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. My research focuses on the security and robustness of AI-driven systems, with an emphasis on cyber-physical settings. In particular, I study how vulnerabilities in learning-based components can manifest in real-world autonomous systems, and develop principled approaches to analyze and mitigate such risks.

I hold an MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence Engineering - Information Security from the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I specialized in secure distributed machine learning. I worked closely with Prof. Carlee Joe-Wong and Prof. Gauri Joshi.

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

🏀 I love sports, especially basketball :)

Featured Project

Banshee: Acoustic Target Switch Attacks on UAV Visual Tracking — IEEE S&P 2026

The first physically realizable acoustic attack that hijacks UAV visual tracking by exploiting gimbal-camera vulnerabilities, achieving 95.5% success in real-world black-box attacks on a commercial drone. See the project website for paper, video, slides, and code.