Recent research findings and reports have raised the concerns for mobile security vulnerability and energy inefficiency. Besides, the rapid emergence of new domains of mobile applications also imposes new requirements for energy efficiency and service latency. These long-standing issues and new challenges span multiple aspects of mobile computing and call for novel approaches to further make the computing secure, energy efficient and fast.
Yongbo Li's dissertation, titled "Pushing the Envelope of Mobile Computing: Improving Security, Energy, and Latency by Bridging the Gap between Analytical Modeling and System Design", presents the solutions to the above problems. First, energy accounting (i.e., to determine how much a software principal contributes to the total system energy consumption) is a long-standing hard problem for multiprocessing systems. By making novel use of cooperative game theory and Shapley value in economic theory, Yongbo’s dissertation successfully provides the ultimate ground truth for the energy accounting problem on modern mobile platforms. Second, his work on security provides the first ever learn-to-reason solution that is inspired by the human decision-making process, which synergistically integrates the gut-feeling (fast and shallow reasoning, and reflexive actions) and deliberative thinking (slower and deeper reasoning, and deliberate actions). Finally, his work proposes a new optimization horizon, Quality-of-Result (QoR) in mobile edge computing, and presents a systematic optimization framework, to trade QoR for improved response time and energy saving. His dissertation not only produced publications at top conferences like ICDCS and DSN, but also bridged the gap between theory and practice in many different areas, making substantial real-world impacts.
During his Ph.D. program, Yongbo interned at Google Inc. (Summer 2016) and worked on Android core library. In 2017 summer, he worked on IoT and Edge Computing projects as a Research Intern at Bell Labs. After graduation, he joined Facebook Inc. as a Research Scientist.