Wenchao Li
Research
Interests
Human-in-the-Loop Systems; Cyber-Physical Systems; Formal Methods; Design Automation; Security; Machine Learning
Employment
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA.
Computer Scientist
Postdoctoral Fellow
Education
July 2016 – Current
March 2015 – June 2016
November 2013 – March 2015
University of California, Berkeley, California, USA.
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
December 2013
• Dissertation: Specification Mining: New Formalisms, Algorithms and Applications
• ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation
• Committee: Sanjit A. Seshia (advisor), Andreas Kuehlmann, Francesco Borrelli
University of California, Berkeley, California, USA.
M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
• Thesis: Formal Methods for Reverse Engineering Gate-Level Netlists
• Committee: Sanjit A. Seshia (advisor), Robert K. Brayton
University of California, Berkeley, California, USA.
B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
B.A. in Economics
May 2007
May 2007
Honors and
Awards
ACM SIGDA Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award
Leon O. Chua Award for Outstanding Achievement in Nonlinear Science, UC Berkeley
University Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, UC Berkeley
Vodafone-US Foundation Fellowship
2006 –
Singapore Ministry of Education Scholarship
1999 –
Publications
Conference and Journal Papers:
2015
2013
2009
2007
2002
1. Devesh Bhatt, Arunabh Chattopadhyay, Wenchao Li, David Oglesby, Sam Owre, Natarajan
Shankar. “Contract-Based Verification of Complex Time-Dependent Behaviors in Avionic Systems,” The 8th NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM), June 2016.
2. Shalini Ghosh, Daniel Elenius, Wenchao Li, Patrick Lincoln, Natarajan Shankar, Wilfried
Steiner. “ARSENAL: Automatic Requirements Specification Extraction from Natural Language,” The 8th NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM), June 2016.
3. Wenchao Li, Hassen Saı̈di, Huascar Sanchez, Martin Schäf, and Pascal Schweitzer “Detecting
Similar Programs via the Weisfeiler-Leman Graph Kernel,” The 15th International Conference
on Software Reuse (ICSR), June 2016.
4. Wenchao Li, Léonard Gérard and Natarajan Shankar. “Design and Verification for Multi-Rate
Distributed Systems,” The 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and
Models for Codesign (MEMOCODE), September 2015.
5. Bowen Zheng, Wenchao Li, Peng Deng, Léonard Gérard, Qi Zhu and Natarajan Shankar.
“Design and Verification for Transportation System Security,” In Proc. the 52nd ACM/IEEE
Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 2015.
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6. Wenchao Li, Dorsa Sadigh, S. Shankar Sastry and Sanjit A. Seshia. “Synthesis for Human-inthe-Loop Control Systems,” In Proc. the 20th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms
for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS), April 2014.
7. Pramod Subramanyan, Nestan Tsiskaridze, Wenchao Li, Adrià Gascón, Wei Yang Tan, Ashish
Tiwari, Natarajan Shankar, Sanjit A. Seshia and Sharad Malik. Reverse Engineering Digital
Circuits Using Structural and Functional Analyses. IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in
Computing: Special Issue on Nanoscale Architectures for Hardware Security, Trust and Reliability
(TETC), December 2013.
8. Alberto Puggelli, Wenchao Li, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Sanjit A. Seshia. “PolynomialTime Verification of PCTL Properties of MDPs with Convex Uncertainties,” In Proce. the 25th
International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV), July 2013.
9. Wenchao Li, Adrià Gascón, Pramod Subramanyan, Wei Yang Tan, Ashish Tiwari, Sharad
Malik, Natarajan Shankar and Sanjit A. Seshia. “WordRev: Finding Word-Level Structures in a
Sea of Bit-Level Gates,” In Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security
and Trust (HOST), June 2013. (Best Presentation Award)
10. Wenchao Li, Sanjit A. Seshia. “Sparse Coding for Specification Mining and Error Localization,”
In Proc. International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV), September 2012.
11. Wenchao Li, Zach Wasson, Sanjit A. Seshia. “Reverse Engineering Circuits Using Behavioral
Pattern Mining,” In Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and
Trust (HOST), June 2012. (Best Paper Finalist)
12. Wenchao Li, Sanjit A. Seshia, Somesh Jha. “CrowdMine: Towards Crowdsourced HumanAssisted Verification,” In Proc. Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 2012.
13. Wenchao Li, Lili Dworkin, Sanjit A. Seshia. “Mining Assumptions for Synthesis,” In Proc.
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for Codesign (MEMOCODE),
July 2011.
14. Wenchao Li, Alessandro Forin, Sanjit A. Seshia. “Scalable Specification Mining for Verification
and Diagnosis,” In Proc. Design Automation Conference (DAC), pp. 755-760, June 2010.
15. Wenchao Li, Marco D. Natale, Wei Zheng, Paolo Giusto, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli,
Sanjit A. Seshia. “Optimizations of an Application-Level Protocol for Enhanced Dependability
in FlexRay,” In Proc. Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), pp. 1076-1081, April
2009.
16. Daniel Holcomb, Wenchao Li, Sanjit A. Seshia. “Design as You See FIT: System-Level Soft
Error Analysis of Sequential Circuits,” In Proc. Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE),
pp. 785-790, April 2009.
17. Orna Kupferman, Wenchao Li, Sanjit A. Seshia. “A Theory of Mutations with Applications
to Vacuity, Coverage, and Fault Tolerance,” In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Formal
Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD), pp. 1-9, November 2008.
18. Sanjit A. Seshia, Wenchao Li, Subhasish Mitra. “Verification-Guided Soft Error Resilience,” In
Proc. Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), pp. 1442-1447, April 2007.
