PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Siming Li

Siming Li is a researcher whose work links machine learning, image captioning and network routing. In 2011, she coauthored a paper on multifocal learning for customer problems and two papers on image descriptions; “Baby talk” joined computer vision with natural-language processing to generate captions. She later coauthored research on greedy routing for mobile sensor networks and Owan, a system that coordinates optical and network layers for wide-area transfers. She completed a 2017 Stony Brook dissertation on wireless and optical routing, and eBay was her first job; “Baby talk” received the Longuet-Higgins Prize in 2021.

Works
37
Citations
1,965
h-index
8

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. April 2011

    Multifocal learning

    In April 2011, she coauthors “Multifocal learning for customer problem analysis,” which groups training data into focal groups to learn prediction models for customer-service problems.

  2. 2011

    Baby talk at CVPR

    In 2011, she coauthors “Baby talk: Understanding and generating simple image descriptions,” a CVPR paper that bridges computer vision with natural-language processing to generate image captions.

  3. June 2011

    Composing image descriptions

    At CoNLL in June 2011, she coauthors “Composing Simple Image Descriptions using Web-scale N-grams” with Girish Kulkarni, Tamara L. Berg, Alexander C. Berg and Yejin Choi.

  4. July 2016

    A map for sensor routing

    In July 2016, she coauthors a paper that maps wireless mobile sensor networks into virtual coordinates for greedy routing. Each node can compute or update its virtual coordinates by applying a locally stored map to its geographic coordinates.

  5. August 2016

    The Owan WAN system

    In August 2016, she coauthors Owan, a system for wide-area bulk transfers that jointly controls optical and network layers. It changes circuit setup, routing and rate allocation as traffic demand changes.

  6. May 2017

    A Stony Brook dissertation

    In May 2017, she completes a Stony Brook dissertation on mobility and traffic-adaptive routing for wireless and optical networks. Jie Gao lists eBay as her first job.

  7. 2021

    The Longuet-Higgins Prize

    In 2021, the Computer Vision Foundation recognizes “Baby talk” with the Longuet-Higgins Prize; she is among the paper’s coauthors.

Career

  1. 2023–2026Huazhong University of Science and Technology
  2. 2013–2021Chengdu University of Technology

Education

  1. 2017Stony Brook UniversityPhD

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

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Huazhong University of Science and Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Huazhong University of Science and Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  3. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Huazhong University of Science and 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.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.

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 Siming Li yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Multifocal learning for customer problem analysis experts.arizona.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Gray sheep, golden cows, and everything in between: Yejin Choi earns Longuet-Higgins Prize in computer vision for enabling more precise image captions via natural language generation news.cs.washington.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Composing Simple Image Descriptions using Web-scale N-grams aclanthology.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Compact Conformal Map for Greedy Routing in Wireless Mobile Sensor Networks researchconnect.suny.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Optimizing bulk transfers with software-defined optical WAN collaborate.princeton.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Students - Jie Gao sites.rutgers.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions) | Electronic Dissertations and Theses | Stony Brook University commons.library.stonybrook.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.