Jingdi Chen

Jingdi Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona, beginning in Fall 2025. She directs the ANNIE Research Group, which focuses on building intelligent, efficient and interpretable multi-agent systems for collaborative, secure and fair decision-making. Her lab is actively recruiting PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and research interns.

Chen received her PhD in electrical and computer engineering and an MS in statistics from The George Washington University, where she was advised by Prof. Tian Lan. She holds a BS in mathematics from Fudan University. Prior to joining the University of Arizona, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the LIONS group at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Prof. Carlee Joe-Wong.

Her research interests include reinforcement learning, algorithmic fairness, network optimization, cybersecurity, and explainable AI. Her recent work has been published in leading venues such as NeurIPS, AAAI, MobiHoc, and IEEE Transactions, and includes collaborations with Nokia Bell Labs and the U.S. Military Academy.

Degrees

• PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, The George Washington University, 2024
• MS in Statistics, The George Washington University, 2019
• BS in Mathematics, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, 2017

Teaching Interests

Reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, machine learning, cybersecurity and AI, data mining and statistical learning and explainable and responsible AI

Research Interests

Reinforcement learning and multi-agent systems, fairness in AI and optimization, network optimization and resource allocation, cybersecurity and intrusion detection, explainable AI and human-centric decision-making and integration of large language models with decision systems

Textbooks/Most Significant Publications

• Jingdi Chen, Hanhan Zhou, Yongsheng Mei, Carlee Joe-Wong, Nathaniel D Bastian, Tian Lan, “RGMDT: Return-Gap-Minimizing Decision Tree Extraction in Non-Euclidean Metric Space”, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.
• Jingdi Chen, Carlee Joe-Wong, Tian Lan, “RGMComm: Return Gap Minimization via Dis- crete Communications in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning”, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2024.
• Jingdi Chen, Hanhan Zhou, Yongsheng Mei, Gina Adam, Nathaniel D Bastian, Tian Lan, “Real-time Network Intrusion Detection via Decision Transformers”, AAAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security (AICS), 2024.
• Jingdi Chen, Lei Zhang, Joseph Riem, Gina Adam, Nathaniel D Bastian, Tian Lan, “RIDE: Real-time Intrusion Detection via Explainable Machine Learning Implemented in a Memristor Hardware Architecture”, IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing (DSC), 2023.
• Jingdi Chen, Tian Lan, Nakjung Choi, “Distributional-Utility Actor-Critic for Network Slice Performance Guarantee”, Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing (MobiHoc), 2023.
• Jiayu Chen, Jingdi Chen, Tian Lan, Vaneet Aggarwal, “Scalable Multi-agent Covering Option Discovery based on Kronecker Graphs”, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022.
• Jingdi Chen, Yimeng Wang, Tian Lan, “Bringing fairness to actor-critic reinforcement learning for network utility optimization”, IEEE INFOCOM 2021-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, 2021.

Awards and Honors

• First Runner-Up, Best Dissertation Award, GWU ECE, 2024
• PICKHOLTZ Graduate Award and ZHANG & WANG Award, 2023–2024
• N2Women Fellowship, 2023
• IEEE CAI Student Conference Award, 2023
• IEEE INFOCOM Student Conference Award, 2021