I am a final year PhD student advised by Rohan Padhye and Vyas Sekar.
My CV, GitHub, Bluesky, and Google Scholar. You may also want to work with me.
My email address is [email protected].
📢📢📢 My partner (Xiangpeng Hao) and I are on the tenure track faculty job market this year, seeking positions in computer science and related areas.
I design and build tools that make complex concurrent and distributed systems easier to debug and test. My research treats applicability as a first-class concern—emphasizing not just algorithmic efficiency, but also usability and real-world practicality. I've developed tools such as: ExChain (NSDI '24), which analyzes complex exception interactions to dramatically reduce debugging effort; Fray (OOPSLA 25'), a controlled concurrency testing platform that helps developers catch bugs in complex concurrent systems; and Fest (NSDI 26'), a feedback-guided testing algorithm that catches design bugs early in distributed system development.
Testimonies
Publication
Feedback-guided Adaptive Testing of Distributed Systems Designs [Code] [Artifact]
Ao Li, Ankush Desai, Rohan Padhye
NSDI 2026
Fray: An Efficient General-Purpose Concurrency Testing Platform for the JVM [Code] [Artifact] [Extended Version]
Ao Li, Byeongjee Kang, Vasudev Vikram, Isabella Laybourn, Samvid Dharanikota, Shrey Tiwari, Rohan Padhye
OOPSLA 2025
The Havoc Paradox in Generator-Based Fuzzing [Artifact]
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 [Artifact]
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 [Code]
Ao Li, Shan Lu, Suman Nath, Rohan Padhye, Vyas Sekar
NSDI 2024
Guiding Greybox Fuzzing with Mutation Testing [Artifact]
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 [Artifact]
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 [Code] [Artifact]
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
Internships
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
Teaching
Guest Lecturer: Find Bugs in Concurrent Programs
Course: Topics in Software Engineering (CS527)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Guest Lecturer: Fuzz Testing
Course: Secure Coding (14-735)
Carnegie Mellon University
Teaching Assistant: Foundations of Software Engineering (17-313)
Carnegie Mellon University
Teaching Assistant: Fantastic Bugs & How to Find Them (17-712)
Carnegie Mellon University
Teaching Assistant: Compilers and Interpreters (CSC 488/2107)
University of Toronto
Teaching Assistant: Programming Language (CSC 324)
University of Toronto
Teaching Assistant: Principles of Compiler Design (CMPT 379)
Simon Fraser University
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)