Hi there. I’m Jiarui Y. Li, a PhD student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, supervised by Prof. Morley Mao. I also work closely with Prof. Qingzhao Zhang. My research centers on the robustness and security of robotics and embodied AI in the physical world — the learning-enabled systems that perceive, reason, and act through real sensors and actuators, where failures carry physical consequences rather than staying confined to the digital domain. I study how vulnerabilities propagate across the perception-to-control pipeline of physically deployed autonomous systems, from drones and self-driving vehicles to robotic manipulators. I build principled methods to stress-test and harden modern learning-based components under real-world, adversarial, and safety-critical conditions.

I hold an MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence Engineering - Information Security from the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where my focus on the robustness and security of learning systems first took shape. Working with Prof. Carlee Joe-Wong and Prof. Gauri Joshi, I studied how adversarial and distributed conditions undermine the reliability of machine learning — a question I now pursue in physically embodied systems.

Prior to this, I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen in 2022. I also interned at Tencent AI Lab for one year, mentored by Dr. Wenxiang Jiao.

🏀 I love sports, especially basketball :)