Ewch i’r prif gynnwys
Yuhua Li

Dr Yuhua Li

Senior Lecturer

Yr Ysgol Cyfrifiadureg a Gwybodeg

Email
LiY180@caerdydd.ac.uk
Telephone
+44 29208 75317
Campuses
Abacws, Ystafell 4.59, Ffordd Senghennydd, Cathays, Caerdydd, CF24 4AG
Users
Ar gael fel goruchwyliwr ôl-raddedig

Trosolwyg

Data Analytics and Machine Learning Research Group

I have conducted fundamental and applied research in machine learning, pattern recognition, data science, semantic similarity analysis and condition monitoring. My top-cited original research paper has more than 1500 citations.

My experience in machine learning and pattern recognition includes statistical, geometrical methods and neural networks for feature/pattern selection and data analysis, knowledge discovery and inference.

My contribution to machine learning includes the development of anomaly/novelty detection methods for safety/mission-critical systems, which have limited or no data/knowledge on rare events, and informative observation selection techniques for sensors/measurements location optimisation for problems such as effective monitoring and process control. My work in semantic similarity analysis has been well recognised in this area and has been adopted in usable systems.

I have led and carried out research projects funded by the government and industry. I have collaborated on research projects with different sizes of national and international companies. My research has applied to solve problems in digital manufacturing, condition monitoring, financial engineering, and other real-world problem.

Public Engagement

  • Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College
  • Academic Adviser to the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission
  • Member of the Innovation Advisory Council for Wales

Cyhoeddiad

2023

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Articles

Conferences

Ymchwil

Data Analytics and Machine Learning Research Group

My research interests include:

  • Machine learning, pattern recognition
  • Novelty detection, anomaly detection
  • Data science, Big Data, text mining
  • Neural networks, deep learning
  • Hyperdimensional computing, vector symbolic architectures
  • Condition monitoring and signal processing
  • Machine learning and AI applications, e.g., cyber secuirity, finance, manufacturing

Selected publications (more publications on Google Scholar).

Addysgu

I received a postgraduate certificate in higher education, I am a Fellow of the HEA. I teach:

  • CMT307 Applied Machine Learning
  • CMT316 Applications of Machine Learning: Natural Language Processing/Computer Vision
  • CMT219 Algorithms, Data Structures and Programming
  • CM1210 Object Oriented Java Programming

Meysydd goruchwyliaeth

Current PhD students

I am the 1st supervisor for: 

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the areas of:

  • Machine learning, pattern recognition
  • Data science, Big Data, text mining
  • Neural networks, deep learning
  • Hyperdimensional computing, vector symbolic architectures
  • Machine learning and AI applications, e.g., cyber secuirity, finance and engineering

You are welcome to contact me (LiY180@cardiff.ac.uk) if you have an outstanding academic background and high ambition for research excellence. Listed below are examples of PhD project proposals.

Project 1- Online classification with emerging new classes

Standard classification methods can only classify pre-defined classes, i.e., they classify a new instance into one (or multiple) of the known classes. For example, for building a classifier for viral respiratory diseases, we need to train the classification model on a dataset with pre-defined classes such as MERS and SARS. At the time of developing a model for disease classification, the classifier is trained on available data which contains only, e.g., MERS and SARS. Such a classifier can only classify MERS and SARS diseases, it will be unable to deal with the emergence of new diseases such as COVID-19 in the future. To deal with the emergence of new classes, a novel approach is needed to learn a classifier that is able to detect newly emerging classes and adapt the classifier accordingly. Such a classifier learning paradigm with new classes has numerous applications, e.g., self-driving cars manoeuvring in novel traffic scenarios, malware detectors dealing with new types of network attacks, robotic soldiers navigating in new types of terrains, etc.


This project aims to develop a novel approach to learning a classifier that is capable of classifying emerging and novel classes. The proposed approach will address two main challenges: effective detection of emerging classes and just-in-time adaptation of classifiers for new classes. Emerging class detection will be built on the latest advances in novelty detection (novelty detection is a machine learning technique that learns a model based on only known classes to detect instances coming from a novel class), and just-in-time adaptation will develop a novel incremental learning strategy to integrate new classes into the current classifier. The developed algorithms will be evaluated on a use case in cybersecurity or the Internet of Things (e.g., new types of network attacks).

Project 2- Learning concept evolution in data streams
In applications with concept evolution, new concepts emerge in the data stream, and existing/known concepts disappear over time, e.g., new types of attacks in a computer network and new topics of interest in a social media data stream. This project aims to develop novel methods for tackling the challenging issue of concept evolution to enable the learned models to accommodate new concepts. It will achieve the following objectives: known concepts modelling; novel instances detection and accumulation; new concepts detection and integration; outdated concepts retiring.

Project 3- Explainable machine learning for securing Internet of Things (IoT) 
Internet of Things (IoT) consists of things, services, and networks, it connects interrelated smart devices, objects, animals or people to transfer data over a network to serve people better. The amount of data transferred with IoT systems is continuous, heterogenous and huge, which makes IoT systems more vulnerable than the traditional network to malicious activities from attackers, so the security and privacy of this highly automated network is a key challenge for the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT). It is constantly subject to adversarial attacks including denial of service, jamming, spoofing, eavesdropping, malware and privacy leakage. The limited resources (computation, battery, and memory) on IoT devices and the amount of data generated and communicated severely constrain the applicability of existing security measures to IoT systems. Even if a security system is effective at the time of deployment, it is prone to fail soon as attackers adapt smarter strategies to foil the system and avoid detection. Machine learning is a major tool for detecting adversarial attacks, and human-level explainability of detection results remains open to research in the security of IoT. 

This project aims to address these key challenges to secure future IoT systems with creative machine learning methods by Investigating data streaming classification methods for effectively detecting known types of attacks and their variants in the future; Developing computationally cheaper machine learning algorithms as well as robustness against eavesdropping attacks; Optimising the offloading policy in dynamic radio environments to optimally distribute the computational load over cloud, device and edge; Investigating adversarial machine learning techniques to tackle attackers’ changing strategies; Interpreting prediction results to support human to take trustworthy actions.