Lecturer School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences University of Leicester, United Kingdom livent@126.com Google Scholar · DBLP · Homepage@UoL

Biography

Dr Wentao Li is currently a Lecturer at the University of Leicester since 2024. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) from 2023 to 2024, working under the supervision of Prof. Wei Wang. Moreover, from 2020 to 2022, he held the position of postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) under the guidance of Prof. Lu Qin. He completed his Ph.D. study at UTS in 2021, advised by Prof. Lu Qin, Prof. Ying Zhang, and Dr. Miao Qiao. He obtained his master’s degree from Chongqing University in 2016 and his bachelor’s degree from Nanchang Hangkong University in 2013.

His research interests are in data management and mining, with a particular focus on graph data processing and mining. To date, he has published more than 20 CORE A*-level papers (including SIGMOD, VLDB, SIGKDD, ICDE, The Web Conference, and VLDBJ), authored one monograph, and obtained one patent (generating 1.01 million RMB in business transformation revenue). He has also served as a program committee member for top conferences such as ICDE and AAAI, and as a reviewer for journals such as ACM TODS and IEEE TKDE. He was selected as one of the 2021 Global Top 100 Chinese Rising Stars in Artificial Intelligence by Baidu Scholar.

News

I am looking for highly motivated PhD students, including CSC Joint PhD candidates, to join me at the University of Leicester. Our work focuses on cutting-edge research in graph data processing, graph mining, and vector databases.

If you are passionate about these areas and eager to contribute to innovative research, please feel free to contact me with your CV and Research Statement at wl226@leicester.ac.uk or livent@126.com.

• For UK or international students seeking PhD opportunities with GTA-funded scholarships, please refer to this link.

• For Chinese students interested in PhD opportunities supported by CSC-funded scholarships, please refer to this link.

Research Interests

His general research interests mainly focus on the areas of big data processing and mining. Currently, He is working on the following research topics:

• Data Processing: Graph Processing, Social Network Analysis, Parallel Computation;

• Data Mining: Recommender Systems, Vector Databases, AI4DB.

Selected Publications (* indicates Corresponding Author)

• Wentao Li, Dong Wen, Lu Qin, Ying Zhang.
  An Overview of Path Queries on Graphs (Tutorial).
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2025. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Weizhe Chen, Wentao Li*, Min Gao, Dong Wen, Maolin Cai, Wei Wang.
  Locally Balancing Signed Graphs.
  International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), 2025. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Dian Ouyang, Dong Wen, Jianye Yang, Wentao Li, Xuemin Lin.
  Weight-Constrained Simple Path Enumeration in Weighted Graph.
  International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), 2025. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Wenqian Zhang, Zhengyi Yang, Dong Wen, Wentao Li, Wenjie Zhang, Xuemin Lin.
  Accelerating Core Decomposition in Billion-Scale Hypergraphs.
  International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2025. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Mingyu Yang, Wentao Li, Jiabao Jin, Xiaoyao Zhong, Xiangyu Wang, Zhitao Shen, Wei Jia, Wei Wang.
  Effective and General Distance Computation for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2025. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Zebin Chen, Kaiyu Chen, Dong Wen, Zhengyi Yang, Wentao Li, Ying Zhang.
  Accelerating Shortest Path Counting on Road Networks.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2025. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Junwei Yin, Min Gao, Kai Shu, Wentao Li, Yinqiu Huang, Zongwei Wang.
  Graph with Sequence: Broad-Range Semantic Modeling for Fake News Detection.
  International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2025. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Wentao Li, Maolin Cai, Min Gao, Dong Wen, Lu Qin, Wei Wang.
  Expanding Reverse Nearest Neighbors.
  International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2024. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Mingyu Yang, Wentao Li*, Wei Wang, Dong Wen, Lu Qin.
  Querying Numeric-Constrained Shortest Distances on Road Networks.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2024. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Junhua Zhang, Long Yuan, Wentao Li, Lu Qin, Ying Zhang, Wenjie Zhang.
  Label-Constrained Shortest Path Query Processing on Road Networks.
  The VLDB Journal, 2024. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Zongwei Wang, Min Gao*, Wentao Li*, Junliang Yu, LinXin Guo, Hongzhi Yin.
  Efficient Bi-Level Optimization for Recommendation Denoising.
  International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), 2023. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Wentao Li, Miao Qiao, Lu Qin, Lijun Chang, Ying Zhang, Xuemin Lin.
  On Scalable Computation of Graph Eccentricities.
  International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2022. [CCF A, CORE A* | PDF | SLIDES | CODE]

• Junhua Zhang, Wentao Li*, Long Yuan, Lu Qin, Ying Zhang, Lijun Chang.
  Shortest-Path Queries on Complex Networks: Experiments, Analyses, and Improvement.
  International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2022. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Junhua Zhang, Long Yuan, Wentao Li, Lu Qin, Ying Zhang.
  Efficient Label-Constrained Shortest Path Queries on Road Networks: A Tree Decomposition Approach.
  International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2022. [CCF A, CORE A* | PDF]

