About me

I’m Hexu Li (李和煦), a final-year master student in Software Institute at Nanjing University (NJU) advised by Prof. Hengfeng Wei. Before that, I received my B.E. in Software Engineering at NJU in 2023. I’m currently working on verification and testing of databases and other concurrent systems. Specifically, I’m trying to find violations of database isolation levels through formal verification methods and software engineering methods. I’m also researching how to formally check consistency of CRDTs efficiently. Broadly speaking, my research interest lies in databases, systems and software engineering. My CV can be found here.

Research Experience

• Research Intern at Tencent advised by Dr. Yuxing Chen, 2025 - 2026 (expected)
• Research Assistant at Northeastern University (Boston) advised by Prof. Cheng Tan, 2023

Education

• M.E., Software Institute, Nanjing University, 2023 - 2026 (expected)
• B.E., Software Institute, Nanjing University, 2019 - 2023
• High School, Xuzhou No. 1 Middle School, 2016 - 2019

Research Projects

(details illustrated in my CV)

• Model-based Database Isolation Testing
  We would like to exploit model checking and test generation approach to detect isolation bugs in database systems, especially those related to various lock modes.
• Checking Consistency of Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs)
  We would like to find a method to efficiently check consistency of different CRDTs which have different operations, semantics and probably different consistency guarantees.
• PolySAT: Abstracting Concurrency, Solely Through Observables
  We proposed PolySAT, a SMT solver that can solve general consistency problems and verify many consistency models by abstracting concurrency via polygraph data structure.

Publications

(*: Corresponding Author)

1. Online Timestamp-based Transactional Isolation Checking of Database Systems
   Hexu Li, Hengfeng Wei*, Hongrong Ouyang, Yuxing Chen, Na Yang, Ruohao Zhang, Anqun Pan
   IEEE 41st International Conference on Data Engineering, Hong Kong (ICDE 2025)
   [IEEE Link], [PDF], [Tech Report], [code], [abstract], [bib]

Activities

• Teaching Assistant of C Programming Language at NJU, 2024 Fall
• Teaching Assistant of Compilers at NJU, 2024 Spring

Honors & Awards

• National Scholarship of China, 2025
• Outstanding Student of Tencent Rhino-Bird Open Source Talent Development Program, 2025, 2024
• Academic Scholarship, 2025, 2024, 2023
• People’s Scholarship, 2022, 2021
• Outstanding Student of NJU, 2021, 2020
• China Merchants Bank All-in-one Card Scholarship, 2020