About Me

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Klara Nahrstedt at the Multimedia Operating Systems and Networking (MONET) group.

My current research focuses on 1) leveraging generative AI to improve the reliability and efficiency of multimedia streaming system; 2) designing and building multimedia systems that sustain high-quality user experience. I build systems that work in the real world.

Previously, I had been working on wireless communication with a focus on multiple access, resource allocation, and wireless video streaming.

I spent two wonderful summers as a Research Intern at ByteDance’s Multimedia Lab in San Diego, working with Shu Shi on VR streaming.

I enjoy water-related activities like swimming, SCUBA diving, surfing and jet ski, but I'm always interested in exploring various sports. I have built interesting underwater communication systems on smartphones and integrated them with generative AI. Check our cool projects AquaScope and AquaVLM !

Download my resumé.

Selected Publications

Lingzhi Zhao, Yongqiang Gui, Yanyan Suo, Sandesh Dhawaskar Sathyanarayana, Ruixiao Zhang, Shu Shi, Klara Nahrstedt Trinity: Exploiting Latency Sensitivity to Improve Quality of Experience on Cloud VR Gaming.
ACM MMSys, 2026

Beitong Tian† Lingzhi Zhao†, Bo Chen, Mingyuan Wu, Haozhen Zheng, Francis Y. Yan, Deepak Vasisht, Klara Nahrstedt AquaScope: Reliable Underwater Image Transmission on Mobile Devices.
arXiv Website Code

Beitong Tian† Lingzhi Zhao†, Bo Chen, Haozhen Zheng, Jingcheng Yang, Mingyuan Wu, Deepak Vasisht, Klara Nahrstedt AquaVLM: Improving Underwater Situation Awareness with Mobile Vision Language Models.
arXiv Website Code

Lingzhi Zhao, Ying Cui, Yuhang Jia, Yunfei Zhang, Klara Nahrstedt Enhancing neural adaptive wireless video streaming via lower-layer information exposure and online tuning.
IEEE Trans. Multimedia (TMM), 2025

PDF Technical Report Code and Dataset

Lingzhi Zhao, Ying Cui, Sheng Yang, Shlomo Shamai (Shitz) An optimization framework for general rate splitting for general multicast.
IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun. (TWC), 2022

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Lingzhi Zhao, Ying Cui, Zhi Liu, Yunfei Zhang, Sheng Yang Adaptive streaming of 360 videos with perfect, imperfect, and unknown FoV viewing probabilities in wireless networks.
IEEE Trans. Image Process. (TIP), 2021

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Chengjun Guo, Lingzhi Zhao, Ying Cui, Zhi Liu, Derrick Wing Kwan Power-efficient wireless streaming of multi-quality tiled 360 VR video in MIMO-OFDMA systems.
IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun. (TWC), 2021

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