Rate My Professor Toby Li

Toby Jia-Jun Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, where he leads the SaNDwich Lab. He also serves as Director of the Human-Centered Responsible AI Lab in the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society and as a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Educational Initiatives. Li earned his Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021, advised by Brad A. Myers and working closely with Tom M. Mitchell. He received his B.S. with Distinction in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 2015, working with Brent Hecht in GroupLens Research.

Li's research operates at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, End-User Software Engineering, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing, employing human-centered methods to design, build, and study interactive systems that empower individuals to create, configure, and extend AI-powered computing systems. His recent work tackles societal challenges in the future of work via bottom-up human-AI collaboration to automate and augment individual tasks. Notable awards include the Google Research Scholar Award (2022), AnalytiXIN Faculty Fellowship (2022), Lucy Societal Impact Award (2024), CHI 2025 Best Paper Award for “Supporting Co-Adaptive Machine Teaching through Human Concept Learning and Cognitive Theories,” CSCW 2024 Best Paper Award for “From Awareness to Action: Exploring End-User Empowerment Interventions for Dark Patterns in UX,” UIST 2020 Best Paper Award for “Multi-Modal Repairs of Conversational Breakdowns in Task-Oriented Dialogs,” CHI 2021 Best Paper Honorable Mention for “Screen2Vec: Semantic Embedding of GUI Screens and GUI Components,” and IS-EUD 2017 Best Paper Award for “Programming IoT Devices by Demonstration Using Mobile Apps.” Key publications encompass “AutoDroid: LLM-powered Task Automation in Android” (2024), “StoryBuddy: A Human-AI Collaborative Chatbot for Parent-Child Interactive Storytelling with Flexible Parental Involvement” (2022), “Luminate: Structured Generation and Exploration of Design Space with Large Language Models for Human-AI Co-Creation” (2024), and “SUGILITE: Creating Multimodal Smartphone Automation by Demonstration” (2017). His scholarship has amassed nearly 5,000 citations on Google Scholar, influencing advancements in human-AI collaboration.