Curriculum Vitae · Updated July 2026

Ding Li

Published as Dingzeyu Li

ding@dingzeyu.li dingzeyu.li Seattle, Washington, USA Google Scholar · DBLP · Patents

Research Profile

I build AI systems for filmmaking and video creation, combining generative video, multimodal understanding, human-computer interaction, graphics, and audio. My goal is to advance how people author, edit, animate, and tell stories, and to make creative tools more collaborative, accessible, and production-ready.

Research Appointments

Adobe ResearchSeattle, WA
Senior Staff Research Manager & Scientist (P55)
Staff Research Manager & Scientist (P50)
Staff Research Scientist (P50)
Senior Research Scientist (P40)
Research Scientist (P30)
Research Intern
Disney ResearchCambridge, MA
Research Intern

Education

Columbia University, Ph.D. in Computer Science
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, B.Eng. in Computer Engineering
ETH Zurich, Exchange Student

Selected Awards and Honors

ACM IUI Best Paper Award Candidate (top 1%)
Adobe Distinguished Inventor
ACM UIST Best Paper Award (top 1%)
Emmy Award for Technology and Engineering
Adobe MAX Sneaks, two selected demos
ACM UIST Best Paper Award (top 1%)
Adobe Research Fellowship
NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Finalist
Shapeways Educational Grant
HKUST Academic Achievement Medal

Selected Public Product Releases

Publications and Scholarly Works

Full list: DBLP · Scholar

Deduplicated against DBLP; archival versions are used when available. My name is shown in bold, mentees in italics, and award-recognized papers with ★.

