Yunyao Li joined IBM Almaden Research Center in July 2007 after obtaining her Ph.D degree in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Michigan in April 2007. Before that, she was a graduate student in the Database Research Group, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, under the guidance of Professor H. V. Jagadish. Her primary research area is Database Systems and Natural Language Processing.
She is particularly interested in designing, developing and analyzing large scale systems that can improve the accessibility of information for a wide spectrum of users. Her current research towards this direction involves a number of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, databases, human-computer interaction, information retrieval, and machine learning.
Before she started her Ph.D study, she obtained dual-degrees of M.S.E in Computer Science & Engineering and M.S in Information from Computer Science and Engineering and School of Information respectively at the University of Michigan. She went to college at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and graduated with dual-degrees of B.E in Automation and B.S in Economics.
You can read about Yunyao's inspiring story from small-town China to Silicon Valley here.
Follow her on Twitter @yunyao_li.