Rate My Professor Zhu Li

Zhu Li is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the School of Science and Engineering at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). He directs the Multimedia Computing and Communication (MC2) Lab and serves as the Director of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) Center for Big Learning at UMKC. Previously an Associate Professor at UMKC, he was promoted to full Professor in 2022. Li also holds a summer faculty appointment at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He is a member of the UMKC Graduate Council for the 2025-2026 academic year.

His research specializations encompass multimedia computing and communication, including image and video processing and compression, deep learning applications, data compression techniques, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), point cloud processing and super-resolution, Gaussian splatting compression, and big learning methodologies. Li has obtained substantial research funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), and industry collaborators such as Qualcomm and Meta/Facebook. Notable funded projects include NSF Center for Big Learning membership renewal, virtual warfare simulations for soldier training, and initiatives strengthening STEM workforce preparation through undergraduate research. He has contributed to patents such as US12190573B1 'Systems and methods for hyperspectral image generation' (2025) with Paras Maharjan, and US12198273B2 on related systems. Li's scholarly record includes over 240 publications, an h-index of 44, and more than 9,900 citations as per Google Scholar. Key publications feature 'Compact Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Super-Resolution' (Allerton Conference, 2014), works on multi-scale sparse convolutional learning for point cloud super-resolving and compression (recent seminars), and contributions to IEEE conferences like ICIP 2025 on Gaussian splatting benchmarks. He has guest edited special issues for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) on multimedia over future networks and serves on the editorial board of CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology. Li has received the Trustees' Faculty Fellow Award and the N.T. Veatch Award for Distinguished Research and Creativity. He delivers invited public lectures at institutions including Westlake University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the University of Hong Kong.