Pengfei Li
Final-year Ph.D. candidate, University of California, Riverside

Winston Chung Hall 459
Riverside, US 92507
pli081@ucr.edu, pli2@caltech.edu
I am Pengfei Li, a final-year CS Ph.D. candidate in University of California, Riverside, under the supervision of Prof. Shaolei Ren. Prior to that, I obtained a M.S.E degree in Robotics from Johns Hopkins University and a B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University. Since the summer of 2022, I has been working closely with Adam Wierman at Caltech, focusing on trustworthy learning augmented online optimization. In the summer 2023, I was fortunate to intern at Nokia Bell Labs mentored by Dr Matthew Andrews, focusing on autonomous ware-house operations with digital twins.
Research Highlights
My overarching research goal is to develop trustworthy, sustainable and equitable machine learning systems that enhance the efficiency of real-world systems and address critical societal and environmental challenges.
- Trustworthy Online Algorithms: Addressing fundamental theoretical and algorithmic challenges in online algorithms, towards strict robustness, safety and fairness guarantees (NeurIPS’23a, NeurIPS’23b, ICML’23).
- Sustainable AI: Modeling and measuring the resource consumption and environmental footprint during the deployment of AI system, mitigating these negative impacts with principled approaches (SIGMETRICS’22, eEnergy’24a, eEnergy’24b, SIGMETRICS’25, CACM’25).
- Environmental and Social Fairness: Developing algorithmic solutions to mitigate the environmental and social inequities (ICML’24, HotEthics’24).
news
Feb 20, 2025 | I am honored to receive the Dissertation Completion Fellowship Award (DCFA) from the Graduate Program in Computer Science ✨✨✨ This award will support my final two quarters at UC Riverside. |
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Feb 01, 2025 | Join us for an exciting workshop on learning-augmented algorithms at SIGMETRICS 2025, where we’ll bring together leading experts to discuss provable guarantees, real-world applications, and the future of algorithms enhanced by ML predictions. |
Jan 01, 2025 | AI’s silent toll on public health is bigger than you think. Our new findings expose the overlooked health toll of AI’s environmental footprint, urging action for responsible, health-informed AI development. |