  1. 2026 Xingyu Bruce Liu, Mira Dontcheva, and Dingzeyu Li. “A Text-Native Interface for Generative Video Authoring.” UIST, conditionally accepted. paper
  2. 2026 Ruei-Che Chang, Wenqian Xu, Dingzeyu Li, Bryan Wang, and Anhong Guo. “Sidekick: Designing Communication for Effective Multitasking with Computer Use Agents.” UIST, conditionally accepted.
  3. 2026 Mina Huh, C. Ailie Fraser, Dingzeyu Li, Mira Dontcheva, and Bryan Wang. “VidTune: Creating Video Soundtracks with Generative Music and Video-Based Thumbnails.” CHI. paper
  4. 2026 ★ Best Paper Award Candidate · Sitong Wang, Anh Truong, Lydia B. Chilton, and Dingzeyu Li. “Rewriting Video: Text-Driven Reauthoring of Video Footage.” IUI. paper
  5. 2025 Yi-Hao Peng, Dingzeyu Li, Jeffrey P. Bigham, and Amy Pavel. “Morae: Proactively Pausing UI Agents for User Choices.” UIST. paper
  6. 2025 Saelyne Yang, Anh Truong, Juho Kim, and Dingzeyu Li. “VideoMix: Aggregating How-To Videos for Task-Oriented Learning.” IUI. paper
  7. 2025 Mina Huh, Dingzeyu Li, Kim Pimmel, Hijung Valentina Shin, Amy Pavel, and Mira Dontcheva. “VideoDiff: Human-AI Video Co-Creation with Alternatives.” CHI. paper
  8. 2025 Chen Chen, Cuong Nguyen, Alexa Siu, Dingzeyu Li, and Nadir Weibel. “SweeperBot: Making 3D Browsing Accessible through View Analysis and Visual Question Answering.” IJHCI. paper
  9. 2025 Tao Long, Sitong Wang, Émilie Fabre, Tony Wang, Anup Sathya, Jason Wu, Savvas Petridis, Dingzeyu Li, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Yue Jiang, Jingyi Li, Tiffany Tseng, Ken Nakagaki, Qian Yang, Nikolas Martelaro, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, and Lydia B. Chilton. “Facilitating Longitudinal Interaction Studies of AI Systems.” UIST 2025 Workshop. paper
  10. 2025 Sitong Wang, Samia Menon, Dingzeyu Li, Xiaojuan Ma, Richard S. Zemel, and Lydia B. Chilton. “Schemex: Interactive Structural Abstraction from Examples with Contrastive Refinement.” arXiv:2504.11795. paper
  11. 2024 Sitong Wang, Zheng Ning, Anh Truong, Mira Dontcheva, Dingzeyu Li, and Lydia B. Chilton. “PodReels: Human-AI Co-Creation of Video Podcast Teasers.” DIS. paper
  12. 2024 Sitong Wang, Samia Menon, Tao Long, Keren Henderson, Dingzeyu Li, Kevin Crowston, Mark Hansen, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, and Lydia B. Chilton. “ReelFramer: Human-AI Co-Creation for News-to-Video Translation.” CHI. paper
  13. 2024 Gihyun Kwon, Simon Jenni, Dingzeyu Li, Joon-Young Lee, Jong Chul Ye, and Fabian Caba Heilbron. “Concept Weaver: Enabling Multi-Concept Fusion in Text-to-Image Models.” CVPR. paper
  14. 2023 Arda Senocak, Junsik Kim, Tae-Hyun Oh, Dingzeyu Li, and In So Kweon. “Event-Specific Audio-Visual Fusion Layers: A Simple and New Perspective on Video Understanding.” WACV. paper
  15. 2023 Xiang Anthony Chen, Jeff Burke, Ruofei Du, Matthew K. Hong, Jennifer Jacobs, Philippe Laban, Dingzeyu Li, Nanyun Peng, Karl D. D. Willis, Chien-Sheng Wu, and Bolei Zhou. “Next Steps for Human-Centered Generative AI: A Technical Perspective.” arXiv:2306.15774. paper
  16. 2022 ★ Best Paper Award · Xingyu Bruce Liu, Ruolin Wang, Dingzeyu Li, Xiang Anthony Chen, and Amy Pavel. “CrossA11y: Identifying Video Accessibility Issues via Cross-modal Grounding.” UIST. paper
  17. 2022 Oliver Alonzo, Hijung Valentina Shin, and Dingzeyu Li. “Beyond Subtitles: Captioning and Visualizing Non-speech Sounds to Improve Accessibility of User-Generated Videos.” ASSETS. doi
  18. 2022 Yang Zhou, Jimei Yang, Dingzeyu Li, Jun Saito, Deepali Aneja, and Evangelos Kalogerakis. “Audio-Driven Neural Gesture Reenactment with Video Motion Graphs.” CVPR. paper
  19. 2022 Henrique Teles Maia, Chang Xiao, Dingzeyu Li, Eitan Grinspun, and Changxi Zheng. “Can One Hear the Shape of a Neural Network? Snooping the GPU via Magnetic Side Channel.” USENIX Security. paper
  20. 2021 Yujia Wang, Wei Liang, Haikun Huang, Yongqi Zhang, Dingzeyu Li, and Lap-Fai Yu. “Toward Automatic Audio Description Generation for Accessible Videos.” CHI. doi
  21. 2020 Yang Zhou, Xintong Han, Eli Shechtman, Jose Echevarria, Evangelos Kalogerakis, and Dingzeyu Li. “MakeItTalk: Speaker-Aware Talking-Head Animation.” ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH Asia. paper
  22. 2020 Yapeng Tian, Dingzeyu Li, and Chenliang Xu. “Unified Multisensory Perception: Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing.” ECCV. paper
  23. 2020 Zhenyu Tang, Nicholas J. Bryan, Dingzeyu Li, Timothy R. Langlois, and Dinesh Manocha. “Scene-Aware Audio Rendering via Deep Acoustic Analysis.” IEEE TVCG. paper
  24. 2020 Yujia Wang, Wei Liang, Wanwan Li, Dingzeyu Li, and Lap-Fai Yu. “Scene-Aware Background Music Synthesis.” ACM Multimedia. doi
  25. 2020 Yapeng Tian, Chenliang Xu, and Dingzeyu Li. “Deep Audio Prior.” CVPR Sight and Sound Workshop. paper
  26. 2019 Henrique Teles Maia, Dingzeyu Li, Yuan Yang, and Changxi Zheng. “LayerCode: Optical Barcodes for 3D Printed Shapes.” ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH. doi
  27. 2019 Haikun Huang, Michael Solah, Dingzeyu Li, and Lap-Fai Yu. “Audible Panorama: Automatic Spatial Audio Generation for Panorama Imagery.” CHI. doi
  28. 2018 Dingzeyu Li, Timothy R. Langlois, and Changxi Zheng. “Scene-Aware Audio for 360° Videos.” ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH. paper
  29. 2017 ★ Best Paper Award · Dingzeyu Li, Avinash S. Nair, Shree K. Nayar, and Changxi Zheng. “AirCode: Unobtrusive Physical Tags for Digital Fabrication.” UIST. paper
  30. 2017 Dingzeyu Li. “Interacting with Acoustic Simulation and Fabrication.” UIST Doctoral Symposium. paper
  31. 2016 Gabriel Cirio, Dingzeyu Li, Eitan Grinspun, Miguel A. Otaduy, and Changxi Zheng. “Crumpling Sound Synthesis.” ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH Asia. doi
  32. 2016 Dingzeyu Li, David I. W. Levin, Wojciech Matusik, and Changxi Zheng. “Acoustic Voxels: Computational Optimization of Modular Acoustic Filters.” ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH. doi
  33. 2015 Dingzeyu Li, Yun (Raymond) Fei, and Changxi Zheng. “Interactive Acoustic Transfer Approximation for Modal Sound.” ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH. doi
  34. 2015 Yin Yang, Dingzeyu Li, Weiwei Xu, Yuan Tian, and Changxi Zheng. “Expediting Precomputation for Reduced Deformable Simulation.” ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH Asia. doi
  35. 2013 Qifeng Chen, Dingzeyu Li, and Chi-Keung Tang. “KNN Matting.” IEEE TPAMI. doi
  36. 2013 Dingzeyu Li, Qifeng Chen, and Chi-Keung Tang. “Motion-Aware KNN Laplacian for Video Matting.” ICCV. doi
  37. 2012 Qifeng Chen, Dingzeyu Li, and Chi-Keung Tang. “KNN Matting.” CVPR. doi

