Mingkai Li
About Me
I am a 2nd-year Ph.D. student at Columbia University, advised by Prof. Tanvir Ahmed Khan. I also work closely with Prof. Suman Jana and Prof. Joe Devietti.
The goal of my research is to enable dependable heterogeneous systems on cloud and edge devices. I believe that the next-generation computing systems should take security and reliability as first design principles, rather than afterthoughts. Currently, I am particularly interested in two directions:
- Automated Bug Detection: automated testing, analysis and verification techniques for heterogeneous systems, specifically machine learning systems.
- Security By Design: hardware-software co-design such as memory tagging and capability-based architectures.
Before Columbia, I received my B.E. in Computer Science from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). I was fortunate to work with Prof. Prateek Saxena and Prof. Trevor E. Carlson at National University of Singapore, as well as Prof. Xianghang Mi at USTC. At my spare time, I enjoy cycling, squash, and swimming.
Please feel free to reach out if you share similar interests!
News
- [Mar. 2026] NanoTag is accepted to Oakland 2026! 🎉 See you in San Francisco!
Publications
-
Oakland 26
The 47th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2026.BibTex camera-ready version coming soon! -
HotEthics 26
The 2nd Workshop on Ethical Systems and Architecture Design (HotEthics), 2026 (co-located with ASPLOS '26). -
SACMAT 25
The 30th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT), 2025. -
FSE 23
The 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), 2023.
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
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