Professor Xiang Li has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s CISE Research Initiation Initiative Grant (NSF CRII) totaling $169,021. 

The NSF CRII award, also known as the "Mini CAREER Award", is a prestigious and highly competitive award. The grant was awarded to Professor Li for her research titled “Data-Driven Cascading Failure Abstraction and Vulnerability Analysis in Cyber-Physical Systems.” The goal of the research is to design a framework to understand complicated cascading failure behaviors with simpler models derived from data and gain insights with the help of the simpler models. The grant will provide support for multiple undergraduate and graduate students to involve in state-of-the-art research work focusing on big data, machine learning, security, and cyber-physical systems.

Professor Li's research interests are centered on large-scale optimization and its intersection with cyber physical systems, cyber-security of networking systems, and big data analysis. More specifically, the focus of her research is to develop models, theories, and data-driven optimization algorithms for many computationally hard problems in Smart Grids, Online Social Networks, Device-to-Device Networks, and Internet of Things. To learn more about Professor Li's past and present research, visit http://www.cse.scu.edu/~xli.