Zhizhong Li (?)
Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
Email: lizhitwo [arte] protonmail [doge] com
Office: WFH
I recently joined Amazon’s Rekognition team in July 2020 to work on Custom Labels. I graduated from my Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (UIUC) in May 2020. During my Ph.D. years, I worked with Prof. Derek Hoiem on computer vision and machine learning. My Ph.D. defense recording, thanks to the same pandemic, is here [GDrive] [OneDrive][slides]. I am working on topics related to transfer learning and continual learning in computer vision.
My résumé can be found here [Résumé] (updated Sep. 2020).
Research Interests
Ultimately, my research interest lies in Computer Vision, especially its intersection with Machine Learning.
For machine learning models such as a deep neural network, it is not uncommon to train separate models for each vision task ad-hoc. In contrast, the human brain is simultaneously able to perform a multitude of vision tasks. New categories can be learned seamlessly with the old ones, and knowledge from all sources helps to gain insight into one another. Constructing a learning algorithm that gradually grows its visual knowledge and adapts to new circumstances is an interesting research area, as well as a grand vision in AI agent design.
Throughout my Ph.D. years, I have worked on topics that remove roadblocks for achieving this goal. Privacy or legal concerns may prevent past data from being retained, and limit in knowledge regarding the new task and the cost of obtaining data can degrade performance. Much of my research has involved mitigating these missing aspects of data that often occur in the wild.
Pre-Ph.D. Experience
Before coming to UIUC, I completed an MS in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I am supervised by Daniel Huber. My research focused on Infrastructure Component Recognition using Cross-domain Learning to account for dataset shift, within the Aerial Robotic Infrastructure Analyst (ARIA) project. I obtained my bachelor’s degree from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. My undergraduate dissertation is on Stick Figure Body Parts Recognition with Prof. Changshui Zhang. I also accomplished a project involving a 6 DoF robot under Prof. Zongying Shi’s guidance.
* My first name can be pronunced “Gee-Jong” and rhymes with oolong. Most people just call me “Zee”. My Chinese name is 李之仲.
* Not to be confused with Zhizhong Li (李治中) from CUHK, Zhizhong Li (李志忠) from THU, or Zhizhong Li from MSKCC.
