About Me

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Systems Engineering at City University of Hong Kong.

Previously, I obtained my Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University, M.S. from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, and B.E. from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University.

Openings

I am actively looking for Ph.D. students starting in Fall 2027. If your research interests are compatible with mine, please don’t hesitate to contact me with your CV and transcripts.

Contact: shutian.liu AT cityu DOT edu DOT hk

Research Interests

My research interests lie in game theory, optimization/control, risk analysis, and their applications in complex system modeling, misinformation, security, and public health..

Some of my recent interests include, but not limited to:

  1. Information design in games and partially observable systems;
  2. Risk-sensitive optimization and games;
  3. Systemic risks in financial and public health systems.

Publications

Please find the timely updated list on my Google Scholar Profile.

Book Chapters

  1. S. Liu. and Q. Zhu, “Cyber insurance for cyber resilience”, in Automated Cyber Resilience, JohnWiley & Sons, to appear.

  2. F. Fang, S. Liu, A. Basak, Q. Zhu, C. D. Kiekintveld, and C. A. Kamhoua, “Introduction to game theory”, in Game Theory and Machine Learning for Cyber Security, JohnWiley & Sons, pp. 21-46, 2021

Jounral Articles

  1. S. Liu and Q. Zhu, “Mitigating moral hazard in insurance contracts using risk preference design,” Operations Research Letters, 107322, 2025.

  2. S. Liu and Q. Zhu, “Stackelberg risk preference design”, Mathematical Programming 209 (1), 785-823, 2024.

  3. S. Liu, T. Li, and Q. Zhu, “Game-theoretic distributed empirical risk minimization with strategic network design”, IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks, vol. 9, pp. 542-556, 2023.

  4. S. Liu, Y. Zhao, and Q. Zhu, “Herd behaviors in epidemics: a dynamics-coupled evolutionary games approach”, Dynamic Games and Applications, 12(1), pp.183-213, 2022.

  5. S. Liu and Q. Zhu, “Robust and stochastic optimization with a hybrid coherent risk measure with an application to supervised learning”, IEEE Control Systems Letters, 5(3), pp.965-970, 2020.

Conference Papers

  1. S. Liu and Q. Zhu, “On the role of risk perceptions in cyber insurance contracts”, 2022 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security: Cyber Resilience Workshop, Austin, TX, USA, October 2022.

  2. S. Liu and Q. Zhu, “EPROACH: a population vaccination game for strategic information design to enable responsible COVID reopening”, in American Control Conference (ACC 2022), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, June, 2022.

  3. S. Liu, Y. Zhao, and Q. Zhu, “Understanding the interplay between herd behaviors and epidemic spreading using federated evolutionary games”, in American Control Conference (ACC 2022), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, June, 2022.

  4. G. Peng, T. Li, S. Liu, J. Chen, and Q. Zhu, “Locally-aware constrained games on networks”, in American Control Conference (ACC 2021), virtual, May, 2021.

Working Papers

  1. S. Liu and Q. Zhu, “Dynamic information manipulation game,” under major revision for Mathematics of Operations Research, 2024.

  2. S. Liu and Q. Zhu, “On the impact of gaslighting on partially observed stochastic control,” arXiv preprint, 2023, arXiv:2304.01134.