Kexin Li (Cassie)

PhD Student in Computer Engineering at University of Toronto

Industry & Research Experience

Intel Corporation (now Altera) Software Engineer
May 2020 - May 2021
  • Enhanced production LLVM-based High-Level Synthesis (HLS) compiler toolchains (oneAPI, OpenCL,HLS compiler) for Intel FPGAs, improving performance and robustness for internal and external users
  • Shipped compiler features and analysis passes that supported scalable compilation of complex FPGA work-loads across multiple device families
  • Executed weekly Quality-of-Results (QoR) analysis, diagnosing performance and resource regressions acrosscompiler versions and architectures to ensure production readiness
  • Collaborated with globally distributed teams to assess architectural changes and clearly communicate perfor-mance, reliability, and usability trade-offs to stakeholders and customers
Tsinghua University Research Intern
May 2021 - April 2022
Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace | Supervisor: Prof. Qi Li
  • Designed a novel intellectual property protection mechanism for deep neural networks (DNNs), targeting robustness against model extraction and unauthorized reuse
  • Characterized attacker behaviors and identified security limitations in existing DNN protection techniques through empirical analysis
  • Conducted systematic, large-scale empirical evaluations across diverse adversarial threat models to assess defense effectiveness
University of Toronto Summer Research Intern
May 2019 - August 2019
Programmable Digital Systems Group | Supervisor: Prof. Jason H. Anderson
  • Enhanced the LegUp High-Level Synthesis framework to exploit register-rich FPGA architectures, enabling deeper pipelines and higher performance designs
  • Implemented LLVM backend extensions that improved pipeline depth and performance of synthesized FPGA circuits

Teaching Experience

University of Toronto Teaching Assistant
2022 - Present
  • ECE1508H1 Applied Deep Learning (2025 – Present)
  • ECE568H1 Computer Security (2023 – Present)
  • ECE244H1 Programming Fundamentals (2022 – Present)
Last update on December 15, 2025.
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