Computer Science Expert Named
IEEE Fellow

Dr. Weili (Lily) Wu, professor of computer science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas, was recently named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for her contributions to the study of data communication and processing in wireless sensor networks. According to the IEEE, the fellow designation is reserved for individuals with extraordinary professional distinction. Less than .1 percent of members are named fellows each year.

“I am proud and thankful to receive this recognition,” Wu said. “My work over the years at UT Dallas has become a milestone in the study of lifetime coverage, motivating several new research issues and open problems.”

Wu specifically studies algorithms and optimization problems for wireless network environments and database systems and has received several federally funded awards supporting projects related to wireless mesh networks, wireless sensor network deployments, intrusion detection and infrastructure for time-critical embedded systems. The algorithms help wireless networks to operate more efficiently in complex systems such as those used underwater, across greater distances or in remote areas.

Wu has served as a faculty member at UT Dallas since 2002. She leads the Data Communication and Data Management Laboratory along with Dr. Ding-Zhu Du, also a professor of computer science. Wu’s areas of research include social computing and big data, machine learning, blockchain technologies and Internet of Things (IoT), distributed systems and mobile computing, wireless sensor networks and data management.

“Since Weili joined about two decades ago, she became a lead researcher in algorithms for wireless sensor networks and later a top expert in social computing and analyzing influence in social networks,” said Dr. Ovidiu Daescu, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science and holder of the Jonsson School Chair at UT Dallas. “Weili has advised and helped many PhD and assisted or shepherded postdoctoral students, organized multiple conferences, edited books and has been a great collaborator and a mentor to our faculty. She is overall a wonderful colleague. Having an exceptional record of journal and conference publications, it was only a matter of time until she would receive due recognition from the main professional organizations in the field. With her election as an IEEE Fellow, she joins a group of a selected few. I am proud of her accomplishments and look to see many more contributions and successes in the years ahead.”

Wu has published more than 257 journal articles and 106 conference papers, and her research has received 13,327 citations with an h-index of 56. One of her papers on the coverage of wireless sensor networks has received more than 1,400 citations. This work led to several new research directions, including a major problem that Wu solved.

“I was able to solve a problem that was open for seven years in 2012, which is whether or not the maximum lifetime coverage has a polynomial constant approximation or not,” Wu said. “I used a technique called a double partition, which has been included in a textbook as a classical technique for the design of approximation algorithms.”

Wu has also served as an associate editor of Computational Social Networks; IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications; Discrete Mathematics, Algorithms and Applications; the Journal of Combinatorial Optimization; the Journal of Global Optimization; the Association for Computing Machinery Transactions on Internet Technology and the International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications.

Her contributions have influenced the study of virtual backbone, connected dominating sets (CDSs), which are a concept of graph theory, and have established her as an expert in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. CDSs have several uses including simplifying routing protocols so they use a smaller set of nodes to manage network traffic more efficiently.

Wu established the first nontrivial relationship, or a linear combination of vectors that equals zero, between a minimum CDS and a maximal independent set in homogenous wireless sensor networks. After observing applications such as underwater sensor systems, she introduced routing-cost constraint into CDS construction, which opened a new research direction.

In Wu’s design and analysis of CDS construction, she discovered new techniques to deal with greedy algorithms, or algorithms that choose the best available option without considering the bigger picture, by using nonsubmodular potential functions. These techniques became significant developments in computer algorithm theory.

In addition to her research activities, Wu teaches advanced courses in database systems and database design at UT Dallas’ Department of Computer Science. Wu earned MS and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering from the University of Minnesota.