Director

Yong Li, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Software, and School of Artificial Intelligence, Southeast University. He is a Croucher Scholar, a Jiangsu Province “Double Innovation” Doctor, and has been selected for the Ministry of Education’s Overseas Postdoctoral Talent Introduction Program (a national-level talent introduction program). His research mainly focuses on multimodal large models, computer vision, and affective computing, with a commitment to promoting the application of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies in real-world scenarios such as embodied intelligent robots, smart healthcare, and rehabilitation assessment. He has published numerous academic papers as the first or corresponding author in international journals and conferences such as IEEE TPAMI, TIP, TAC, CVPR, ICCV, and NeurIPS. Some of his conference papers have been selected for oral presentation or highlighted, and he has given multiple presentations at domestic and international academic conferences.
He obtained his Ph.D. from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2020, under the supervision of Professor Shiguang Shan, the assistant director of the Institute of Computing Technology, an IEEE Fellow, and the director of the Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing. His doctoral dissertation, “Research on Facial Expression Analysis Methods in Open Scenarios,” was selected as an outstanding doctoral dissertation by the Chinese Society of Image and Graphics (only 10 each year nationwide). From 2022 to 2024, studied and worked at City University of Hong Kong (under the supervision of Prof. Antoni Bert Chan) and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (under the supervision of Prof. Cuntai Guan), where he carried out the project “Precise Evaluation of the Effect of Rehabilitation Training Paradigms for Early Alzheimer’s Patients.” The related achievements have been applied in the scenarios of smart elderly care and rehabilitation assessment and received high praise. In terms of industrial cooperation, the self-supervised facial expression action unit analysis technology he led the research on has been applied in Huawei’s digital human project, and the 3D facial reconstruction model has been implemented in Jiangsu Xiaoshi Technology Co., Ltd. At the same time, he has maintained long-term cooperation with leading domestic robot enterprises and Ant Group, leading research projects on emotional companion robots and smart healthcare, promoting the integrated research of “algorithm – model – application.”
In terms of academic services, he serves as an Associate Editor for the SCI Zone 1 journal Pattern Recognition and is the Deputy Secretary-General of the Excellent Doctor Club of the Chinese Society of Image and Graphics. He has long organized the Excellent Doctor Forum and special academic discussions, actively serving the academic community. His research group regularly invites teachers, postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students from top universities at home and abroad to conduct academic and technical exchanges, broadening academic horizons and promoting international cooperation.