Bio

Bowen is a Ph.D. student at HKUST and a member of Prism research group, led by Professor Charles Zhang. Before this, he obtained bachelor degree in CS at Hongyi Honor College, Wuhan University, and was fortunate to be instructed by Professor Xiaoyuan Xie. 

His current research is about static analysis and synthesis. In particular, he focuses on designing and implementing better Intermediate Representations (IR) for static analysis. Recently he is working on a symbolic compiler for Jazz music!

Research

Here are some of my efforts to help static analysis community better utilize IR:

• I used program synthesis to automatically obtain IR translators between IR versions [ASPLOS 24] (appendix), or cross different IRs (ongoing).

• I wrote a survey aiming at assisting static analysis practioners in bridging knowledge gaps in IR [preprint]. 

• We introduced the Seal framework [EuroSys 25] to infer diverse bug specifications from Linux patches by performing deductions on Program Dependence Graph,  the essential IR for value-flow analysis. Seal unseals 95 confirmed bugs within various Linux subsystems.

Service

Paper (sub-, co-)Review: OOPSLA 23 SRC, ISSTA 24, ICSE 24, POPL 25, ICSE 26 shadow PC(distinguished reviewer), OOPSLA 26.

Artifact Evaluation: OSDI 23, ATC 23, USENIX 24 (distinguished reviewer), ICSE 25, USENIX 25, PLDI 25.

Student Volunteer: SPLASH 25.

Teaching Assistant: 

• Computer Systems (2020 Fall). WHU.

• COMP1021: Introduction to Computer Science (2022 Fall, 2023 Fall). HKUST.

• COMP3021: Java Programming (2022 Spring). HKUST.

• COMP 3111: Software Engineering (2024 Fall). HKUST.

Industrial Experience

WeBank, Remote (Jun. 2024 - Jul. 2025). Research Intern. Working on change impact analysis for Fintech.

Goplus, Remote (Jun. 2023 - Oct. 2024). Research Intern. Working on static analysis for smart contract user security.

Tencent, Shenzhen, China (Dec. 2020 - Apr. 2021). Software Testing Intern. Working on system testing.

Alibaba Cloud, Hangzhou, China (Jun. - Sept. 2020). C++ Compiler Intern. Working on compiler optimization study.

Misc

I am recently amazed by some thoughts and "meta-methods".

• X Y problem.

• Synthesis and Verification for All

• "AI" Course.

• FlashFill.

• Songwright Apothecary Lab. 

• Post Practice Improvement.

The jazz-soul bottles (out of my subjective categorization):