Zishuo Zhao
PhD Candidate, Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Expected graduation: TBA (2026-2027) [CV]
Welcome to my homepage!
I am Zishuo Zhao, a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of ISE, UIUC, advised by Professor Yuan Zhou. Before the PhD program, I received my bachelor's degree from Yao Class at IIIS, Tsinghua University.
From Fall 2023 to Summer 2024, I visited MIT under the supervision of David Simchi-Levi.
My life philosophy is Andante Cantabile.
While I would like to pursue for a faculty or postdoc position in academia, with the awareness of the currently intense competition on the academic job market, I would anticipate to slightly extend my PhD timeline for a more solid research profile. I anticipate to graduate in 2026, depending on my research progress.
Research Statement
I currently do research on Mechanism Design, and my research interest spans the fields in (the intersection of) Operations Research, EconCS and (Cyber-)Security.
I have a special interest in mechanism design for blockchain and decentralized AI, and my recent research focus is on the design and theoretical boundaries of incentive-secure decentralized trustworthy AI platforms, for a general scope of reliability and social sustainability in AI and digital economy, including (particularly) the current concern and initiative of AI safety for the upcoming AGI era. Particularly, I am actively looking into the following questions:
How to incentivize selfish blockchain users to behave honestly, even if they may potentially collude with each other?
Is it possible to utilize the blockchain (or other decentralized) platforms to ensure the credibility of AI models, assuming all or majority of agents are economically rational?
In particular, while traditional blockchain protocols are computationally redundant, could we possibly develop a theoretically reliable decentralized AI platform with minimal overheads?
My research has won Best Paper Award at NeurIPS Workshop on Decentralization and Trustworthy Machine Learning in Web3, and published at the top-tier journal Operations Research in the field of OR/OM.
Contacts
zishuoz2 [at] illinois.edu
Ai no Hime (Steam)
Advising
• Haibo Xiao (Undergraduate at Tsinghua University)
• Hongxu Su (PhD student at HKUST(GZ) )
• Qiushi Han (Undergraduate at UIUC, visiting MIT)
• Renfei Tan (PhD student at MIT)
Research
Proof-of-Learning with Incentive Security [Arxiv]
Zishuo Zhao, Zhixuan Fang, Xuechao Wang, Xi Chen, Yuan Zhou
EC Workshop on Foundation Models and Game Theory, 2024.
INFORMS Conference on Security (IConS'24)
In submission (2024)
Bayesian Mechanism Design for Blockchain Transaction Fee Allocation [Link]
Xi Chen*, David Simchi-Levi*, Zishuo Zhao*, Yuan Zhou* (alphabetical order)
Operations Research (2025, forthcoming)
Best Paper Award, NeurIPS Workshop on Decentralization and Trustworthy Machine Learning in Web3, 2022
CESC 2022
It Takes Two: A Peer-Prediction Solution for Blockchain Verifier's Dilemma [Arxiv]
Zishuo Zhao, Xi Chen, Yuan Zhou
Working Paper (2024). Substantially improved results are available compared to the Arxiv version. [Slides]
Personalized Pricing with Group Fairness Constraint
Xin Chen*, Zexing Xu*, Zishuo Zhao*, Yuan Zhou* (alphabetical order)
ACM FAccT, 2023
Dynamic Car Dispatching and Pricing: Revenue and Fairness for Ridesharing Platforms
Zishuo Zhao, Xi Chen, Xuefeng Zhang, Yuan Zhou
IJCAI 2022, Long Oral (top 3.75%)
ClusterSLAM: A SLAM Backend for Simultaneous Rigid Body Clustering and Motion Estimation [Link]
Jiahui Huang, Sheng Yang, Zishuo Zhao, Yukun Lai, Shi-Min Hu.
CVMJ 2021
ICCV 2019
Tentative Projects
Online Peer Prediction (For LLM Alignment)
with David Simchi-Levi, Qiushi Han and Renfei Tan
Competitions Attended
THUCTF2020, 12th place [Writeup]
2020/09 - 2020/10
The 24th Artificial Inteligence Programming Contest of Tsinghua University, 12th place
2020/03 - 2020/05
The 20th Artificial Inteligence Programming Contest of Tsinghua University, 15th place
2016/03 - 2016/05
Extracurricular Life
Beside math and computer sciences, I am also interested in music and visual arts since my childhood, and was good at writing essays & poems during high school times. I still maintain photography, singing and writing as my main hobbies, and have developed new interests in orienteering, gardening and sketching during college years.
I have been growing a very lovely Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant) since Fall 2021 when I came to UIUC. The plant is named The Cryptbloom, which simultaneously refers to my passion for research on blockchain & Web3, my favorite League of Legends item, and a (zero-knowledge) lovely story related to the plant. A few plantlets named as Cryptbloom Minors are also growing separately.
