Biography
Hao Li is Associate Professor at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Director of the MBZUAI Metaverse Center, as well as CEO and Co-Founder of Pinscreen. He was previously a Distinguished Fellow 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. He 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. He was named top 35 innovator under 35 by MIT Technology Review in 2013 and was also awarded the Google Faculty Award, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant, as well as the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair. He won the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award in 2018 and was named named to the DARPA ISAT Study Group in 2019. In 2020, he won the ACM SIGGRAPH Real-Time Live! “Best in Show” award. 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, Hao was featured in the first season of Amazon's documentary re:MARS Luminaries. Hao obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich and his MSc at the University of Karlsruhe (TH).