Tianshi Li

(she/her)

Assistant Professor

  • Human–computer interaction
  • Mobile apps
  • Security and privacy
  • PhD in Human–computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University
  • BS in Computer Science, Peking University — China

Tianshi Li is an assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston. 

After obtaining her doctorate in human–computer interaction, Li joined UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral scholar, where she continued her research on usable privacy and security in mobile apps and explored novel privacy issues in human–LLM interactions. Li also worked at Google, where she applied her techniques to products that provide privacy compliance support to companies. Specifically, she developed a series of integrated development environment plugins to assist developers in building mobile apps with native privacy support by adding privacy annotations to their source code. Li is particularly interested in enabling developers who don’t specialize in privacy, security, accessibility, and fairness to create apps that still meet privacy, security, accessibility, and fairness requirements. She has published work at the CHI, IMWUT/UbiComp, CSCW, and PETS conferences, as well as the TOCHI journal, and has earned several “best paper” honors. 

Li was drawn to Khoury College by the opportunity to pursue rich collaborative research in cybersecurity, privacy, and HCI. She is dedicated to developing practical techniques in that leverage technological advancements to address pressing societal issues. She also hopes to direct her own lab. 

When she isn’t working, Li enjoys playing board games and the guitar.