Welcome to Jian Li's Homepage

Jian Li

Assistant Professor

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science

Binghamton University, State University of New York

Office: 2306 Engineering and Science Building

E-mail: lij AT binghamton DOT edu

Short Biography

Jian Li is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Binghamton University, State University of New York (SUNY). He was a postdoc with the College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst from January 2017 to August 2019, hosted by Prof. Don Towsley. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University in December 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Srinivas Shakkottai. He has also worked very closely with Prof. Vijay Subramanian from University of Michigan. He received the B.E. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in June 2012. Dr. Li is a recipient of the NSF CISE CRII Award. His papers have received the ACM e-Energy'21 Best Paper Runner-Up Award and IEEE MASCOTS'18 Best Paper Runner-Up Award. His research is supported by NSF, ARO and DOE.

Research Interests

Theory: Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Armed Bandits, Decentralized/Federated Learning, Stochastic Optimization and Control.
Applications: Next-Generation Large-Scale Networked Systems include wireless networks, edge and cloud computing, caching and content delivery, serverless computing and Internet-of-Things.

News

05/2023: [Paper] One paper accepted to ACM KDD 2023 (acceptance rate: 22.1%).
04/2023: [Paper] Two papers accepted to ICML 2023 (acceptance rate: 27.9%).
04/2023: [Award] Awarded the Distinguished Member of the 2023 IEEE INFOCOM Technical Program Committee.
03/2023: [Service] I will serve as a PC member for NeurIPS 2023 and IEEE ICNP 2023.
02/2023: [Student] My Ph.D. student Guojun Xiong will be a research intern at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) this summer.
02/2023: Delivered an invited talk at Information Theory and Applications Workshop - ITA 2023.
01/2023: [Student] My Ph.D. student Gang Yan will be a research intern at AT&T Labs - Research this summer. Look forward to the long-term collaboration with AT&T.
12/2022: [Grant] Our project on resource constrained reinforcement learning in tactical networks is funded by the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO). Thanks, ARO.
12/2022: [Paper] Our paper "Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Dimensioning of Cloud Caches: A Restless Bandit Approach" accepted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.
12/2022: [Student] My Ph.D. students Guojun Xiong and Gang Yan received the Student Scholar Award from AAAI 2023.
12/2022: [Service] I will serve as a PC member for ICML 2023.
11/2022: [Paper] Our paper "Decentralized Stochastic Multi-Player Multi-Armed Walking Bandits" accepted to AAAI 2023 (oral presentation, acceptance rate: 10.8%).
11/2022: [Paper] Our paper "DeFL: Defending Against Model Poisoning Attacks in Federated Learning via Critical Learning Periods Awareness" accepted to AAAI 2023 (acceptance rate: 19.6%).
10/2022: [Student] My Ph.D. student Guojun Xiong received the Scholar Award from NeurIPS 2022.
10/2022: [Service] I will serve as a TPC member for ACM MobiHoc 2023 and IEEE ICDCS 2023.
09/2022: [Paper] Our paper "Learning Infinite-Horizon Average-Reward Restless Multi-Action Bandits via Index Awareness" accepted to NeurIPS 2022 (acceptance rate: 25.6%)
08/2022: [Service] I will serve as a PC member for AAAI 2023.
07/2022: [Paper] Our paper "Index-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Video Streaming at the Wireless Edge" accepted to ACM MobiHoc 2022 (acceptance rate: 19.8%).
07/2022: [Award] I was awarded as an outstanding reviewer (top 10%) of ICML 2022.
04/2022: [Paper] Our paper "Towards Latency Awareness for Content Delivery Network Caching" accepted to USENIX ATC 2022 (acceptance rate: 16.3%).
