Jing Liu

Biography

Jing Liu is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. She earned her Ph.D. in the computer sciences department, University of Wisconsin–Madison, under the guidance of Prof. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Prof. Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. Jing was a recipient of a Meta Ph.D. Research Fellowship, and a Erik Riedel Best Paper Award at FAST 2025.

She works on operating systems and storage, focusing on the CPU-side system stack for agentic AI and on how computing systems and AI models should co-evolve. She studies systems managed by AI agents and rethinks infrastructure for AI-generated code: what should remain fixed, what should be generated at runtime, and how to execute generated components safely and reliably.

Her goal is for each workload to approach its thermodynamic optimum: workload-specialized algorithms executed at the highest efficiency the hardware can sustain, without wasted computation. XKernel (OSDI 2026) lets LLM-generated policy code change operating-system behavior in situ without stopping workloads or recompiling the kernel. YoloFS (SOSP 2026) introduces agent-native file-system primitives that improve task success and reliability while reducing misuse.

I’m actively looking for interns; feel free to drop me a line.

News

• August 2026: YoloFS is accepted to SOSP ’26. Congrats to the team!
• March 2026: XKernel is accepted to OSDI ’26. Congrats to the team!

Publications

+ Students mentored

• Shawn Wanxiang Zhong, Junxuan Liao, Jing Liu, Mai Zheng, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau. “Don’t Let AI Agents YOLO Your Files: Information and Control in Agent-Native Filesystems.” In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP ’26), 2026. arXiv
• Zhongjie Chen⁺, Wentao Zhang, Yulong Tang⁺, Ran Shu, Fengyuan Ren, Tianyin Xu, and Jing Liu. “Xkernel: Principled Performance Tunability of Operating System Kernels.” In 20th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ’26). paper, code
• Yaoqi Chen, Jinkai Zhang, Baotong Lu, Qianxi Zhang, Chengruidong Zhang, Jing Liu, Jingjia Luo, Di Liu, Huiqiang Jiang, Qi Chen, Bailu Ding, Xiao Yan, Jiawei Jiang, Chen Chen, Mingxing Zhang, Yuqing Yang, Fan Yang, and Mao Yang. “RetroInfer: A Vector Storage Engine for Scalable Long-Context LLM Inference.” In Proceedings of the 52nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB ’26), Boston, USA, 2026.
• Chuandong Li, Ran Yi, Zonghao Zhang, Jing Liu, Changwoo Min, Jie Zhang, Yingwei Luo, Xiaolin Wang, Zhenlin Wang, Diyu Zhou. “Aeolia: A Fast and Secure Userspace Interrupt-Based Storage Stack.” In Proceedings of the 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP ’25), Seoul, South Korea, 2025. paper
• Shawn Zhong⁺, Jing Liu, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. “Revealing the Unstable Foundations of eBPF-Based Kernel Extensions.” In Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Computer Systems (Eurosys ’25), Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2025. paper, slides, poster, code, website
• Jing Liu, Yifan Dai, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau. “Fast, Transparent Filesystem Microkernel Recovery with Ananke.” In Proceedings of The 23rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’25), Santa Clara, CA, USA, 2025. paper, slides (Erik Riedel Best Paper Award)
• Jing Liu, Xiangpeng Hao, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Tej Chajed. “Shadow Filesystems: Recovering from Filesystem Runtime Errors via Robust Alternative Execution.” In 16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage ’24), Santa Clara, CA, 2024. paper, slides
• Yifan Dai, Jing Liu, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau. “Symbiosis: The Art of Application and Kernel Cache Coordination.” In Proceedings of The 22nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’24), Santa Clara, CA, USA, 2024. paper
• Jing Liu, Anthony Rebello, Yifan Dai, Chenhao Ye, Sudarsun Kannan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau. “Scale and Performance in a Filesystem Semi-Microkernel.” In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP ’21), Virtual Event, Germany, 2021. paper, video-long, slides-long, video-short, slides-short, code
• Irene Zhang, Amanda Raybuck, Pratyush Patel, Kirk Olynyk, Jacob Nelson, Omar S. Navarro Leija, Ashlie Martinez, Jing Liu, Anna Kornfeld Simpson, Sujay Jayakar, Pedro Henrique Penna, Max Demoulin, Piali Choudhury, and Anirudh Badam. “The Demikernel Library OS Architecture for Microsecond, Kernel-Bypass Datacenter Systems.” In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP ’21), Virtual Event, Germany, 2021. paper
• Jing Liu, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Sudarsun Kannan. “File Systems as Processes.” In 11th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage 19), Renton, WA, 2019. paper, slides
• Irene Zhang, Jing Liu, Amanda Austin, Michael Lowell Roberts, and Anirudh Badam. “I’m Not Dead Yet! The Role of the Operating System in a Kernel-Bypass Era.” In Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS ’19), Bertinoro, Italy, 2019. paper
• Suli Yang, Jing Liu, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau. “Principled Schedulability Analysis for Distributed Storage Systems using Thread Architecture Models.” In Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on Operating System and Design Implementation (OSDI ’18), CA, USA, 2018. paper
• Ramnatthan Alagappan, Aishwarya Ganesan, Jing Liu, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. “Fault-Tolerance, Fast and Slow: Exploiting Failure Asynchrony in Distributed Systems.” In Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on Operating System and Design Implementation (OSDI ’18), CA, USA, 2018. paper
• Jing Liu, Tongwei Ren, Yuantian Wang, Sheng-Hua Zhong, Jia Bei, and Shengchao Chen. “Object proposal on RGB-D images via elastic edge boxes.” In Neurocomputing, 2017 May, 236:134-146. paper
• Jing Liu, Tongwei Ren, Bing-Kun Bao, and Jia Bei, “Depth-aware layered edge for object proposal.” In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME ’16), Seattle, USA, 2016. paper
• Jing Liu, Tongwei Ren, and Jia Bei. “Elastic edge boxes for object proposal on RGB-D images.” In Proceedings of International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM ’16), Miami, USA, 2016. paper, slides

