Jie Fu

Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida

Fu’s lab focuses on developing intelligent and (semi-)autonomous systems through the integration of control theory, machine learning, and formal methods. At our lab, we aim to build trustworthy systems in complex decision-making and dynamic environments, in coordination with or under the supervision of human operators. The research contains several main areas: (1) Preference-aware decision making with human-on-the loop; (2) learning-enabled adaptive control and planning with complex temporal objectives; (3) game-theoretic design of provably correct autonomous systems. The applications include human-autonomy shared control, security and safety for cyber-physical systems, and cyber security.

Lab Director:

Dr. Jie Fu is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA. She received the M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and Automaton from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in 2009, and the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA, in 2013. From 2013 to 2015, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the University of Pennsylvania. From 2016-2021, she was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Robotics Engineering, with an affiliation in Dept. of ECE, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA. In 2021, she joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida as an assistant professor. Fu’s research focuses on developing control theory and planning algorithms for constructing secured (semi-)autonomous systems with high-level logic reasoning and adaptive decision-making capabilities.  Dr. Fu has also received several early career awards, including the AFOSR Young Investigator Award and the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2021, and the NSF CAREER Award in 2022. She has received funding for her research projects from ARO, NSF, DARPA, and AFOSR.

News:

• April 2024: Our paper “Information-Theoretic Opacity-Enforcement in Markov Decision Processes” is accepted by the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
• Dec 2023: Our paper “Covert Planning against Imperfect Observers” is accepted by 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. 
• Dec 2023: Our paper “Synthesis of Opacity-Enforcing Winning Strategies Against Colluded Opponent” is accepted and presented at 2023 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).
• Oct 2023: Our paper “Optimal Resource Allocation for Proactive Defense with Deception in Probabilistic Attack Graphs” and ” Opacity-enforcing active perception and control against eavesdropping attacks” accepted and presented at  Conference on Game Theory and AI for Security, 2023.
• July 2023: I am so excited to announce that our paper “Reinforcement Learning of CPG-Regulated Locomotion Controller for a Soft Snake Robot,” has been accepted to the prestigious journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics. Congratulations to my Ph.D. student Xuan Liu! 
• June 2023: Our paper “”Optimizing Sensor Allocation against Attackers with Uncertain Intentions: A Worst-Case Regret Minimization Approach” has been accepted for publication as a Submission for L-CSS and CDC in the IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS).” Congratulations to my Ph.D. student Haoxiang! 
• April 2023: Our lab received funding from ARL project Tactical Behaviors for Autonomous Maneuver Collaborative Research Program (TBAM-CRP) “Sticky Formation Tracking: Maneuver with Learning and Deception in Complex Terrains (StickyLearn)” in collaboration with Raytheon BBN Technologies (total ward to UF: $400 k).
• Jan 2023: Two papers are accepted at American Control Conference 2023. “Opportunistic Qualitative Planning in Stochastic Systems with Incomplete Preferences over Reachability Objectives” and “Synthesis of Proactive Sensor Placement In Probabilistic Attack Graphs“.
• Jan 2023: Our paper “Probabilistic Planning with Partially Ordered Preferences over Temporal Goals” has been accepted at the The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2023.
• Jan 2023: Our paper “Quantitative Planning with Action Deception in Concurrent Stochastic Games” and “Optimal Sensor and Decoy Allocation for Proactive Defense in Probabilistic Attack Graphs” have been accepted as a full paper and an extended abstract, respectively, at the The 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2023. With preprint on ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.01349 and https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.01336.pdf.
• Oct 2022: We have presented our latest work at the Conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security (GameSec-22). The paper is titled: “On Almost-Sure Intention Deception Planning that Exploits Imperfect Observers” with a preprint on ArXiv. This study investigates the vulnerability of security systems by analyzing the deceptive attacks.