04/2022: [Service] I will serve as a TPC member for IEEE INFOCOM 2023.
04/2022: [Grant] Our proposal entitled "RINGS: Resilient Edge Networks with Data-driven Model-based Learning" is funded through the NSF Resilient & Intelligent NextG Systems (RINGS) program, with collaborators from NYU. Thanks, NSF.
03/2022: [Student] My Ph.D. student Guojun Xiong received the IEEE INFOCOM 2022 Student Conference Grant award sponsored by IEEE.
03/2022: [Service] I will serve as a PC member for NeurIPS 2022.
02/2022: [Award] Awarded the Distinguished Member of the 2022 IEEE INFOCOM Technical Program Committee.
01/2022: [Paper] Our paper "Accelerating Serverless Computing by Harvesting Idle Resources" accepted to ACM WWW 2022 (acceptance rate: 17.7%).
12/2021: [Service] I will serve as a PC member for ICML 2022.
12/2021: [Paper] Our paper "Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Dimensioning of Cloud Caches: A Restless Bandit Approach" accepted to IEEE INFOCOM 2022 (acceptance rate: 19.9%).
12/2021: [Paper] Our paper "Reinforcement Learning Augmented Asymptotically Optimal Index Policies for Finite-Horizon Restless Bandits" accepted to AAAI 2022 (oral presentation, acceptance rate: 4.6%).
12/2021: [Paper] Our paper "Seizing Critical Learning Periods in Federated Learning" accepted to AAAI 2022 (acceptance rate: 15%).
12/2021: [Student] My Ph.D. student Gang Yan received the ACM CoNEXT 2022 Student Conference Grant award sponsored by ACM.
11/2021: [Service] I will serve as a TPC member for ACM MobiHoc 2022.
09/2021: [Paper] Our paper "Learning from Optimal Caching for Content Delivery" accepted to ACM CoNEXT 2021 (acceptance rate: 22.5%).
06/2021: [Paper] Our ACM e-Energy paper on online energy scheduling won the Best Paper Runner-Up Award.
04/2021: [Service] I will serve as a TPC member for IEEE INFOCOM 2022.
04/2021: [Paper] Our paper "Online Peak-Aware Energy Scheduling with Untrusted Advice" accepted to ACM e-Energy 2021 (acceptance rate: 22%).
04/2021: [Grant] Honored to receive the NSF CRII Award. Thanks NSF.
12/2020: [Service] I will serve as a TPC member for ACM MobiHoc 2021 and IEEE ICDCS 2021, .
11/2020: [Grant] Thanks the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for funding our project to advance solar technologies. Media coverage: BingUNews.
09/2020: [Paper] Our paper "Online Algorithms for Multi-shop Ski Rental with Machine Learned Advice" accepted to NeurIPS 2020 (acceptance rate: 20%).
07/2020: [Paper] Our paper "RL-Belady: A Unified Learning Framework for Content Caching" accepted to ACM Multimedia 2020 for full oral presentation (acceptance rate: 27%).
06/2020: [Service] I will serve as a TPC member for IEEE INFOCOM 2021.
02/2020: Delivered an invited talk on "A TTL-based Approach for Real-time Geo-distributed Data Analytics" at Information Theory and Applications Workshop - ITA 2020.
10/2019: [Paper] Our paper "Quickest Detection of Dynamic Events in Networks" accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (IEEE TIT).
08/2019: I joined Binghamton University-SUNY as an assistant professor.
07/2019: I was invited to attend NSF-NeTS Early Career Workshop.
04/2019: [Paper] Our paper on streaming analytics in geo-distributed edge systems accepted to ACM SIGMETRICS/IFIP Performance 2019 (acceptance rate: 17%).
04/2019: [Service] I will serve as a TPC member for IEEE INFOCOM 2020.
09/2018: [Paper] Our paper on network cache design under stationary requests selected as best paper finalist at IEEE MASCOTS 2018.
04/2018: [Paper] Our paper on online learning for caching algorithm design accepted to IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (IEEE JSAC).
04/2018: I was invited to attend Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2018. See you in Redmond this summer!

I am actively looking for self-motivated students to join my research group. Please send me a brief email with your resume and transcripts if you are interested. Visiting scholars/students are also highly welcome.