Biography
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
Victor O.K. Li 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 Emeritus Professor, Chair Professor of Information Engineering (Sep 1997 – June 2025), and Cheng Yu-Tung Professor in Sustainable Development (March 2017 – June 2023). He served as Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2012 to 2018, and Assoc. Dean of Engineering at HKU from 2007 to 2012. He was the first Managing Director of HKU Versitech Ltd. (http://www.versitech.hku.hk/), the technology transfer and commercial arm of HKU, from 1997 to 2004, and has been a director since 2004. He is an independent non-executive director 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 Prof. Jacqueline CK Lam, he established the HKU AI to Advance Well-being and Society Research Lab (https://ece.hku.hk/hku-ai-wise/) and three collaborative research platforms with Cambridge University, namely, HKU-Cambridge Clean Energy and Environment Research Platform (https://ece.hku.hk/CEERP/), HKU-Cambridge AI to Advance Well-being and Society Research Platform (https://ece.hku.hk/ai-wise/index.html), and HKU-Cambridge AI for Neuro-disease 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 models for personalized and smart air pollution monitoring and health management. More recently, the team was awarded the 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 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 of Fano (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 Cambridge University Press Data and Policy, 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. He is Top 1% Most Cited Scholar, Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024. He is a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering, the IEEE, and the HKIE.
Related Links
Selected Publications
- Li, V.O.K.*, Han, Y., Kaistha, T., Zhang, Q., Downey, J., Gozes, I., and Lam, J.C.K.*, “DeepDrug as an expert-led AI-driven drug-repurposing methodology for selecting the lead combination of drugs for Alzheimer’s disease,” Nature Scientific Reports, 15, 2093 (2025).
- Li, V.O.K.*, Lam, J.C.K.*, and Han, Y., “Unravelling causal genetic biomarkers of Alzheimer’s Disease via neuron to gene-token backtracking in neural architecture: A groundbreaking Reverse-Gene-Finder approach,” Proc. 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), Philadelphia, USA, Feb 2025.
- Mo, T., Lam, J.C.K.*, Li, V.O.K.*, and Cheung, L.Y.L., “DECT: Harnessing LLM-assisted fine-grained linguistic knowledge and label-switched and label-preserved data generation for diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease,” Proc. AAAI-25, Philadelphia, USA, Feb 2025.
- Levert-Levitt, E., Shapira, G., Sragovich, S., Shomron, N., Lam, J.C.K., Li, V.O.K., Heimesaat, M., Bereswill, S., Ben Yehuda, A., Sagi-Schwartz, A., and Solomon, Z., Gozes, I., “Oral microbiota signatures in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) veterans,” Nature Molecular Psychiatry, Vol. 27, pp. 4590–4598, July 2022.
- Downey, J.*, Li, V.O.K*, Lam, J.C.K.*, Gozes, I., “Somatic mutations and Alzheimer’s dementia,” Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, vol. 90, no. 2, pp. 475-493, 2022.
- Gu, J., Lu, Z., Li, H., and Li, V.O.K., “Incorporating copying mechanism in sequence-to-sequence learning,” Proc. ACL, Berlin, Germany, Aug 2016.
- 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.
- Lee, K.C. and Li, V.O.K., “A wavelength-convertible optical network,” IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology, Volume 11, No. 5, May 1993, pp. 962-970.
- Hou, T.C. and Li, V.O.K., “Transmission range control in multihop packet radio networks,” IEEE Trans. on Communications, Vol. COM-34, No. 1, January 1986, pp. 38-44.