Rate My Professor Toby Li

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.