V.O.K. Li

SB, SM, EE, ScD MIT; FHKEng, FIEEE, FIAE, FHKIE
Email:
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Tel.: 3917 8425
Office: CB 601D

Victor O.K. Li, BBS

Chair of Information Engineering
Cheng Yu-Tung Professorship in Sustainable development

Research Interests

Development and applications of artificial intelligence technologies to important societal problems, including clean energy and environment, medicine and health, and smart city.
S.B., Electrical Engg. and Computer Science, MIT, 1977
S.M., Electrical Engg. and Computer Science, MIT, 1979
EE, Electrical Engg. and Computer Science, MIT, 1980
Sc.D., Electrical Engg. and Computer Science, MIT, 1981
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1380-9445
Victor O.K. Li was born and raised in Hong Kong. He joined the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, California, USA in February 1981, and became Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the USC Communication Sciences Institute.? Since September 1997 he has been with the University of Hong Kong (HKU), Hong Kong, where he is Chair of Information Engineering, and Cheng Yu-Tung Professor in Sustainable Development. He served as Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering from 2012 to 2018,? and Assoc. Dean of Engineering at HKU from 2007 to 2012. He was the first Managing Director of Versitech Ltd. (http://www.versitech.hku.hk/), the technology transfer and commercial arm of HKU, and is now serving on the board of Sunevison Holdings Ltd, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. He served as the Convenor of the Strategic Research Theme of Information Technology at HKU, and as Co-Director of the Area of Excellence in Information Technology funded by the Hong Kong government.? He is the Chair of the Executive Committee, HKU Initiative on Clean Energy and Environment, an interdisciplinary research project with researchers from Engineering, Science, Architecture, and Social Science.? With colleague Dr. Jacqueline CK Lam, he established the HKU-Cambridge Clean Energy and Environment Research Platform, and the HKU-Cambridge AI to Advance Well-being and Society Research Platform.? The research focus is the development of AI technologies to solve important societal problems, or AI for Social Good. In Jan 2018, the team co-led by Dr. Jacqueline CK Lam and Prof. Victor OK Li was awarded a USD 6.3M RGC Theme-based Research Project to develop deep learning techniques for personalized and smart air pollution monitoring and health management.? More recently, the team was awarded the 2021 US National Academy of Medicine Healthy Longevity Catalyst Award. The co-author of seven US patents licensed for commercial exploitation, he is very active in technology transfer.? He is the Chairman of the Board and Co-Founder, with his PhD student Dr. Miles Wen, of Fano Labs (www.fano.ai), an award-winning AI Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing Company. Sought by government, industry, and academic organizations, he has lectured and consulted extensively around the world. ?Prof. Li chaired the Computer Communications Technical Committee of the IEEE Communications Society 1987-1989, and the Los Angeles Chapter of the IEEE Information Theory Group 1983-1985.? He co-founded the International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (IC3N), and chaired its Steering Committee 1992-1997. He also chaired various international workshops and conferences, including IEEE INFOCOM 2004 and IEEE PIMRC 2015. Prof. Li served as an editor of IEEE Network, IEEE JSAC Wireless Communications Series, ACM/Springer Wireless Networks, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, Telecommunication Systems, and Springer Networking Science.? He also guest edited special issues of Elsevier Environmental Science and Policy, IEEE JSAC, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, and KICS/IEEE Journal of Communications and Networking.? Prof. Li has been appointed to the Central Policy Unit and to the Hong Kong Information Infrastructure Advisory Committee by the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR).? He has also served on various other HKSAR advisory committees, including the Innovation and Technology Fund (Electronics) Vetting Committee, the Small Entrepreneur Research Assistance Programme Committee, the Engineering Panel of the Research Grants Council, and the Task Force for the Hong Kong Academic and Research Network (HARNET) Development Fund of the University Grants Committee.? He was a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, The University of Cambridge, Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas, at the University of California at San Diego, at the University of London, at the National Science Council of Taiwan, and at the California Polytechnic Institute. Prof. Li has also delivered keynote speeches at many international conferences. He has received numerous awards, including the PRC Ministry of Education Changjiang Chair Professorship at Tsinghua University, the UK Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Visiting Fellowship in Communications, the Outstanding Researcher Award of HKU, the Outstanding Research Student Supervisor Award of HKU, the Croucher Foundation Senior Research Fellowship, and the Bronze Bauhinia Star, Government of HKSAR, China.? He is a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences, the IEEE, the HKIE, and the IAE.
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Selected Publications

