Short Bio

Dr. Hepeng Li will be joining the ECE department at the University of Maine, Orono, ME, 2024 Fall as the Robert N. Haskell Power Engineering Assistant Professor. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at Bradley University. He received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA, in 2023, supervised by Prof. Haibo He. From 2012 - 2019, he was an assistant research fellow at Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science, China.

Dr. Li serves as a Member of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Adaptive Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning (ADPRL) Technical Committee (2023-Present). He served as the Session Chair on Reinforcement Learning at the International Conference on Machine Learning 2022 (ICML'22). He also served as the Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS) in 2021.

Research Interests

My research interests include Renewable Energy, Next Generation Power Grid technologies, Intelligent Control, Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Agent Systems, and Cyber-Physical Systems.

• Power and Energy Systems: Renewable Energy, Microgrid/Distribution System Operation and Control, Electric Vehicles, etc.

• Intelligent Control: Safe/Deep Reinforcement Learning, Adaptive Control, Networked Control Systems

• Multi-Agent Systems: Game Theory, Distributed Optimization, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

• Cyber-Physical Systems: Real-Time Control, Autonomous Systems, Internet of Things (IoT) Security and Privacy

News:

• [May 2024]: I am delighted to share that our paper "Optimal Operation of Networked Microgrids With Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning" received the Best Paper Award at IEEE PES General Meeting Society General Meeting 2024 (PESGM24).

• [May 2024]:  I will be joining the Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the University of Maine (UMaine) as an Assistant Professor holding the Robert N. Haskell Power Engineering Professorship.

• [March 2024]: Our paper "Optimal Operation of Networked Microgrids With Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning" was accepted by IEEE PES General Meeting Society General Meeting 2024 (PESGM24).

• [October 2023]: I am excited to share that I have been granted the Faculty Scholarship Award, coming with $6000 in funding!

• [October 2023]: I have been rewarded the Caterpillar Fellowship, which includes a prize of $5000. Many thanks to Caterpillar for their generous support!

• [August 2023]:  Dr. Hepeng Li joined the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at The Bradley University as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor.

• [August 2023]:  Hepeng Li received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rhode Island!

• [April 2023]:  Our paper "An Improved Trust-Region Method for Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning" was accepted for presentation at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2023).

• [April 2023]:  Our paper "Multi-Agent Trust Region Policy Optimization" was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS).