Lu Feng
University of Virginia
I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia. I am also a member of the Link Lab - the center of research excellence in Cyber-Physical Systems. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. I hold a D.Phil. in Computer Science from the University of Oxford, a M.Phil. in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology from the University of Cambridge, and a B.Eng. in Information Engineering from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. I have been fortunate to receive several awards in the past, including NSF CAREER Award, NIH NHLBI Big Data Analysis Challenge Winner Award, NSF CRII Award, Rising Stars in EECS, James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, among others.
My research focuses on assuring the safety and trustworthiness of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), which are engineered systems with seamless integration of computing devices, control and actuation, and sensing of the physical world. Prominent examples of CPS include automated vehicles, medical devices, and smart cities. Specifically, my current research tackles challenges such as:
Safety of AI-enabled CPS: The data-rich nature of CPS has resulted in AI technologies increasingly being embedded in CPS. But many AI systems lack safety guarantees and can lead to catastrophic failures. How do we provide mathematically rigorous guarantees about the safety of AI-enabled CPS?
Trust in Human-CPS: There is a growing trend toward human-CPS, where systems collaborate or interact with humans to harness complementary strengths of humans and autonomy. How do we build trustworthy human-CPS while accounting for the uncertainty of human interaction?
Read more about my research here.
Highlights of Recent News
Sep. 2024: Our paper “Safe POMDP Online Planning among Dynamic Agents via Adaptive Conformal Prediction” has been accepted for publication at the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
May 2024: Congratulations to three of my Ph.D. students, Dr. Ingy Elsayed-Aly, Dr. Josephine Lamp, and Dr. Shili Sheng, on successfully defending their dissertations and graduating!
May 2024: Our paper “ADESSE: Advice Explanations in Complex Repeated Decision-Making Environments” has been accepted for publication at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2024.
Mar. 2024: Two papers have been accepted for publication at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024: “Safe POMDP Online Planning via Shielding” and “Trust-Aware Motion Planning for Human-Robot Collaboration under Distribution Temporal Logic Specifications”.
Mar. 2024: Our paper “Distributional Probabilistic Model Checking” has been accepted for publication at the NASA Formal Methods Symposium 2024.
Contact
Office: Olsson Hall, Room 271
Phone: 434-982-2388
Email: lu.feng at virginia dot edu