Short Biography

Jian Li is an Assistant Professor of Data Science in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and the Department of Computer Science within the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University, State University of New York (SUNY). He is also a core faculty member of the AI Innovation Institute (AI3) and affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS). Previously, he was an assistant professor at SUNY-Binghamton, and a postdoctoral researcher at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, hosted by Prof. Don Towsley. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Srinivas Shakkottai. He also worked very closely with Prof. Vijay Subramanian from University of Michigan. He received his B.E. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2012. Dr. Li is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2024) and NSF CISE CRII Award (2021). His research has been recognized with several awards, including the ACM/IEEE SC'24 Best Student Paper Finalist, the ACM e-Energy'21 Best Paper Runner-Up Award and the IEEE MASCOTS'18 Best Paper Runner-Up Award. His research has been supported by NSF, ARO and DOE. 

Research Interests

• Theory: Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Armed Bandits, Federated/Decentralized Learning, Stochastic Optimization and Control, RL with Human Feedback (RLHF) and Alignment for Large Language Models (LLMs)

• Systems and Security: Large-Scale Networked and Trustworthy Intelligent Systems including LLMs, wireless networks, edge and cloud computing, caching and content delivery, serverless computing and Internet-of-Things

News

• 02/2025: [Call for Submission] We are organizing the ACM SIGMETRICS 2025 Workshop: AI Crossroads: Systems, Energy, and Applications (Submission Deadline: 04/01/25, Workshop Date: 06/13/25)

• 02/2025: [Talk] Delivered an invited talk at the CSE Department Seminar, University of California, Merced.

• 02/2025: [Award] Excellence in Teaching Award for Fall 2024.

• 02/2025: [Talk] Delivered an invited talk at Information Theory and Applications Workshop - ITA 2025. 

• 01/2025: [Paper] Three papers accepted to ICLR 2025  (acceptance rate: 32.08%).

• 12/2024: [Paper] One paper accepted to AAAI 2025 for oral presentation (acceptance rate: 4.6%).

• 12/2024: [Student] Congratulations to Shufan Wang for passing his Ph.D. dissertation defense. 

• 11/2024: [Award] Best Student Paper Finalist of ACM/IEEE SC'24. 

• 10/2024: [Talk] Delivered an invited talk at the Workshop on Stochastic Control, RL and Decision-making (SCRL). 

• 10/2024: [Service] I will serve as a Workshop Co-Chair for ACM MobiHoc 2025 and an Area Chair for AISTATS 2025. 

• 09/2024: [Talk] Delivered an invited talk at the CIS Department Seminar, University of Delaware.

• 08/2024: [Grant] NSF CAREER Award. [SBU News]

• 07/2024: [Student] Congratulations to Guojun Xiong for passing his Ph.D. dissertation defense. Best of luck on your upcoming adventure at Harvard and beyond! 

• 06/2024: [Talk] Delivered an invited talk at the Reinforcement Learning for Stochastic Networks (RL4SN) Workshop. 

• 06/2024: [Paper] One paper accepted to SC 2024 (acceptance rate: 22.7%).

• 06/2024: [Paper] One paper accepted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

• 06/2024: [Paper] One paper accepted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

• 05/2024: [Service] I will serve as a SPC for AAAI 2025, and a PC for NeurIPS 2024 and IEEE INFOCOM 2025. 

• 05/2024: [Paper] One paper accepted to KDD 2024  (acceptance rate: 20%).

• 05/2024: [Student] My Ph.D. student Guojun Xiong received the Excellence in Research Award from the Data Science Program at Stony Brook University. Congratulations!   

• 05/2024: [Paper] One paper accepted to ICML 2024  (acceptance rate: 27.5%). 

• 03/2024: [Talk] Delivered an invited talk at INFORMS Optimization Society Conference (IOS) - Emerging Applications of Data-driven Sequential Decision Making.