper Award at ASPLOS'20 and ASPLOS'22.

Research Interests

We design algorithms and system optimizations for high-performance processing of large data across graphs, semi-structured formats (JSON/XML/HTML), and binary serialization. We boost performance through parallelization (multicore, SIMD, GPU), redundancy elimination, program analysis, and AI techniques.

Parallelization JSON & Graph Analytics Program Analysis AI & LLM Systems

Selected Works

Semi-Structured and Serialization Data Processing

Speculative decoding of ProtoBuf data [ASPLOS'26 ] ]
GPU-accelerated JSON processing [ASPLOS'26 ]
Streaming JSONPath evaluation in parallel [ASPLOS'19 ], [ASPLOS'22 ]
Parallel structural index construction for JSON [VLDB'21 ]

Graph Analytics

CFL reachability evaluation [ICS'25 ]
Concurrent evaluation of graph queries [ASPLOS'23 ]
Incremental evaluation of graph queries [SoCC'24 ], [EuroSys'21 ]
Out-of-GPU-memory graph processing [EuroSys'20 ]
GPU-friendly processing of irregular graphs [ASPLOS'18 ]

Mobile App State Preservation

Identifying and preserving mobile app state [OOPSLA'20 ]
Handling runtime changes without activity restarting [MobiSys'18 ]

Finite-State Machine (FSM)

Enabling effective parallelism for FSM execution [ASPLOS'21 ]
Leveraging FSMs for effective parallelization of bit-stream computations [ASPLOS'20 ]