PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

C. Karen Liu

Also known as Karen Liu

C. Karen Liu is a Stanford computer science professor whose work connects human movement in animation with AI control of robots. She earned her doctorate at the University of Washington in 2005 and held faculty posts at the University of Southern California and Georgia Tech before moving to Stanford. With collaborators, she coauthored EDGE, a model for generating editable dances from music, in 2023 and introduced the ToddlerBot humanoid platform in 2025. In 2026, she and her student Zhen Wu received two ICRA paper awards for OmniRetarget.

Works
286
Citations
7,834
h-index
51

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 27 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1999–2005

    Computer science degrees

    She earns a computer science bachelor's degree at National Taiwan University in 1999, a master's at the University of Washington in 2001, and a doctorate there in 2005. Her doctoral work is with Zoran Popović in the Allen School's Graphics & Imaging Laboratory (GRAIL).

  2. August 2007

    Joining Georgia Tech

    After an assistant professorship at the University of Southern California, she joins Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing as an assistant professor in August 2007.

  3. 2012

    A SIGGRAPH researcher award

    She receives the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award in 2012 for her contributions to computer animation, particularly the optimization and control of human motion.

  4. 2018

    The DART toolkit

    In 2018, she coauthors “DART: Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit” with Jeongseok Lee and colleagues in the Journal of Open Source Software.

  5. 2019

    SIGGRAPH Asia papers chair

    In 2019, she serves as technical papers chair for SIGGRAPH Asia.

  6. 2023

    EDGE generates editable dances

    She coauthors “EDGE: Editable Dance Generation From Music” with Jonathan Tseng and Rodrigo Castellon at CVPR in 2023. EDGE combines a transformer-based diffusion model with the Jukebox music feature extractor to generate dances that users can edit.

  7. 2024

    An alumni impact award

    In 2024, she receives the University of Washington Allen School Alumni Impact Award.

  8. 2025

    The ToddlerBot humanoid platform

    She coauthors “ToddlerBot: Open-Source ML-Compatible Humanoid Platform for Loco-Manipulation” with Haochen Shi, Weizhuo Wang, and Shuran Song in 2025. The platform supports learning robot skills from human demonstrations and transferring control policies from simulation to physical hardware.

  9. 2026

    Two ICRA paper awards

    In 2026, she and her student Zhen Wu receive the ICRA Best Conference Paper Award and the Best Paper Award on Robot Manipulation and Locomotion for “OmniRetarget: Interaction-Preserving Data Generation for Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation and Scene Interaction.”

  10. As of October 2026

    Professor of computer science

    In October 2026, she is a professor in Stanford University's Computer Science Department. Her research includes reinforcement learning, physics-based animation, and learning control policies for humanoids and assistive robots.

Career

  1. NowStanford UniversityProfessor of Computer Science
  2. Until 2007University of Southern CaliforniaAssistant Professor
  3. From 2007Georgia Institute of TechnologyAssistant Professor, School of Interactive Computing

Education

  1. 2005University of WashingtonDoctorate in computer science
  2. 2001University of WashingtonMaster's degree in computer science
  3. 1999National Taiwan UniversityBachelor's degree in computer science

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of C. Karen Liu yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. C. Karen Liu | Computer Science cs.stanford.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  2. ‘You write your own story’: Allen School celebrates the graduating class of 2024 news.cs.washington.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  3. ACM SIGGRAPH Announces 2012 Award Honorees blog.siggraph.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  4. Journal of Open Source Software: DART: Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit joss.theoj.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  5. Presenter - SIGGRAPH 2026 Conference Schedule s2026.conference-schedule.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  6. CVPR 2023 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 27 October 2026.
  7. C. Karen Liu's Profile | Stanford Profiles profiles.stanford.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  8. [2502.00893] ToddlerBot: Open-Source ML-Compatible Humanoid Platform for Loco-Manipulation arxiv.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  9. Allison Okamura, Somil Bansal, Karen Liu, and Mac Schwager are recognized at 2026 ICRA — Stanford Robotics Center src.stanford.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.