Andy Li

Bio

I am a first-year Computer Science Ph.D. student in the Extreme Scale Computer Architecture Laboratory (ESCAL) at the University of California, Riverside, advised by Dr. Hung-Wei Tseng.

Prior to my Ph.D., I earned my B.S. in Computer Science (Summa Cum Laude, GPA: 3.96/4.0) from UC Riverside in December 2024. During my undergraduate studies, I worked with Prof. Yan Gu and Prof. Yihan Sun in the UCR Parallel Algorithm Lab on parallel graph algorithms.

My research focuses on computer systems architecture, GPU acceleration, and high-performance parallel algorithms. Currently, I am investigating novel techniques to repurpose dedicated hardware Ray-Tracing Accelerators (RT Cores via NVIDIA OptiX) to accelerate general-purpose computing workloads such as Gradient Boosted Decision Trees and Multiple Sequence Alignment.

Research Interests

• GPU & Heterogeneous Architectures: Repurposing specialized hardware accelerators (Ray-Tracing RT Cores, Tensor Cores) for non-graphics and irregular workloads.
• High-Performance Parallel Algorithms: Parallel graph algorithms, matrix-semiring formulations, thread-level parallelism on shared and distributed memory machines.
• Hardware-Software Co-Design: Optimizing memory hierarchies, BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) traversal hardware, and CUDA/MPI parallel pipelines.

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science — University of California, Riverside (Sept 2025 – Present)
  • Advisor: Dr. Hung-Wei Tseng
  • Focus: Computer Architecture & Systems
• B.S. in Computer Science — University of California, Riverside (Sept 2021 – Dec 2024)
  • GPA: 3.96 / 4.0

Publications

1. Parallel Point-to-Point Shortest Paths and Batch Queries
   Xiaojun Dong, Andy Li, Yan Gu, and Yihan Sun.
   Proceedings of the 37th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2025), pp. 458–472.
   DOI / ACM Digital Library

Selected Honors & Achievements

• Quizlet's Game On! Hackathon — 1st Place Winner ($25,000 USD prize) (Oct 2023)
  Developed Match n' Bash, an interactive educational game combining fast card matching mechanics with enemy-battling gameplay built using React and Phaser.
• ICPC Southern California Regional — 4th Place & ICPC North America Championship (NAC) Qualifier (2022–2023)
  Represented UCR at the ICPC North America Championship after placing top 5 in the Southern California Regional.
• UCR Programming Contest (UCRPC) — 1st Place Undergraduate Champion (Oct 2022)
  Champion among 109 competing teams solving advanced algorithmic problems in C++.
• UCR Cutie Hack — 1st Place Winner (Nov 2021)
  Created Space Slimes, a bullet-hell game in Unity/C# featuring custom memory-efficient object pooling (1st place out of 142 participants).

Contact

• Email: liandy1028@gmail.com
• GitHub: github.com/liandy1028
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/liandy1028
• Website: andylyc.com