Rate My Professor Justin Li

Justin Li is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Occidental College, where he serves as Chair of the Computer Science department. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science, cum laude, from Northwestern University in 2009, accompanied by a Certificate in Engineering Design, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 2016. Li began his tenure-track career at Occidental College as Assistant Professor in 2015 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2021. Prior positions include Graduate Student Research Assistant at the University of Michigan from 2009 to 2015 and Engineering Teaching Consultant there from 2012 to 2014, as well as teaching roles at Northwestern University and the Center for Talented Youth.

Li's research specializes in strategic knowledge search processes in humans and AI, including information seeking behavior, memory mechanisms within agent architectures, inference over semantic networks, and reinforcement learning applications to memory utilization. He examines how knowledge is retrieved at the appropriate time. Representative publications encompass journal works like "Multifaceted Equity: Critiquing a First-Year Writing Assessment through Curricular, Performance, and Reliability Lenses" with Julie Prebel (Journal of Writing Assessment, 2024), "Explorable Web Apps to Teach AI to Non-Majors" (The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 34(4), 2019), and "Towards Modeling False Memory with Computational Knowledge Bases" with Emma Kohanyi (Topics in Cognitive Science, 9(1), 2017). Key conference papers include "Exploring Integrated Co-occurrence and Semantic Mechanisms for Long Term Memory Retrieval" with Lily Gebhart (Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, 2025), "Towards a Computational Model of a Dynamic Feeling of Knowing" (19th ICCM, 2022), "Integrating Declarative Long-Term Memory Retrievals into Reinforcement Learning" (8th Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, 2020), and "Spontaneous Retrieval from Long-Term Memory in a Cognitive Architecture" with John E. Laird (29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2015). Li has been honored with the Linda and Tod White Teaching Prize Finalist (Occidental College, 2024) and the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award (University of Michigan EECS Department, 2009). As principal or co-principal investigator, he obtained grants such as the $493,878 NSF Major Research Instrumentation award for a high-performance computing cluster (2019), $1,000,000 NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (2020), and $535,000 HHMI Inclusive Excellence 3 Initiative (2022).