Hao Li

Hao Li served as Associate Professor of Computer Science with tenure at the University of Southern California (USC) from May 2019 to June 2020. Prior to this promotion, he was Assistant Professor holding the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair in the USC Department of Computer Science from August 2013 to May 2019. He also directed the Vision and Graphics Lab at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies from August 2016 to June 2020. Before joining USC, Li was a research lead at Industrial Light & Magic / Lucasfilm, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and Princeton University, and a visiting professor at Weta Digital. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in November 2010, with a thesis on "Animation Reconstruction of Deformable Surfaces" advised by Prof. M. Pauly. He received his M.Sc. in Computer Science from Universität Karlsruhe (TH) in January 2006.

Li's research specializations in Computer Science center on computer graphics and computer vision, with a focus on developing novel geometry processing, data-driven, and deep learning algorithms for digitizing humans, real-time facial performance capture, hair digitization, dynamic full body capture, and applications in immersive communication and telepresence in virtual worlds. Key publications include "PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization" (ICCV 2019), "Real-Time Facial Segmentation and Performance Capture from RGB Input" (ECCV 2016), "Facial Performance Sensing Head-Mounted Display" (ACM SIGGRAPH 2015), "Single-View Hair Modeling Using a Hairstyle Database" (ACM SIGGRAPH 2015), "Unconstrained Realtime Facial Performance Capture" (CVPR 2015), "Face/Off: Live Facial Puppetry" (SCA 2009, Best Paper Award), and "Global Correspondence Optimization for Non-Rigid Registration of Depth Scans" (SGP 2008). Major awards and honors encompass the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2018), DARPA ISAT Study Group Member (2019), USC Stevens Commercialization Award (2017), Microsoft Academic Top 10 Leaderboard in Computer Graphics (rank #1, 2016), World Technology Award Fellow (2015), Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair (2015), Google Faculty Research Award (2015), and MIT Technology Review TR35 innovator under 35 (2013). At USC, he taught courses including CSCI 621: Digital Geometry Processing and CSCI 420: Computer Graphics, and served on committees such as PhD Admissions, Faculty Search, and as chair of the SCA IMGD / CSGames Faculty Joint Appointment Committee.

Professional Email: hao.li@usc.edu