Hao Li

Li is CEO and co-founder of Pinscreen, a startup that builds cutting edge AI-driven virtual avatar technologies, as well as associate professor at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). He was previously a Distinguished Fellow of the Computer Vision Group at UC Berkeley and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where he was also director of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

Li works at the intersection between computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning, with focus on virtual humans, reality capture, and AI synthesis. His goal is to enable new AI and immersive technologies that can make the concept of the metaverse possible, and enhance our lives with digital experiences that are otherwise not possible in the physical world. Examples include virtual teleportation and immersive communication using 3D avatars, fully autonomous AI agents that are indistinguishable from a real person, hyper realistic simulated worlds that can be generated and authored by anyone, as well as augmented reality technologies that can enhance our senses and enrich our experiences.

With the rapid advancement of AI-driven content creation technologies, Hao is committed to prioritizing our safety and wellbeing by developing tools to prevent new forms of cyberthreats such as deepfakes used for disinformation campaigns or harassment. Li was also a visiting professor at Weta Digital, a research lead at Industrial Light & Magic / Lucasfilm, and a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia and Princeton universities. Hao was speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020 and exhibited at SXSW in 2022. His startup, Pinscreen, was recipient of the Epic Megagrants in 2021, and in 2022, Li was featured in the first season of Amazon's documentary re:MARS Luminaries.

• Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Diploma (M.Sc.) in computer science from Universität Karlsruhe, Germany

• Epic MegaGrants Recipient, 2021
• ACM SIGGRAPH 2020 Real-Time Live! “Best in Show” Award, 2020
• DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group Member, 2019
• Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, 2018
• USC Stevens Commercialization Award, 2017
• Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair, 2015
• Okawa Foundation Research Grant, 2015
• Google Faculty Research Award, 2015
• MIT TR35: World’s top 35 Innovator Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, 2013
• Swiss National Science Foundation Fellowship, 2011
• ACM Symposium on Computer Animation Best Paper Award, 2009

Li’s research involves the development of novel deep learning, data-driven, and geometry processing algorithms. He is known for his seminal work in avatar creation, facial animation, hair digitization, dynamic shape processing, as well as his recent efforts in AI media synthesis and deepfake detection.

• Normalized avatar synthesis using stylegan and perceptual refinement. Huiwen Luo, Liwen Hu, Koki Nagano, Zejian Wang, Han-Wei Kung, Qingguo Xu, Lingyu Wei, Hao Li. Proceedings of the 34th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern 2021, 06/2021 – CVPR 2021
• Monocular real-time volumetric performance capture. Ruilong Li, Yuliang Xiu, Shunsuke Saito, Zeng Huang, Kyle Olszewski, Hao Li. Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Computer Vision 2020, 08/2020 – ECCV 2020
• Learning to infer implicit surfaces without 3D supervision. Shichen Liu, Shunsuke Saito, Weikai Chen, Hao Li. Proceedings of the 33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2019, 12/2019 – NeurIPS 2019
• Softrasterizer: differentiable rendering for image-based 3D reasoning. Shichen Liu, Tianye Li, Weikai Chen, Hao Li. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision 2019, 10/2019 – ICCV 2019 (Oral Presentation)
• PIFU: Pixel-aligned function for high-resolution clothed human digitization. Shunsuke Saito, Zeng Huang, Ryota Natsume, Shigeo Morishima, Angjoo Kanazawa, Hao Li. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision 2019, 10/2019 – ICCV 2019
• Virtual human creator. Lingyu Wei, McLean Goldwhite, Zejian Wang, Huiwen Luo, Liwen Hu, Andy Spielberg, Brandon White, Katherine Lee, Aviral Agarwal, Anda Deng, Yen-Chun Chen, Jack Howard, Yuki Ikegami, Yudai Tamamura, Philip Scott, Kazuma Takahashi, Hao Li. SXSW 2022 Creative Industries Expo, Austin, 03/2022 – SXSW 2022