Han, Y., Lam, J.C.K., Li, V.O.K, Crowcroft, J., Fu, J., Downey, J., Gozes, I., Zhang, Q., Wang, S., and Gilani, Z., “Outdoor PM2.5 concentration and rate of Change in COVID-19 infection in provincial capital cities in China,” accepted for publication, Nature Scientific Reports.
Yu, Y.W., Li, V.O.K., and Lam, J.C.K., “Hierarchical recovery of missing air pollution data via Improved Long-short Term Context Encoder Network,” accepted for publication, IEEE Trans. on Big Data.
Fan, Y., Lam, J.C.K., and Li, V.O.K., “Demographic effects on facial emotion expression: An interdisciplinary investigation of the facial action units of happiness,” accepted for publication, Nature Scientific Reports.
Li, V.O.K, Lam, J.C.K., Cui, J., “AI for Social Good: AI and Big Data Approaches for Environmental Decision-making,” accepted for publication, Elsevier Environmental Science and Policy.
Li, V.O.K, Lam, J.C.K., Han, Y., and Chow, K., “A big data and artificial intelligence framework for smart and personalized air pollution monitoring and health management in Hong Kong,” accepted for publication, Elsevier Environmental Science and Policy.
Li, V.O.K, Lam, J.C.K., Han, Y., Cheung, L.Y.L., Downey, J., Kaistha, T., and Gozes, I., “Editorial: Designing a protocol adopting an Artificial Intelligence (AI)–driven approach for early diagnosis of Late?Onset Alzheimer’s Disease,” Journal of Molecular Neuroscience, June 9 2021 (Online).
Han, Y., Li, V.O.K, Lam, J.C.K., and Pollitt, M., “How blue is the sky? Estimating the air quality data in Beijing during the Blue Sky Day Period (2008-2012) by the Bayesian Multi-Task LSTM approach,” Elsevier Environmental Science and Policy, Vol. 116, Feb 2021, pp. 69 -77.
Lam, J.C.K., Li, V.O.K., Han, Y., Zhang, Q., Lu, Z., and Gilani, Z., “In search of bluer skies: Would people move to places of better air qualities?” Elsevier Environmental Science and Policy, Vol. 117, Mar 2021, pp. 8 – 15.
Sragovich, S., Gershovits, M., Lam, J.C.K., Li, V.O.K, and Gozes, I., “Putative blood somatic mutations in PTSD-symptomatic soldiers: High impact of cytoskeletal and inflammatory proteins,” Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Vol. 79, 2021, pp. 1723-1734.
Wang, A., Lam, J.C.K., Song, S., Li, V.O.K., and Guo, P., “Can smart energy information interventions help householders save electricity? A SVR machine learning approach,” Elsevier Environmental Science and Policy, Vol. 112, Oct 2020, pp. 381 – 393.
Bai, R., Lam, J.C.K., Li, V.O.K., “Siamese-like Convolutional Neural Network for fine-grained income estimation of developed economies,” IEEE Access, Vol. 8, Aug 2020, pp. 162533-162547.
Song, S., Lam, J.C.K., Han, Y., and Li, V.O.K, “ResNet-LSTM for real-time PM₅ and PM₁₀ estimation using sequential smartphone images,” IEEE Access, Vol. 8, Dec 2020, pp. 220069-220082.
Han, Y., Lam, J.C.K., Li, V.O.K and Reiner, D., “A Bayesian LSTM Model to evaluate the effects of air pollution control regulations in Beijing, China,” Elsevier Environmental Science and Policy, Vol. 115, Jan 2021, pp. 26 – 34.
Han, Y., Lam, J.C.K., Li, V.O.K and Zhang, Q., “A domain-specific Bayesian Deep-Learning approach for air pollution forecast,” accepted for publication, IEEE Trans. on Big Data.
Fan, Y., Li, V.O.K., Lam, J.C.K., “Facial emotion recognition with deeply-supervised attention network,” accepted for publication, IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing.