19. Roozbeh Jafari, Wenchao Li, Ruzena Bajcsy, Steven Glaser, Shankar Sastry. “Physical Activity
Monitoring for Assisted Living at Home” In Proc. Body Sensor Networks Conference (BSN),
March 2007.
Refereed Workshop Papers:
20. Dorsa Sadigh, Katherine Driggs-Campbell, Alberto Puggelli, Wenchao Li, Victor Shia, Ruzena
Bajcsy, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, S. Shankar Sastry and Sanjit A. Seshia. “Data-Driven
Probabilistic Modeling and Verification of Human Driver Behavior,” In Proc. AAAI 2014 Symposium on Modeling in Human Machine Systems: Challenges for Formal Verification, March
2014.
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21. Wenchao Li, Susmit Jha, Sanjit A. Seshia. “Power-Aware Dynamic Control of Error-Resilience
Mechanisms,” In Proc. the 9th Workshop on Silicon Errors in Logic - System Effects (SELSE),
March 2013.
22. Susmit Jha, Wenchao Li, Sanjit A. Seshia. “Localizing Transient Faults Using Dynamic
Bayesian Networks,” In Proc. IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop (HLDVT), November 2009.
Technical Reports (without substantial overlap with the papers above):
23. Daniel Holcomb, Wenchao Li, Sanjit A. Seshia. “Algorithms for Green Buildings: LearningBased Techniques for Energy Prediction and Fault Diagnosis,” Technical Report, University of
California, Berkeley, UCB/EECS-2009-138, October 2009.
24. Orna Kupferman, Wenchao Li, Sanjit A. Seshia. “On the Duality between Vacuity and Coverage,” Technical Report, University of California, Berkeley, UCB/EECS-2008-26, March 2008.
Internship
Experience
Computer Science Laboratory, SRI International, Menlo Park, California.
Student Associate
Spring 2013
• Project: Automatic Requirement Specification Extraction from Natural Language
• Mentor: Shalini Ghosh
Formal Methods and Dependable Systems, SRI International, Menlo Park, California.
Student Associate
Summer 2012
• Project: Reverse Engineering Circuit Functions from a Sea of Gates
• Mentor: Natarajan Shankar
Embedded Systems and Reconfigurable Computing, Microsoft Research, Redmond.
Research Intern
Summer 2009
• Project: Assertion Mining for the eMIPS Microprocessor on FPGA
• Mentor: Alessandro Forin
Teaching
Experience
EECS 144/244: Fundamental Algorithms for System Modeling, Analysis, and Optimization, UC Berkeley
Graduate Student Instructor
Fall 2011
• Designed and graded homework and exams; held office hours.
• Instructor: Edward A. Lee, Jaijeet Roychowdhury, Sanjit A. Seshia
EECS 149: Introduction to Embedded Systems, UC Berkeley
Graduate Student Instructor
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Spring 2009
Designed and graded homework and exams; led weekly labs.
Instructor: Sanjit A. Seshia
Mentored student projects: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS7MdBus8jygYZy76rIO0pw
Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, UC Berkeley
Guest Lectures:
• Bridging Natural Language and Formal Languages, EECS 294-98, UC Berkeley
Spring 2014
• Abstraction, CEGAR, Proof Based Abstraction, Interpolation-Based Model Checking, EECS
219C, UC Berkeley
Fall 2012
• Scheduling Algorithms, EECS 149, UC Berkeley
Fall 2012
• Scheduling Anomalies, EECS 149, UC Berkeley
Fall 2012
• Symbolic and CTL Model Checking, EECS 219C, UC Berkeley
Spring 2011, Fall 2012
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• Testing for Stuck-At Faults, EECS 144/244, UC Berkeley
• FlexRay and Control Area Network, EECS 149, UC Berkeley
Mentoring
Experience
Dorsa Sadigh (Ph.D. Student, EECS, UC Berkeley)
Fall 2011
Spring 2009
January – December, 2013
• Correct-by-construction synthesis of robotic controllers.
• Resulted in a publication at TACAS 2014.
Wei Yang Tan (Master Student, EECS, UC Berkeley)
August – December, 2012
• Leveraging 2QBF solving to extract circuit functions from synthesized netlists.
• Resulted in a publication at HOST 2013.
Lili Dworkin (Undergraduate Student at Haverford College, SUPERB/NSF REU Participant at UC
Berkeley)
June – August, 2010
• Correct-by-construction synthesis of an electronic voting machine.
• Assumption mining for LTL synthesis.
• Resulted in a publication at MEMOCODE 2011.
Services
Technical Program Committee Member:
• Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), 2017
• International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems (ICESS), 2016, 2015
• International Workshop on Formal Techniques for Safety-Critical Systems (FTSCS), 2015
• Workshop on Design Automation for Understanding Hardware Designs at DATE, 2016, 2014
Session Chair:
• International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), 2014
Reviewer for Journals and Conference Articles (apart from TPC service):
• Journals: ACM Transaction on Embedded Computing (TECS), IEEE Transactions on MultiScale Computing Systems (TMSCS), IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
(TCAD), IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC), IEEE Transactions on
Computers (TC), IEEE Embedded System Letters (ESL), ACM Transaction on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES)
• Conferences: Design Automation Conference (DAC), Computer Aided Design (CAV), International Test Conference (ITC), International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD),
Nasa Formal Methods (NFM), USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX), Formal Methods in
Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD), Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC), Automated Software Engineering (ASE), International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the
Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS), International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT), International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for System Design
(MEMOCODE), Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems (FORMATS), International
Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (LPAR), International Colloquium on Theoretical
Aspects of Computing (ICTAC), International Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems
(SIES), International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems (QEST), International
Conference on Embedded Software and Systems (ICESS)
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