Ninghui Li
Samuel D. Conte Professor and Associate Department Head of Computer Science
ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow
ninghui@purdue.edu
Biographical Information
Address
Purdue University
Department of Computer Sciences
305 N. University Street
West Lafayette, Indiana, 47907-2107
Office Phone: +1 765-496-6756
FAX: +1 765-494-0739
Starting February 2026, I joined
Perplexity AI while taking a part-time research
leave from Purdue University. At Perplexity, we launched
Secure Intelligence Institute, and I am serving as the intitute's
inaugural director.
News
Selected Current and Recent Professional Activities
Current Research Projects
- SaTC: Frontiers: Center for Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC) 10/1/2022 to 9/30/2027, (PI of Purdue Portion). Funded by NSF.
Collaboration with IU Bloominton, CMU, Duke, Ohio State, Penn State, UNC Chapel Hill, Yale.
- ACTION: AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation 06/01/2023 to 05/31/2028. Funded by NSF.
Collaboration with University of California-Santa Barbara, University of California-Berkeley, Georgia Tech, and other universities
- Collaborative Proposal: SaTC: CORE: Small: Differentially Private Data Synthesis. 07/15/2023-06/30/2026. Funded by NSF. (PI of Purdue, in collaboration with UCLA)
- Quantifying and Characterizing Privacy Leakage in Vision-Language-Action Models via Membership Inference. 12/11/2025-12/12/2026. Funded by CISCO. (PI)
- See here for a list of
K-12 competition math courses I've taught
- Learning to Code on the Cloud: Virtual Summer Camps for Middle and High School Students
- See here for resources on learning to program
- See here for some info of grades 3-6 math
- On November 10, 2024, Purdue Teams competed in the ICPC North America East Division competition.
Purdue Waffle Wizards team (Wilbert Chu, Robert Lee, and Thomas Quintus Marlowe) solved all 13 problems and finished at 3rd place in the combined ranking including all 3 regions in the division, behind CMU and MIT. The team advances to North America Championship.
- In April, 2024, ICPC held the 46th and 47th World Finals.
Purdue Team (Trung Dang, Richard Li, and Devin Qu) competed in the 47th World Final, and Purdue Team (Egor Gagushin, Peter Jin, and Minh Thanh Nguyen) competed in the 46th World Final.
- On May 29, 2023, Purdue Team (Trung Dang, Richard Li, and Devin Qu) received a Bronze Medal in ICPC North America Championship. Purdue team finished at 4th place.
- On February 25, 2023, Purdue Team (Trung Dang, Richard Li, and Devin Qu) won ICPC East Central North America Contest, besting teams from CMU, Waterloo, Toronto, Michigan and many other universities in the region.
- On November 10, 2022, Purdue Team (Riley Borgard, Trung Dang, and Richard Li) finished 20th place in ICPC World Finals Dhaka. Purdue was 4th place among all universities in North America behind MIT, CMU, and Waterloo.
- On May 30, 2022, Purdue Team (Trung Dang, Minh Nguyen, and Devin Qu) finished 9th place in ICPC North America Championship, and advanced to World Final .
- On August 14, 2021, Purdue Team (Riley Borgard, Trung Dang, and Richard Li) finished 12th place in ICPC North America Championship, and advanced to World Final Dhaka.
- On February 23, 2020, Purdue Team (Riley Borgard, Trung Dang, and Yi Xu) won Bronze Medal (4th place) in 2020 North America Championship, and advanced to World Final Moscow. Due to Covid, only Riley attended WF Moscow.
- CS(i+1)90-CPi: Competitive Programming :
- CS 556 (former 590-DSP): Data Security and Privacy (Graudate)
Spring 2025,
Spring 2022,
Spring 2018
- CS 529: Security Analytics (Graudate)
Fall 2018,
Fall 2017
-
CS 526: Information Security (Graduate):
Fall 2015,
Fall 2014,
Fall 2013,
Fall 2012,
Spring 2012,
Fall 2011,
Spring 2011,
Spring 2009,
Fall 2008
-
CS 591RS2: Research Seminar for First Year Grad Students:
Fall 2016
-
CS 252: Systems Programming:
Spring 2017, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
-
CS 555: Cryptography (Graduate):
Spring 2012,
Fall 2004,
Spring 2004,
-
CS 426: Computer Security (Undergraduate):
Fall 2010,
Fall 2007,
Fall 2006,
-
CS 590U: Access Control: Theory and Practice (Graduate):
Spring 2006,
Spring 2005,
Fall 2003,
-
CS 590N: Logical Methods in Information Security (Graduate):
Spring 2008
-
CS 655: Advanced Cryptology (Graduate) :
Spring 2007
-
CS 355: Cryptography (Undergraduate):
Fall 2005
-
CS 591C: Research Seminar for Beginning Graduate Students:
Spring 2006
- A reading list in security
Current Students and PostDocs
PhD Graduates
Former PostDocs
Former Visiting Students and Scholars
- Jerry Ma
(January 2013 to December 2013)
- Min Luo (February 2013 to February 2014)
- Min Lv
(September 2014 to Feb 2016)
- Zhikun Zhang
(September 2017 to August 2019)
- Jianyu Yang
(September 2019 to October 2020)
On COVID-19
- August, 2021: Our paper titled "PURE: A Framework for Analyzing Proximity-based Contact Tracing Protocols" was accepted to appear in ACM Computing Surveys
- June 29, 2020: I gave a keynote at 2020 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS) titled "COVID-19, Cybersecurity, and Epidemiology".
- April 5, 2020: We Should Learn from Austria's Experiences Fighting COVID-19.
PDF version on
(April 5, 2020)
- March 22, 2020: Resources for Kids Learning at Home
PDF version on
(Mar 23, 2020)
- March 30, 2020: COVID-19 for the Risk Digest.
Essentially the same version titled: Covid-19, CyberSecurity, and Epidemiology
- March 14, 2020: Open Letter 2: Aggressive Social Distancing is Everyone's Responsibility
PDF version on
(Mar 14, 2020)
- March 9, 2020: Open Letter 1: The Urgent Need for Aggressive Social Distancing Actions
PDF version on
(Mar 10, 2020)
(Mar 11, 2020)
This page last modified July 8, 2026.