• Aug 2022: Our lab received funding for a collaborative NSF project titled `”Collaborative Research: CPS: Medium: Adaptive, Human-centric Demand-side Flexibility Coordination At-scale in Electric Power Networks” (total award to UF: $333 k). This project will be lead by Dr. Anamika Dubey from WSU Pullman. Dr. Fu and Dr. Vijay Gupta from Purdue University are both co-principle investigators. If you are interested in data-driven adaptive control, please reach out to Dr. Fu.
• Aug 2022: Dr. Fu has received a grant $400k from Army Research Office in support of the project “Verification and Synthesis of Assured Dynamic Cyber Defense with Deception and Counter Deception”. This project will research and develop formal methods approach and algorithmic game theory for modeling, verifying, and synthesizing provably correct dynamic cyber defense systems with deception and counter-deception. If you are interested in model checking and game theory for cybersecurity, please reach out to Dr. Fu.
• July 2022: Our paper “`”Synthesizing Attack-Aware Control and Active Sensing Strategies Under Reactive Sensor Attacks” is published at IEEE Control Systems Letters. This work will be presented at IEEE CDC 2022.
• Jun 2022: Dr. Fu has received NSF CAREER Award $550k in support of her project “Formal Synthesis of Provably Correct Cyber-Physical Defense with Asymmetric Information.” The project will work to enhance the security and performance of cyber-physical systems, specifically autonomous robotic systems in dynamic, uncertain environments. The project continues progress made by Dr. Fu in her research area—integrated formal methods, learning, control, and game theory.
• Feb 2022: Dr. Fu has received the 2021 DARPA Young Faculty Award and funding $500k for two years. The project is titled “Game-Theoretic Reasoning and Synthesis of Defense with Strategic Deception and Counter-Deception”. This project will be led by PI Fu. Dr. Shuo Han from the University of Illinois, Chicago will collaborate with Fu in this project as a sub-awardee.
• Feb 2022: Congratulations to Zhentian Qian on the paper “Towards Accurate Loop Closure Detection in Semantic SLAM with 3D Semantic Covisibility Graphs” accepted at IEEE Robotics and Automation letters. The work will be presented at 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
• Mar 2021: Our PI Jie Fu has received the 2021 Airforce Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Research Award: https://www.afrl.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2406086/afosr-awards-grants-to-36-scientists-and-engineers-through-its-young-investigat/ The project is titled “Toward Preference-Aware Autonomy: Specification, Synthesis, and Interactive Planning”. Please reach out to Dr. Fu if you are interested in research opportunities on this topic.
• Aug 2021: Dr. Fu joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida as an Assistant Professor.
• March. 2021: Two papers are accepted to ICRA2021. “Attention-Based Planning with Active Perception” (arXiv:2012.00053 [cs.RO])and “Semantic SLAM with Autonomous Object-Level Data Association”, arXiv:2011.10625 [cs.RO]”.
• Sept. 2020: Our paper titled “Decoy Placement Games on Graphs with Temporal Logic Objectives” is accepted to GameSec 2020. The preprint can be found at ArXiv link.
• Aug. 2020: Receive NSF National Robotics Initiative (NRI) award, “Collaborative Research: NRI: INT: Transparent and Intuitive Teleoperation Interfaces for the Future Nursing Robots and Workers”, PI: Jane Li (WPI), Co-PI: Cagdas Onal, Jie Fu (UF), Jeanine Skorinko (WPI) and Yunus Telliel (WPI); $731,329, 2020/09/01-2023/08/31). The interdisciplinary project is in collaboration with the Nursing Department of Worcester State University.
• July, 2020: Our paper titled ” Learning to Locomote with Deep Neural-Network and CPG-based Control in a Soft Snake Robot” is accepted to  2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2020)
• July, 2020: Our paper titled “Deceptive Labeling: Hypergames on Graphs for Stealthy Deception” is accepted to IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS)  and presentation at IEEE CDC2020. Based on the insight from this paper, we are looking into design defense with deception for cyber security applications and robotic applications.
• May, 2020: Our paper titled ‘‘Deceptive Strategy Synthesis under Action Misperception in Reachability Games’’ is accepted to IJCAI2020. The paper is one of our key research efforts for constructing a hypergame framework for games with temporal logic objectives and asymmetric information.
• April, 2020: Paper titled “A Receding-Horizon MDP Approach for Performance Evaluation of Moving Target Defense in Networks” is accepted for presentation at, and publication in the proceedings of,  2020 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA2020).