Ken (Tongli) Su

Ph.D. Student · Emory University

Ken (Tongli) Su

LLM Agents · Alignment · AI Safety

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Emory University. My goal is to turn advances in AI into greater human agency: helping people accomplish complex goals while retaining meaningful control. My research centers on LLM agents, alignment, and AI interpretability and safety, with a particular interest in multi-agent collaboration and theory of mind. I explore how agents can understand their environments, reason about their collaborators’ beliefs and intentions, and work together effectively. I am especially interested in agents that adapt to people’s values and preferences and recognize when to act autonomously or seek human input. Alongside these capabilities, I study how to evaluate and explain agent behavior, and uncover risks that emerge through interactions among agents.

Before my Ph.D., I spent two years building and deploying LLM and RAG systems in industry, including AI copilots and decision-support systems. I hold an M.S. in Data Science from Columbia University and a B.A. in Computer Science & Economics from Emory University.

Always happy to talk about LLM agents, alignment, or AI safety — reach out any time.

Research Interests

LLM Agents & Collaboration

How can agents understand their environments and collaborators well enough to plan and work together reliably?

Alignment & Human Agency

How should agents adapt to individual goals and preferences, and decide when human involvement is most valuable?

Interpretability & Safety

How can we explain and safeguard agent behavior, including risks that emerge through shared memory and communication?

News

Publications & Preprints

A Review of Multimodal Pretraining Strategies for Physiological Wearable Sensor Foundation Models

Tongli Su, Nicki Barari, Nasim Katebi

Under review, 2026

Reviews 22 studies of multimodal pretraining for wearable sensor foundation models, organizing five learning paradigms and identifying challenges in personalization, robustness, and generalization.

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science
Emory University
Department of Computer Science
Aug 2025 – Dec 2028 (expected)
M.S. in Data Science
Columbia University
Dec 2023 New York, NY
B.A. in Computer Science & B.A. in Economics
Emory University
Dual major
May 2022 Atlanta, GA

Experience

Research Intern
Causal Dynamics Lab
Research on coding agents and code world models.
Jul 2026 – Aug 2026
Data Scientist, GenAI
DuPont Specialty Products
LLM model fine-tuning and deployment for sales lead auto discovery and recommendation; development of internal sales co-pilot.
Jul 2024 – Aug 2025 New York, NY

Academic Service