Lam, J.C.K., Bai, R., Li, V.O.K., Leong, J., Han, Y., and Maji, K.J., “Household wealth proxies for socio-economic inequality policy studies in China,” accepted for publication, Data and Policy, Cambridge University Press.
Mao, Y., Clerckx, B., and Li, V.O.K., “Rate-splitting for multi-antenna non-orthogonal unicast and multicast transmission: Spectral and energy efficiency analysis,” IEEE Trans. on Communications, Vol. 67, No. 12, Dec 2019, pp. 8754-8770.
Song, B., and Li, V.O.K., “A revisit of infinite population models for evolutionary algorithms on continuous optimization problems,” MIT Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 55-85. (Available online Feb 2019.)
Gu, J., Lu, Z., Li, H., and Li, V.O.K., “Incorporating copying mechanism in sequence-to-sequence learning,” Proc. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Berlin, Germany, Aug 2016.
Yu, J.J.Q. and Li, V.O.K., “A Social Spider Algorithm for solving the non-convex Economic Load Dispatch Problem,” Elsevier Neurocomputing, Vol. 171, pp. 955 – 965, Jan. 2016.
Niu, G., Fan, X., Li, V.O.K., Long, Y., and Xu, K., “Multi-source-driven asynchronous diffusion model for video-sharing in online social networks,” IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Vol. 16, No. 7, Nov 2014, pp. 2025 – 2037.
Chim, T.W., Yiu, S.M., Li, V.O.K., Hui, L.C.K., and Zhong, J., “PRGA: Privacy-preserving recording & gateway-assisted authentication of power usage information for smart grid,” IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Vol. 12, Issue 1, Jan 2015, pp. 85 – 97.
Fan, X., Li, V.O.K., and Xu, K., “Fairness analysis of routing in opportunistic mobile networks,” IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, Vol. 63, No. 3, Mar 2014, pp. 1282 – 1295. (Conference version received the Best Paper Award, Mobile Applications and Services Track, IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, Spring 2011, Budapest, Hungary, May 2011.)
Chim, T.W., Yiu, S.M., Hui, L.C.K., and Li, V.O.K., “VSPN: VANET-based secure and privacy-preserving navigation,” IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 63, No. 2, Feb 2014, pp. 510 – 524.
X. Fan, G. Niu, and V. O. K. Li, “An analytical model for the propagation of social influence,” in Proceedings of IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Nov. 2013. (Best Paper Award of the Conference.)
Song, B. and Li, V.O.K., “A hybridization between memetic algorithm and semidefinite relaxation for the Max-Cut Problem,” Proc. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, July 2012. (Best Paper Award, Evolutionary Combinatorial Optimization and Metaheuristics Track.)
Hong, J. and Li, V.O.K., “The effect of information on scheduling performance in multi-hop wireless networks,” IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Vol. 9, No. 10, Oct 2010, pp. 3238 – 3246.
Geng, Y. and Li, V.O.K., “A framework to analyze network performance based on information quality,” Proc. IEEE International Conference on Communications, Cape Town, South Africa, May 2010. (Best Paper Award, Next Generation Networking and Internet Symposium.)
Lam, A.Y.S. and Li, V.O.K., “Chemical-reaction-inspired metaheuristic for optimization,” IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 14, No. 3, June 2010, pp. 381-399.
Wang, W., Liew, S.C., Li, V.O.K., “Solutions to performance problems in VoIP over 802.11 wireless LANs,” IEEE Trans. on Vehicular Technology, Vol. 54, No. 1, Jan 2005, pp. 366 – 384.
