I am a PhD student advised by Rohan Padhye and Vyas Sekar. I work on building practical debugging and testing tools for heterogeneous cloud applications. My email address is [email protected].

My GitHub, Bluesky, and Google Scholar. You may also want to work with me.

📢📢📢 Java developer? Supercharge your concurrent code with Fray - the testing platform that catches what you miss.

Publication

Feedback-guided Adaptive Testing of Distributed Systems Designs
Ao Li, Ankush Desai, Rohan Padhye
NSDI 2026

Fray: An Efficient General-Purpose Concurrency Testing Platform for the JVM [Appendix]
Ao Li, Byeongjee Kang, Vasudev Vikram, Isabella Laybourn, Samvid Dharanikota, Shrey Tiwari, Rohan Padhye
OOPSLA 2025

The Havoc Paradox in Generator-Based Fuzzing
Ao Li, Madonna Huang, Vasudev Vikram, Caroline Lemieux, and Rohan Padhye
TOSEM 2025

SPIDER: Fuzzing for Stateful Performance Issues in the ONOS Software-Defined Network Controller
Ao Li, Rohan Padhye, Vyas Sekar
ICST 2025

It’s About Time: An Empirical Study of Date and Time Bugs in Open-Source Python Software
Shrey Tiwari, Serena Chen, Alexander Joukov, Peter Vandervelde, Ao Li, Rohan Padhye
MSR 2025 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

The Havoc Paradox in Generator-Based Fuzzing (Registered Report)
Ao Li, Madonna Huang, Caroline Lemieux, Rohan Padhye
FUZZING 2024

ExChain: Exception Dependency Analysis for Root Cause Diagnosis
Ao Li, Shan Lu, Suman Nath, Rohan Padhye, Vyas Sekar
NSDI 2024

Guiding Greybox Fuzzing with Mutation Testing
Vasudev Vikram, Isabella Laybourn, Ao Li, Nicole Nair, Kelton OBrien, Rafaello Sanna, Rohan Padhye
ISSTA 2023 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

Automatic Horizontal Fusion for GPU Kernels
Ao Li, Bojian Zheng, Gennady Pekhimenko, Fan Long
CGO 2022

Watching the watchmen: Least privilege for managed network services
Guyue Liu, Ao Li, Christopher Canel, Vyas Sekar
HotNets 2021

Securing Smart Contract with Runtime Validation
Ao Li, Jemin Andrew Choi, Fan Long
PLDI 2020

Polarimetric Dense Monocular SLAM
Luwei Yang, Feitong Tan, Ao Li, Zhaopeng Cui, Yasutaka Furukawa, Ping Tan
CVPR 2018

Patent

Augmented Imaging Assistance For Visual Impairment
Anirudh Koul, Ao Li, Elias Haroun, Irene Wen Ling Chen, Shweta Sharma, Christiano Bianchet, Saqib Shaikh, Stéphane Morichère-Matte, Biing Tsyr Lai, Nathan Pak Kei Lam, Wendy Lu

Managing network configuration through network path analysis
John David Backes, Samuel Bayless, Daniel William Dacosta, Ao Li

Work Experience

Industry

Research Intern: Antithesis (Summer 2025), Distributed System Testing

Applied Scientist Intern: Amazon AWS (Summer 2023), Distributed System Testing

Research Intern: Microsoft Research (Summer 2022), Cloud Reliability

Software Engineer Intern: Amazon AWS (Summer 2020), Network Verification

Software Engineer Intern: Google (Summer 2017), Android LLVM Toolchain

Software Engineer Intern: Google (Summer 2016), Gmail iOS Notification

Software Engineer Intern: Microsoft (Spring 2016), Seeing AI

Academic

Teaching Assistant: Carnegie Mellon University (Spring 2024), Foundations of Software Engineering

Teaching Assistant: Carnegie Mellon University (Spring 2023), Fantastic Bugs & How to Find Them

Teaching Assistant: University of Toronto (Fall 2019), CSC 488/2107 - Compilers and Interpreters

Teaching Assistant: University of Toronto (Spring 2019), CSC 324 - Programming Language

Teaching Assistant: Simon Fraser University (Spring 2018), CMPT 379 - Principles of Compiler Design

Education

Ph.D. Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (2020-)

M.Sc. Computer Science, University of Toronto (2018-2020)

B.Sc. Computer Science, Simon Fraser University (2015-2018)

B.Eng. Computer Science, Zhejiang University (2013-2018)