Experience

• Instructor, Computer Science Department, UW-Madison, WI. (Summer ’23)
  • CS537 Operating Systems
• Teaching Assistant, Computer Sciences Department, UW-Madison, WI. (Spring ’22, Spring ’23)
  • CS739 Distributed Systems
  • Instructor: Prof. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau
• Research Intern, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA. (May. 2018 - August. 2018)
  • Mentor: Dr. Irene Zhang.
• Research Assistant, State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University. (Mar. 2014 - Jun. 2016)
  • Advisor: Prof. Tongwei Ren.
• Teaching Assistant, Software Institute, Nanjing University.
  • Computer Operating System. (Spring ’15, Spring ’16)
  • Instructor: Prof. Bing Luo & Prof. Jidong Ge.

Honors & Awards

• Erik Riedel Best Paper Award, FAST ’25
• Meta PhD Research Fellowship, 2022 - 2024
• Travel Grant: OSDI ’22, OSDI ’18, and SOSP ’17
• Summer Research Award, CS@UW-Madison, 2017
• Graduate Research Fellowship, UW-Madison, 2016 – 2017
• Departmental Best Undergraduate Thesis, University Highest Honor, 2016
• National Encouraging Scholarship, Ministry of Education of China, 2014 & 2015
• National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of China, 2013

Education

• Ph.D. Department of Computer Sciences, UW-Madison, USA. August 2024
• B. Eng., Software Institute, Nanjing University, China. June 2016

Service

• Shadow PC Co-chair, Eurosys ’26
• Program Committee, SOSP ’25, APSys ’25, NSDI ’26, OSDI ’26
• External Review Committee, ATC ’24
• ATC/OSDI Artifact Evaluation Committee, 2022
• Topic (OS & Emerging Hardware) Moderator, SOSP ’21 Diversity Workshop
• External Reviewer, FAST ’18