SBU’s Jian Li earns NSF Early CAREER Award
Stony Brook University Assistant Professor Jian Li, from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and the Department of Computer Science, was recently awarded a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Early CAREER award for his project, “CAREER: Structured Learning and Optimization for Efficient Management in the Wireless Edge Cloud: Theory and Algorithms.”
“This project aims to bridge the gap between prevailing graph-based job services and wireless edge cloud designs via advocating structured learning and optimization solutions with provable performance guarantees,” said Professor Li. “The results will enhance the performance of wireless edge networks for distributed computing loads. At the same time this project develops fundamental theories that pertain to the area of machine learning, specially to reinforcement learning and distributed learning.”
According to the National Science Foundation, NSF CAREER Awards support early-career faculty with the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
“These awards are extremely competitive and are selectively given to the nation’s most promising researchers. We are very proud of Jian,” said Professor Joe Mitchell, chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. “Professor Li’s project seeks to improve our fundamental understanding in areas of reinforcement learning, optimization, and scheduling, with potential broader impacts in the performance and responsiveness of edge and cloud computing, which is a core technology we all rely upon, especially for the ever-expanding suite of AI tools that have become an integral part of our daily lives.”
Li earned his doctorate in computer engineering from Texas A&M University in 2016 and his bachelor of engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2012. He was a postdoc with the College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2017 to 2019 and an assistant professor at Binghamton University before joining Stony Brook in 2023.
