PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jiachen Li

Jiachen Li is a robotics and AI researcher whose work focuses on multi-agent trajectory prediction and trustworthy autonomous systems. He completed a PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley from 2016 to 2021 under Masayoshi Tomizuka, posting the EvolveGraph trajectory prediction framework in March 2020 and interning at the Honda Research Institute and Waymo. From 2021 to 2023, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University with Mykel J. Kochenderfer, receiving an RSS Robotics Pioneer Award in 2022 and an ASME DSCD Rising Star selection in 2023. After serving as an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside from January 2024 to June 2026, he joined Georgia Tech in 2026, where he is a Coca-Cola Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor, directs the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Laboratory, and co-chairs the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Learning.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2016–2021

    Berkeley PhD with Tomizuka

    From 2016 to 2021, he completes a PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works with Masayoshi Tomizuka as a graduate student researcher in the Mechanical Systems Control Laboratory, Berkeley AI Research and Berkeley DeepDrive. From September 2019 to May 2021, he also serves as a research intern at the Honda Research Institute in San Jose, California.

  2. March 2020

    EvolveGraph trajectory forecasting

    In March 2020, he posts EvolveGraph with Fan Yang, Masayoshi Tomizuka and Chiho Choi. The framework addresses multi-agent trajectory prediction for interactive agents through dynamic relational reasoning.

  3. May–October 2021

    Research internship at Waymo

    From May 2021 to October 2021, he works as a software engineer and research intern at Waymo LLC in Mountain View, California.

  4. 2021–2023

    Stanford postdoc with Kochenderfer

    From 2021 to 2023, he works as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University with Mykel J. Kochenderfer at the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2022, he coauthors Grouptron, a dynamic multi-scale graph convolutional network for group-aware dense crowd trajectory forecasting, presented among the Stanford AI Lab's ICRA 2022 papers.

  5. 2022

    An RSS Robotics Pioneer

    In 2022, he receives an RSS Robotics Pioneer Award.

  6. 2023

    An ASME DSCD Rising Star

    In 2023, he is selected as an ASME DSCD Rising Star.

  7. January 2024–June 2026

    Assistant professor at UC Riverside

    From January 2024 to June 2026, he serves as an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. At UC Riverside, he directs the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Laboratory and is a faculty member in the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems.

  8. Since 2026

    Assistant professor at Georgia Tech

    In 2026, he joins Georgia Tech as a Coca-Cola Foundation Early Career Professor and Assistant Professor, with a joint appointment in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. He directs the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Laboratory, serves as a core faculty member in the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, and is Co-Chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Learning.

Career

  1. NowGeorgia Institute of TechnologyAssistant Professor
  2. 2021–2023Stanford UniversityPostdoctoral scholar
  3. 2021WaymoSoftware Engineer and Research Intern
  4. 2019–2021Honda Research InstituteResearch Intern
  5. 2016–2021University of California, BerkeleyGraduate Student Researcher
  6. University of California, RiversideDirector

Education

  1. 2021University of California, BerkeleyPh.D.

From the biography.

  1. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Jiachen Li. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  2. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  4. People shaping AI work at a median of 3 organizations over a career: 3 for university starters and institute and lab starters, versus 2 for company startersIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. Across 6,853 people shaping AI with a dated work role, we estimate a median of 3 parent organizations over a career (mean 3.6), comparing role groups, starting sectors and starting decades from the 1950s to 2020–2026.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Jiachen Li yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Jiachen Li | alphaXiv alphaxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Lab Members | Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Laboratory (TASL) webarchive.ucr.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Jiachen Li | H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering isye.gatech.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. [2003.13924] EvolveGraph: Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction with Dynamic Relational Reasoning arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Stanford AI Lab Robotics Papers (ICRA and RSS 2022) | SAIL Blog ai.stanford.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Jiachen Li | Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Laboratory (TASL) webarchive.ucr.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Homepage for Jiachen Li jiachenli94.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. Jiachen Li | Research Community people.research.gatech.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.