XIAOFAN
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Dr. Xiaofan Li

I am a Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. My research is primarily concentrated on cutting-edge domains within databases and artificial intelligence, specifically focusing on: 1) Algorithm design for graph databases, particularly for handling big graphs. 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

Education & Work

  • 2023.08 - 2025.09
    Research Fellow
    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

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

  • 2018.07 - 2023.03
    Doctoral Degree in Computer Science
    Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

  • 2016.09 - 2018.04
    Master Candidate in Theoretical Physics
    University of Science and Technology of China, China

  • 2012.09 - 2016.06
    Bachelor of Engineering in Geomatics Engineering, Excellent Engineer Program
    Wuhan University, China

    • Research Projects

  • Australia Research Council (AU), Discovery Projects, Biclique Discovery in Big Data, 2017.01–2021.12, AU$341K (RMB 1.6 M), participated.

  • Australia Research Council (AU), Discovery Projects, A Data Driven Paradigm for Service-Oriented System Engineering, 2018.01–2022.12, AU$360K (RMB 1.7 M), participated.

  • Australia Research Council (AU), Discovery Projects, Searching Cohesive Subgraphs in Big Attributed Graph Data, 2020.01–2024.12, AU$450K (RMB 2.1 M), participated.

  • Federal Ministry of Education and Research (DE), International Leibniz Future Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence, 2020.01–2023.12, participated.

  • Ministry of Education (SG), Tier-2 Project, Machine Learning Driven Query Optimizers for Big Database Systems, 2022.08–2025.07, S$740K (RMB 3.9 M), participating.

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

    • 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 2025 (CORE A*, CCF A)
      Xintong Yu, Rui Zhou, Xiaofan Li, Lu Chen, and Chengfei Liu. 2025. Finding a Summary for All Maximal Bicliques. In 2025 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). IEEE.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. ICDM 2019 (CORE A*, CCF B)
      Xiaofan Li, Rui Zhou, Yujun Dai, Lu Chen, Chengfei Liu, Qiang He, and Yun Yang. 2019. Mining Maximal Clique Summary with Effective Sampling. In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM). IEEE, 1198-1203.

    Teaching & Supervision

    Fundamentals of Quantum Machine Learning, Spring 2023, Leibniz University Hannover. Served as a co-supervisor, mentoring 2 PhD students in research and supervising 1 master’s student in completing the thesis.

    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

  • Swinburne SUPRA Scholarship, 2018.

  • Excellent Student of Physics Summer School, Wuhan University, 2015, ranked 2/154 in school.

  • National Encouragement Scholarship, 2013 & 2014.

  • Star of Memory Challenge, Wuhan University, 2013 & 2014, ranked 6 in university.