Lili Su

Lili Su is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. She specializes in distributed machine learning, cybersecurity, neural computation, and bio-inspired algorithms, with applications in autonomous systems and blockchain technologies.

Education:

• PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2017)
• MS, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2014)

Research Interests:

Her work focuses on securing distributed machine learning systems against adversarial attacks, developing fault-tolerant algorithms for high-dimensional data, and bio-inspired approaches to distributed computing. Key areas include federated learning, Byzantine resilience, and autonomous vehicle safety. She also explores neural computation models inspired by biological systems, such as spike-based winner-take-all circuits.

Publications:

Her recent work addresses challenges in federated learning, including mitigating client heterogeneity and connection unreliability. She has also contributed to trajectory prediction for autonomous vehicles, privacy-preserving algorithms, and Byzantine-resilient optimization techniques. Her research often bridges theory and practice, with applications in edge computing and vehicular networks.

Awards and Honors:

• NSF CAREER Award (2023)
• Best Student Paper Finalist, DISC 2016
• Best Student Paper Award, SSS 2015
• Rising Stars EECS 2018

Grants and Projects:

• Principal Investigator: NSF-funded project on federated learning foundations (2023)
• Center for Science of Information grant for distributed machine learning security (2020)

Labs and Affiliations:

She is affiliated with Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI, where she collaborates on interdisciplinary projects in machine learning and autonomous systems.