Li (Lilly) Wu

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, working with Prof. Prashant Shenoy.

My research interests lie broadly in distributed systems. I design and build systems and algorithms that enhance the reliability and sustainability of large-scale computing through fault tolerance, performance diagnosis, and resource management. I also work on systems for AI, AI for systems, and IoT security. My current research areas include:

• Fault-Tolerant Edge AI Systems: Low-latency, resource-aware model serving on constrained edge environments (SoCC 2025, ICCCN 2024, MILCOM 2024).
• Reliable Cloud Microservices: Intelligent, online diagnosis and recovery from cascading failures at cloud scale (NOMS 2020, AIOps 2021, ACSOS 2021).
• Sustainable Data Centers: Energy- and carbon-efficient resource management for cloud and edge data centers (HPDC 2025, CCGrid 2024).

I completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin), Germany, advised by Prof. Odej Kao, Dr. Johan Tordsson, and Prof. Erik Elmroth. My dissertation on automatic performance diagnosis and recovery in cloud microservices led to the MicroX series, with open-source projects such as MicroRCA and a fault-injected microservices benchmark.

In the past, I worked as an SRE at IBM Cloud, a Systems Scientist at Elastisys, and a Senior Research Scientist at Bosch Research, where I gained first-hand exposure to reliability challenges in cloud and edge systems.

You can find my publications on Google Scholar and my CV here (Jan. 2026).

I am currently on the 2025–2026 academic job market. Please feel free to reach out!

See my Research Statement and Teaching Statement.