Mingkai Li | Columbia University

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, advised by Prof. Tanvir Ahmed Khan. My research focuses on improving system security and reliability by combining insights from operating systems, computer architecture, and programming language. I also work closely with Prof. Suman Jana and Prof. Joe Devietti.

I received my B.Eng. in Computer Science at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Before joining Columbia, I was fortunate to work with Prof. Prateek Saxena and Prof. Trevor E. Carlson at National University of Singapore (NUS) and Prof. Xianghang Mi at USTC.

Please feel free to reach out if you would like to discuss my research or potential collaborations.

Research Interests

System Security and Reliability
Compiler and Programming Language
Hardware-Software Co-design

Publications

SACMAT 25

Caplification: Bridging Capability-Aware and Capability-Oblivious Software

Jason Zhijingcheng Yu, Mingkai Li, Aditya Badole, Trevor E. Carlson, Michael Swift, Prateek Saxena

The 30th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT), 2025.

PDF Code Project Page BibTex

FSE 23

TransMap: Pinpointing Mistakes in Neural Code Translation

Bo Wang, Ruishi Li, Mingkai Li, Prateek Saxena

The 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), 2023.

PDF Code Project Page BibTex

Teaching

EECS6894: Data Center Processing by Prof. Tanvir Ahmed Khan, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2025
CSEE4119: Computer Networks by Prof. Ethan Katz-Bassett, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2024