• Yuxuan Qiu, Dong Wen, Lu Qin, Wentao Li, Ronghua Li, Ying Zhang.
  Efficient Shortest Path Counting on Large Road Networks.
  International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2022. [CCF A, CORE A*]

• Wentao Li, Min Gao, Dong Wen, Hongwei Zhou, Cai Ke, Lu Qin.
  Manipulating Structural Graph Clustering.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2022. [CCF A, CORE A* | PDF]

• Junhua Zhang, Wentao Li*, Lu Qin, Ying Zhang, Dong Wen, Lizhen Cui, Xuemin Lin.
  Reachability Labeling for Distributed Graphs.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2022. [CCF A, CORE A* | PDF]

• Wentao Li, Miao Qiao, Lu Qin, Ying Zhang, Lijun Chang, Xuemin Lin.
  Distance Labeling: on Parallelism, Compression, and Ordering.
  The VLDB Journal, 2022. [CCF A, CORE A* | PDF]

• Wentao Li, Min Gao, Fan Wu, Wenge Rong, Junhao Wen, Lu Qin.
  Manipulating Black-Box Networks for Centrality Promotion.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2021. [CCF A, CORE A* | PDF | SLIDES]

• Wentao Li, Miao Qiao, Lu Qin, Ying Zhang, Lijun Chang, Xuemin Lin.
  Scaling Up Distance Labeling on Graphs with Core-Periphery Properties.
  International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2020. [CCF A, CORE A* | PDF | SLIDES | CODE]

• Wentao Li, Miao Qiao, Lu Qin, Ying Zhang, Lijun Chang, Xuemin Lin.
  Scaling Distance Labeling on Small-World Networks.
  International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2019. [CCF A, CORE A* | PDF | SLIDES | CODE]

• Wentao Li, Miao Qiao, Lu Qin, Ying Zhang, Lijun Chang, Xuemin Lin.
  Eccentricities on Small-World Networks.
  The VLDB Journal, 2019. [CCF A, CORE A* | PDF]

• Wentao Li, Miao Qiao, Lu Qin, Ying Zhang, Lijun Chang, Xuemin Lin.
  Exacting Eccentricity for Small-World Networks.
  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2018. [CCF A, CORE A* | PDF | SLIDES]

• Min Gao, Wentao Li.
  Shilling Attacks and Detection in Social Recommender Systems (Book).
  Science Press, 2017. [LINK]

• Kan Tan, Min Gao, Wentao Li, Renli Tian, Junhao Wen, Qingyu Xiong.
  Two-layer Sampling Active Learning Algorithm for Social Spammer Detection.
  Acta Automatica Sinica, 2017. [CCF T1]

• Wentao Li, Min Gao, Hua Li, Qingyu Xiong, Junhao Wen, Bin Ling.
  A Shilling Attack Detection Algorithm Based on Popularity Degree Features.
  Acta Automatica Sinica, 2015. [CCF T1 | Granted Patent]

Academia Services

• Organization
  • Program Committee Chair of 4th International Workshop on Large-Scale Graph Data Analytics (LSGDA) @VLDB, 2025.
  • Session Chair of International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2023-2025.
• Journal Reviewer
  • ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS).
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS).
  • Information Sciences.
  • Knowledge and Information Systems.
  • Data Science and Engineering.
  • Intelligent Computing.
• Program Committee Member
  • International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2025.
  • AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023-2025.
  • International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA), 2023-2025.
  • Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), 2021-2025.
  • International Conference Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA), 2023-2025.
  • APWeb-WAIM joint International Conference on Web and Big Data (APWEB-WAIM), 2025.
  • Australasian Database Conference (ADC), 2021-2024.
  • International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2022.
  • International Web Information Systems Engineering conference (WISE), 2021.
• External Reviewer
  • ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), 2024-2025, 2019-2020.
  • International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2020.
  • International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA), 2020.
  • ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2018-2019.

Teaching Experiences

• Lecturer/Convenor, CO3093 Big Data and Predictive Analytics,
  University of Leicester, Spring Session 2025.
• Guest Lecturer, Data Analytics for Graphs,
  University of New South Wales, Autumn Session 2022.
• Tutor, Studio 3: Innovation (Machine Learning),
  University of Technology Sydney, Spring Session 2022.
• Tutor, Studio 3: Innovation (Machine Learning),
  University of Technology Sydney, Autumn Session 2022.
• Tutor, Studio 3: Innovation (Machine Learning),
  University of Technology Sydney, Spring Session 2021.
• Tutor, Data Structures and Algorithms,
  University of Technology Sydney, Summer Session 2020.
• Tutor, Enterprise Business Requirements,
  University of Technology Sydney, Autumn Session 2020.
• Tutor, Computer Networks,
  Chongqing University, Autumn Session, 2015.
• Tutor, The Fundamentals of Computer,
  Chongqing University, Autumn Session, 2014.

Honors and Awards

• 2021 Global Top 100 Chinese Rising Stars in Artificial Intelligence, 2021.
• SIGMOD Travel Award, 2019.
• Outstanding Graduate of Chongqing City, 2016.
• Outstanding Graduate of Chongqing University, 2016.

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