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.
Her research focuses on building instance-customizable operating systems and system stacks — systems that adapt at runtime to hardware and workloads without breaking compatibility, so that each workload instance can approach its own optimal performance. This includes both rethinking system architecture to make it customizable and designing mechanisms that turn traditionally fixed decisions into customizable ones while preserving compatibility.
More recently, she has been exploring how to enable in-situ code generation as part of core systems. The idea is to enable large language models (LLMs) write policy code that customizes kernel and system behavior on a per-instance basis (workload + hardware) at runtime, while keeping the system safe and responsive as workloads evolve. You can find more details in our recent work, KernelX.
I’m actively looking for interns; feel free to drop me a line.
News
August 2025: Aeolia is accepted to SOSP ’25. Congrats to the team!
August 2025: Invited to serve on the OSDI ’26 program committee.
June 2025: Serving as Shadow-PC Co-chair for Eurosys ’26, check info here!
Feb 2025: Ananke won the Erik Riedel Best Paper Award at FAST ’25!
Jan 2025: Depsurf is accepted to Eurosys ’25.
Publications
Zhongjie Chen, Wentao Zhang, Yulong Tang, Ran Shu, Fengyuan Ren, Tianyin Xu, and Jing Liu.
“Principled Performance Tunability in Operating System Kernels.” arXiv Preprint, 2025. paper
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
