Li Jian
Jian
Li
Assistant Professor

Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Computer Science

Interests

Reinforcement Learning and multi-armed bandits, federated/decentralized learning, and applications in next-generation networked systems (e.g., wireless networks)

Biography

Jian Li is an Assistant Professor of Data Science with the Departments of Applied Mathematics and Statistics & Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University, State University of New York (SUNY). Before that, he was an assistant professor at SUNY-Binghamton from 2019 to 2023, and a postdoc with the College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2017 to 2019, hosted by Prof. Don Towsley. He completed 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 papers have received the ACM e-Energy'21 Best Paper Runner-Up Award and IEEE MASCOTS'18 Best Paper Runner-Up Award. His research has been supported by NSF, ARO and DOE.

Research

  • Theory: Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Armed Bandits, Federated/Decentralized Learning, Stochastic Optimization and Control, and RL with Human Feedback and Alignment for Large Language Models (LLMs).
  • Applications: Next-generation Large-scale Networked Systems include wireless networks, edge and cloud computing, caching and content delivery, serverless computing, and Internet-of-Things.