Congratulations to Department of Computer Science Assistant Professor Yuchen Liu on receiving a Faculty Early Career Development award, also known as the CAREER award, from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This prestigious award supports early-career faculty who serve as role models in both research and education.

Liu’s continuing grant of $680,760 will support his project, “CatFly: Towards Resilience-Native Wireless Networks through Learning, Twinning, and Reconfiguring Co-Design.” His award is effective July 1, 2025 through June 2030. 

“Receiving this NSF award is both an honor and a meaningful milestone in my early career,” said Liu. “It not only affirms the promise and vision of my research, but also provides the crucial support needed to mentor students, establish lasting collaborations and pursue bold, forward-looking ideas that can define the next generation of resilient and intelligent network systems.”

Cats All the Way Down

The project aims to increase the level of intelligence and timely situational awareness in networks in the face of challenges like network or access point failures. Traditionally, networks rely on reactive, patchwork countermeasures after vulnerabilities emerge. Liu’s goal is to design networks that are inherently robust and self-adaptive from the ground up. This project proposes a resilience-native network paradigm, CatFly, that was inspired by an unlikely source: the way cats fall and land.

In a long drop, falling cats survive because they have time to relax and stretch out their legs, increasing air resistance and reducing the shock of impact. Inspired by this, Liu’s solution is to increase a network’s intelligence and speed by: 

• Predicting disturbances or failures with sufficient lead time

• Preparing and automating countermeasures ahead of time

• Reconfiguring physical structures to avoid or minimize losses

The uses hybrid digital-physical (HDP) intelligence to create a virtual copy of a network; this digital representation can be used to run “what-if” scenarios and uncover reconfigurability, exposing the different ways a real network can physically rearrange itself to stay reliable.

Advancing the Department’s Mission

Liu’s research is focused on wireless networking, digital twins, generative AI, mobile sensing and software simulation. He also directs the Networking and IntelligenCE (NICE) Lab at NC State, where he works with and advises multiple Ph.D., M.S. and undergraduate students. Liu receiving a CAREER award for his work is emblematic of the department as a whole: serving as a leader in both research and mentorship for the next generation of computer scientists.

“We're delighted to hear about Yuchen's CAREER award,” said Department Head Gregg Rothermel. “It's wonderful to see our newest faculty succeed, and obtaining support for their research– allowing them to bring on students as research assistants– is a critical part of that success.”

~brown~