About
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. My research builds trustworthy AI and cyberinfrastructure for safety-critical, data-intensive systems — spanning digital twins, edge intelligence, clinical and operational decision support, and large-scale scientific computing.
I work most often with biomedical, environmental, and infrastructure researchers on modeling pipeline and make it deployable, validated, federated, and runtime-safe at scale. Recent and ongoing collaborations span ORNL leadership-class HPC (Frontier), USDA precision agriculture, NIH-funded research, among others.
Research Themes
- Digital twins & decision-support orchestration — LLM-orchestrated digital twins, hybrid mechanistic + ML models, and human-centered safe decision support for precision agriculture, climate, and healthcare applications.
- Runtime safety & anomaly detection — anomaly detection in clinical and operational event sequences, probabilistic error reasoning, drift monitoring for ML systems in production, and health IT hazard detection.
- Edge AI & LLM agents for scientific systems — instruction-tuned domain LLMs, LLM-driven log mining at HPC scale, and edge AI deployment for traffic, agriculture, and field monitoring.
- Cyber-physical systems security — runtime attestation, control-flow integrity for IoT, behavior-guided firmware decompilation, and defenses against fault injection attacks.
- Federated, privacy-preserving cyberinfrastructure — federated validation pipelines, secure data and model sharing, HPC storage, and distributed sensor systems.
Focus Areas
- AI / ML validation, safety, and runtime monitoring in regulated or safety-critical domains (clinical, regulatory, infrastructure).
- Digital twin frameworks for biomedical, environmental, and infrastructure applications.
- Cyberinfrastructure for federated, privacy-preserving data and model sharing.
- LLM agents for scientific operations, log analytics, and decision support.
Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL - Master of Computer Science in Computer Science
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
Contact
- Email: cao@utk.edu