Yao Li

I am an assistant professor of Statistics at UNC Chapel Hill. I was a Ph.D. student at UC Davis working with Prof. Cho-Jui Hsieh and Prof. Thomas Lee. I received my master degree in London School of Economics and Political Science under supervision of Prof. Piotr Fryzlewicz.

My research focuses on developing new algorithms to resolve the real-world difficulties in the machine learning pipeline. I study both statistical and computational aspects of machine learning models. I am interested in developing new models with statistical guarantees, such as recommeder systems, factorial machine and fiducial inference. Currently, I am working on adversarial examples, trying to improve the robustness of deep neural networks.

Education

• B.S. in Statistics, Fudan University, 2014
• M.S. in Financial Statistics, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2015
• Ph.D in Statistics, University of California Davis, 2020

Work experience

• 7/2020-present: Assistant Professor of Statistics
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 6/2019-9/2019: Machine Learning Engineer Summer Intern
• Facebook, Inc.
• 6/2018-12/2018: Research Assistant
• NEC Laboratories America