I am currently a second year computer science PhD working with Prof. Prashant Pandey at Northeastern University DATA Lab started Fall 2025.

I'm the lead developer of Jasper, a GPU library for billion-scale approximate nearest neighbor search that outperforms NVIDIA cuVS on both index construction and query throughput with a smaller GPU memory footprint.

Before this, I worked on building adaptive state management for streaming system at CASP Lab at Boston University.

Curriculum Vitae

News

• Aug 7, 2026
  Jasper is now merged into the VIBE benchmark!

Projects

• 

  Jasper: GPU Accelerated Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

  An updatable GPU index for billion-scale vector search, with faster construction and query throughput and a smaller memory footprint than NVIDIA cuVS.

• 

  Adaptive Streaming System

  Mechanisms and policies for efficiently scaling streaming workloads at runtime.

Publications

• NSDI'27
  (To appear)
  Koala: Non-disruptive Reconfiguration for Long-running Stateful Dataflows

  Lei Huang, Sakshi Sharma, Chenxu Yu, Zikun Wang, Yuanli Wang, Zichen Zhu, John Liagouris, Vasiliki Kalavri

  USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) 2027
• EDBT'27
  The Dangerous Impact of Solver Imprecision on Data Management Techniques (and How to Avoid It)

  Zixuan Chen, Zikun Wang, Panagiotis Manolios, Mirek Riedewald

  International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT) 2027
• VecDB'26
  [Workshop] Directional Beam Search: I/O-Efficient ANNS on GPU

  Zikun Wang, Hunter McCoy, Prashant Pandey

  The 2nd Workshop on Vector Databases (VecDB) 2026
• VLDB'26
  GPU-Accelerated ANNS: Quantized for Speed, Built for Change

  Hunter McCoy, Zikun Wang, Prashant Pandey

  International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 2026
• EuroSys'25
  CAPSys: Contention-aware task placement for data stream processing

  Yuanli Wang, Lei Huang, Zikun Wang, Vasiliki Kalavri, Ibrahim Matta

  European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) 2025