Yuan, X. C., Li, V.O.K., Li, C.Y., Wai, P. K. A., “A novel self-routing address scheme for all-optical packet switched networks with arbitrary topology,” IEEE/OSA Journal of? Lightwave Technology, Vol. 21, No. 2, Feb 2003, pp. 329 – 339.
Li, V.O.K. and Zhang, Z.C., “Internet multicast routing and transport control protocols,” Proc. of the IEEE, Vol. 90, No. 3, March 2002, pp. 360 – 391.
Cao, Y. and Li, V.O.K., “Scheduling algorithms for broadband wireless networks,” Proc. of the IEEE, Vol. 89, No. 1, January 2001, pp. 76 – 87.
M.Z. Win, X. Qiu, R.A. Scholtz and V.O.K. Li, “ATM Based Time-Hopping Spread-Spectrum Multiple-Access Network for Multimedia PCS,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Comm., Vol. 17, No. 5, May 1999, pp. 824 – 836. (Conference version received the Best Student Paper Award of 4th Annual NetWorld+Interop Engineer Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada, May 1997.)
J. Ju and V.O.K. Li, “An optimal topology-transparent scheduling method in multihop packet radio networks,” IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking, Vol. 6, No. 3, June 1998, pp. 298 – 306.
Ngo, C.Y. and Li, V.O.K., “Fixed channel assignment in cellular radio networks using a modified genetic algorithm,” IEEE Trans. on Vehicular Technology, Vol. 47, No. 1, February 1998, pp. 163 – 172.
Abutaleb, A. and Li, V.O.K., “Paging strategy optimization in Personal Communication System,” ACM/Baltzer Wireless Networks, Vol. 3, No. 3, July 1997, pp. 195 – 204.
W.J. Liao and V.O.K. Li, “The Split and Merge (SAM) Protocol for Interactive Video-on Demand Systems,” IEEE Multimedia, Vol. 4, No. 4, Oct-Dec 1997, pp. 51 – 62. (Won the Best Research Paper Award, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, 1997. United States Patent No. US 6,543,053 B1, April 1 2003.)
V.O.K. Li and W.J. Liao, “Distributed multimedia systems,” Proc. of the IEEE, Vol. 85, No. 7, July 1997, pp. 1063 – 1108.
Li, V.O.K., Liao, W.J., Qiu, X.X., and Wong, E., “Performance model of interactive video-on-demand systems,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Comm., Volume 14, No. 6, August 1996, pp. 1099 – 1109.
Li, V.O.K. Li and Qiu, X.X., “Personal Communication Systems (PCS),” Proc. of the IEEE, Volume 83, No. 9, pp. 1210 – 1243, September 1995.
K.C. Lee and V.O.K. Li, “A wavelength-convertible optical network,” IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology, Volume 11, No. 5, May 1993, pp. 962-970.
Wu, C.S. and Li, V.O.K., “Receiver-initiated busy-tone multiple access in packet radio networks,” ACM Computer Communication Review, Vol. 17, No. 5, 1987, pp. 336-342.
T.C. Hou and V.O.K. Li, “Transmission range control in multihop packet radio networks,” IEEE Trans. on Communications, Vol. COM-34, No. 1, January 1986, pp. 38-44. (Invited Distinguished Lecture, IEEE Symposium on Ad Hoc Mobile Wireless Networks, held in conjunction with IEEE GLOBECOM 2001, San Antonio, Texas, USA, November 2001.)
Li, V.O.K., and Silvester, J.A., “Performance analysis of networks with unreliable components,” IEEE Trans. on Communications, Vol. COM-32, No. 10, Oct. 1984, pp. 1105-1110.
Larson, R.C. and Li, V.O.K., “Finding minimum rectilinear distance paths in the presence of barriers,” Networks, Vol. 11 (1981), pp. 285-304.
Download the paper “Network of Queues: Myth and Reality“.
Download the paper “Double Random Element: Definition, Property, and Example“.

Last updated: November 8th, 2021