XIAOFAN
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Dr. Xiaofan Li

I'm currently an assistant professor at Nanjing University, China. I received my Ph.D. degree from Swinburne University of Technology and my Bachelor’s degree from Wuhan University. My research is primarily concentrated on cutting-edge domains within databases and LLMs, specifically focusing on: 1) Algorithm design for graph databases, particularly for the interdisciplinary frontier bridging LLMs and graph database systems. 2) Development and application of explainable GNNs. 3) Quantum database algorithms, aimed at exploring the potential for quantum computing to achieve significant acceleration of classical database problems.

EMAIL  /  DBLP  /  GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Employment

  • 2025.11 - present.
    Assistant Professor
    Nanjing University, China

  • 2023.08 - 2025.11
    Research Fellow
    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  • 2022.09 - 2023.08
    Senior Researcher
    L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany

    • Research Projects

  • Ministry of Education (SG), Tier-1 Project, Quantum Algorithm for Graph Database, 2024.05–2026.04, S$160K (RMB 850 K), co-applied.

    • Selected Publications

    1. ICDE 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A)
      Xiaofan Li, Rui Zhou, Lu Chen, and Chengfei Liu. 2025. Clique Comparator: A Fundamental Operator for Finding a Concise Clique Summary. In 2025 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). IEEE.

    2. ICDE 2024 (CORE A*, CCF A)
      Xiaofan Li, Gao Cong, and Rui Zhou. 2024. Quantum Algorithms for the Maximum K-Plex Problem. In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). IEEE, 2435-2448.

    3. WWW 2024 (CORE A*, CCF A)
      Wei Zhang, Xiaofan Li, and Wolfgang Nejdl. 2024. Adversarial Mask Explainer for Graph Neural Networks. In 2024 ACM The Web Conference (WWW). ACM, 861-869.

    4. SIGMOD 2022 (CORE A*, CCF A)
      Xiaofan Li, Rui Zhou, Lu Chen, Chengfei Liu, Qiang He, and Yun Yang. 2022. One Set to Cover All Maximal Cliques Approximately. In 2022 ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD). ACM, 2006-2019.

    5. ICDE 2021 (CORE A*, CCF A)
      Xiaofan Li, Rui Zhou, Lu Chen, Yong Zhang, Chengfei Liu, Qiang He, and Yun Yang. 2021. Finding a Summary for All Maximal Cliques. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). IEEE, 1344-1355.

    Teaching & Supervision

    Fundamentals of Quantum Machine Learning, Spring 2023, Leibniz University Hannover. Served as a co-supervisor, mentoring 3 PhD students and 1 master’s student in research.

    Services

    Proceeding co-chair of HIS 2024. Rich review experience for various top-tier conferences/journals: VLDB, ICDE, SIGKDD, TKDE, DASFAA, CIKM, WISE, Information Science, WWW Journal, DSEJ, etc.

    Awards & Fellowship

  • DAAD AInet Fellow, 2025.

  • Swinburne SUPRA Scholarship, 2018.