Sharon Li

About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison. I am a member of machine learning@uw-madison and a faculty affiliate with the Data Science Institute. Previously I was as a postdoc researcher in the Computer Science department at Stanford University, working with the Hazy Group. I completed my PhD from Cornell University in 2017, where I was fortunate to be advised by John E. Hopcroft. My research aims at bringing AI systems to the level where they are not only intelligent, but also safe and beneficial for humanity. In particular, my research focuses on algorithmic and theoretical foundations to enable machine learning models operating reliably in the wild, by detecting out-of-distribution data and learning new structures therein. These days, I am also fascinated by understanding behaviors of advanced intelligent systems such as large language models, and aligning them effectively with human desire.

Updates

9/12/2023: Honored to be named "Innovator of the Year" by MIT Technology Review.
7/19/2023: Yiyou defended his thesis - congratulations Dr. Sun!
6/26/2023: Received funding from ONR to support OOD detection research - thanks ONR!
6/21/2023: Received NSF CAREER Award.
4/24/2023: 3 papers accepted by ICML. Congratulations team!
2/11/2023: Xuefeng received the inaugural Jane Street Graduate Research Fellowship.
1/20/2023: CIDER and NPOS (Non-parametric Outlier Synthesis) accepted by ICLR 2023.
12/14/2022: Grateful to receive the AFOSR Young Investigator (YIP) Award.
11/21/2022: Received NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award.
11/11/2022: Excited to receive funding from Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI), and partner on safe AI research.
11/2022: Received Google-Initiated Research Grant.
9/14/2022: 4 papers accpeted to NeurIPS 2022 and 1 paper accepted to NeurIPS 2022 Datasets and Benchmarks Track. Congrats to the team and co-authors!
8/26/2022: Received Amazon Research Award.
6/8/2022: Received American Family Funding Intiative Award.
5/15/2022: 4 papers accepted by ICML, congratulations to the team!
4/15/2022: Received ICLR Outstanding Paper Award Honorable Mention.

[Openings]: I am looking for creative and curiosity-driven minds to join my lab, with fully funded positions. The admission decision at UW-Madison is committee-based. For questions regarding the application process, please see the FAQ. I highly recommend reading my [Advising Statement] before you apply or email me.

[Services]:

Program chair and founding organizer: ICML Workshop on Uncertainty and Robustness in Deep Learning (UDL) 2019 & 2020.

Area chair and senior program committee: NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and AAAI.

Co-organizer: ICML Workshop on Uncertainty and Robustness in Deep Learning (UDL), 2021.

Co-organizer: ICML Workshop on Distribution-free Uncertainty Quantification (DFUQ), 2021.

Co-organizer: WiML Un-Workshop on Uncertainty Estimation, 2021.

Co-organizer: ICML Workshop on Distribution-free Uncertainty Quantification (DFUQ), 2022.

Co-organizer: NeurIPS Workshop on Robustness in Sequence Modeling, 2022.

Co-organizer: ICCV Tutorial on Reliability of Deep Learning for Real-World Deployment, 2023.

[Talks & Panels]:

12/7/2023: Talk at Machine Learning Lunch Meeting (MLLM) at UW-Madison

11/6/2023: Invited talk at TEDxUWMadison