Yanze Li [CV]
About
I’m a PhD candidate at UBC working with Alexander J. Summers and Ivan Beschastnikh. I’m interested in programming languages (semantics, type systems & type theories, and functional programming) and program verification (program logics and abstract interpretation).
Before I started my PhD, I did my Master’s in Computer Science at Texas A&M University, advised by Jeff Huang, and then worked as a Software Engineer at Coderrect Inc. (now Sec3), where I led the development of a static analyzer for concurrent programs based on LLVM.
I obtained my B.Eng. at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), where I studied how to produce and transmit electricity.
Publication
- [ ESOP’27 ] Modular Responsiveness Verification of Rust Async Runtimes
Yanze Li, Ivan Beschastnikh, Alexander J. Summers
[ PDF ] - [ ICSE’22 ] PUS: A Fast and Highly Efficient Solver for Inclusion-based Pointer Analysis
Peiming Liu, Yanze Li, Bradley Swain, Jeff Huang
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
[ PDF ] - [ Correctness’21 ] OpenRace: An Open Source Framework for Statically Detecting Data Races
Bradley Swain, Jeff Huang, Bozhen Liu, Peiming Liu, Yanze Li, Addison Crump, Rohan Khera
[ PDF ] [ code ] - [ PLDI’21 ] When Threads Meet Events: Efficient and Precise Static Race Detection with Origins
Bozhen Liu, Peiming Liu, Yanze Li, Chia-Che Tsai, Dilma Da Silva, Jeff Huang [ PDF ] - [ SC’20 ] OMPRacer: A Scalable and Precise Static Race Detector for OpenMP Programs
Bradley Swain, Yanze Li, Peiming Liu, Ignacio Laguna, Giorgis Georgakoudis, Jeff Huang
[ PDF ] [ artifact ] - [ ICSE’19 ] (Demo Track) SWORD: A Scalable Whole Program Race Detector for Java
Yanze Li, Bozhen Liu, Jeff Huang
[ PDF ] [ code ]
Working
- AWS, S3 Automated Reasoning Group, Applied Scientist Intern, 2024 fall
I worked on a randomized concurrency testing tool called Shuttle. I developed a lightweight library for annotating large codebases to measure customized state coverage when running Shuttle. I then worked on applying Reinforcement Learning to improve state coverage when doing concurrency testing.
Teaching
CPSC 539S - Program Verifiers and Program Verification, TA, 2023F, 2025F
CPSC 416 - Distributed Systems, TA, 2022S
CPSC 411 - Introduction to Compiler Construction, TA, 2026S
CPSC 410 - Advanced Software Engineering, TA, 2021F, 2022F, 2024S
Services
SIGPLAN-M, Operations Team, 2020.8-2022.11
Sub-reviewer: [PLDI’26] [ICSE’26] [ICSE’23] [ASE’22] [OOPSLA’20] [PLDI’19] [OOPSLA’19] [FSE’19] [ICSE’19] [TSE’18]
Misc
I was often asked how to pronounce my first name correctly. It contains 2 Chinese characters Yan(彦) and Ze(泽) and google translate gives a very accurate pronunciation in Mandarin (link). However, I’m happy with any reasonable pronunciation, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to pronounce it “right”! Most of my friends read it as “Yan-zee” in English.
I’m a huge fan of video games (although I don’t have enough time playing them since I started doing research). I love games with good story-telling. I hope video games can be a main stream for story-telling someday.
Contact