Rate My Professor Hongdong Li

Professor Hongdong Li is a Full Professor of Computer Vision and Machine Learning in the School of Computing at the Australian National University (ANU) within the Computer Science faculty, where he has served since 2003, achieving tenured Level E status. He earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering and has collaborated closely with Professor Richard Hartley since 2004. His career trajectory includes Research Fellow and Fellow positions at ANU's RSISE from 2003 to 2007, Senior Scientist at National ICT Australia (NICTA) from 2008 to 2009 on the Australia Bionic Eye project, Visiting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science in 2017-2018, Associate School Director for Research in ANU's School of Engineering, and co-founding Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision (2014-2020, $42 million funding). On leave in 2022-2023, he was Distinguished Scientist and XR-Lab Chief Scientist at Tencent, and since 2024, he serves part-time as Amazon Scholar at Amazon IML developing generative AI for eCommerce. Li has supervised or co-supervised over 40 PhD students in computer vision, securing research funding from the Australian Research Council, CSIRO, Microsoft Research, General Motors, Ford, OPPO, Tencent, Toshiba, and Baidu.

Li's research specializes in 3D computer vision, machine learning, AI, robotic vision navigation, autonomous driving, VR/AR, and visual foundation models, with emphasis on 3D visual perception, learning for plant sciences, vision-based spatial awareness, and robust robot navigation in unfamiliar environments. He has garnered 18,549 citations across 234 outputs. Notable awards include the IEEE CVPR Best Paper Award (2012), ICCV Marr Prize Honourable Mention, IEEE ICPR and ICIP Best Student Paper Awards, DSTO Best Paper Prize, multiple DICTA Best Paper Awards, WACV Best Applied Paper Award, ACL Best Outstanding Demo Award, and 1st place in the HILTI Visual SLAM Challenge at IEEE ICRA 2024. Li contributes editorially as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) and has chaired programs for ACCV 2018 and 2022, serving as Area Chair for CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV. Key publications feature "A simple prior-free method for non-rigid structure from motion factorization" (CVPR 2012), "Consensus Set Maximization with guaranteed global optimality" (ICCV 2009), and recent ECCV 2024 works: "NeuSDFusion: A Spatial-Aware Generative Model for 3D Shape Completion, Reconstruction, and Generation," "SemReg: Semantics Constrained Point Cloud Registration," and "Weakly-Supervised Camera Localization by Ground-to-Satellite Image Registration."