Professional Service

Research Mentoring and Placements

Mentored research interns and student collaborators on AI-assisted filmmaking, generative video authoring, accessibility, multimodal understanding, animation, and audio.

Mina HuhThe University of Texas at Austin · generative video authoringCurrent: Ph.D. Student, UC Berkeley EECS
Sitong WangColumbia University · human-AI video creationCurrent: Ph.D. Student, Columbia University; joining Microsoft Research as Senior Researcher
Ruei-Che ChangUniversity of Michigan · human-agent communicationCurrent: Ph.D. Candidate, University of Michigan
Xingyu “Bruce” LiuUniversity of California, Los Angeles · video accessibility (2022); generative video authoring tool (2025)Current: Research Scientist, Adobe Research
Saelyne YangKorea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology · multi-video learning interfacesCurrent: Postdoctoral Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University
Yi-Hao PengCarnegie Mellon University · accessible creative agents
Zheng NingUniversity of Notre Dame · LLM-assisted video authoringCurrent: Applied Scientist II, Amazon
Oliver AlonzoRochester Institute of Technology · accessible video authoringCurrent: Assistant Professor, DePaul University
Yapeng TianUniversity of Rochester · audiovisual understandingCurrent: Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Dallas
Yujia WangBeijing Institute of Technology · audio description and music synthesisCurrent: Associate Professor, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University
Arda SenocakKorea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology · audiovisual causalityCurrent: Assistant Professor, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology
Henrique MaiaColumbia University · fabrication and side channelsCurrent: Senior Software Engineer, Google
Yang ZhouUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst · speech-driven animationCurrent: Senior Research Scientist, Adobe Research
Zhenyu TangUniversity of Maryland, College Park · deep acoustic analysisCurrent: Hark AI
Avinash S. NairColumbia University · invisible tags for 3D printingCurrent: Co-Founder, Beacon AI

Patents and Invention

Named inventor on 27 issued U.S. patents spanning AI-assisted video editing, multimodal search, animation, audio, and creative interfaces.

Generative video assembly AI-based assembly of long-form video into edited sequences.

12,640,168 (2026)

Text-native video editing and multimodal search Visual/text search interfaces and transcript-driven effects, styling, and layout.

12,367,238, 12,206,930 (2025)

Speech-driven performance and gesture animation Gesture reenactment from video motion graphs and style-aware talking-head synthesis.

12,347,135 (2025); 11,776,188 (2023); 11,417,041 (2022)

Creative video interface designs Four coordinated graphical-user-interface design patents.

D1,056,944, D1,056,943, D1,056,942, D1,056,928 (2025)

Hierarchical video segmentation, navigation, and interaction Core segmentation from voice activity, screen capture, and tool use:

11,450,112 (2022); 12,014,548, 11,922,695, 11,893,794 (2024)

Timeline, metadata, tile, and cluster interaction:

11,995,894, 11,899,917, 11,887,629, 11,880,408 (2024); 11,631,434, 11,630,562 (2023)

Snap-point and thumbnail segmentation:

12,033,669, 11,887,371 (2024)

Scene-aware audio and audiovisual timing Neural acoustic analysis and motion/beat-aware video retiming.

11,812,254 (2023); 11,190,898 (2021); 11,682,238 (2023)

Audio-visual cue recognition Learning-based recognition of visual and combined audio-visual cues.

12,125,317 (2024)

Image acquisition and domain adaptation Refining image-acquisition data through learned domain adaptation.

11,908,036 (2024)