01 / About

Hi there! I am a first-year CIS PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Professor Ryan Marcus. My research interest includes machine programming and applying ML algorithms to build self-evolvable software systems (especially databases).

I love building cool things. Feel free to leave me an email if we're sharing the same interests!

02 / News

2024.07.26::

Portfolio V3 launched. Stack: Next.js 14, Tailwind, Framer Motion.

2024.07.06::

Bachelor's degree conferred by Tianjin University. Status: COMPLETED.

03 / Selected Publications

Piece of CAKE: Adaptive Execution Engines via Microsecond-Scale Learning
UNDER REVIEW2026.2
Zijie Zhao, Ryan Marcus
DATABASE SYSTEMQUERY PROCESSINGMACHINE LEARNING
Survivorship Bias in Industrial Database Workloads
CIDR 20262025.10Best Paper
Ryan Marcus*, Jeffery Tao*, Peizhi Wu*, Zijie Zhao*
DATABASE SYSTEMQUERY OPTIMIZATIONSUVIVORSHIP BIAS
*Equally Contributed
CodeImprove: Program Adaptation for Deep Code Models
ICSE 20252025.05
Ravishka Rathnasuriya, Zijie Zhao, Wei Yang
SOFTWARE ENGINEERINGDEEP LEARNINGPROGRAM ANALYSIS
NuClass: An ontology-driven vision–language foundation model for zero-shot nuclei classification
MMFM-BIOMED @ CVPR 20252025.04
Yinuo Xu, Jina Kim, Zijie Zhao, Zhi Huang
MEDICAL IMAGEVISION-LANGUAGE MODELDEEP LEARNING