About me

Yunyao Li is a Director of Machine Learning at Adobe, where she leads key strategic initiatives to bring the power of Generative AI and Knowledge Graph to enterprise systems and transform the way companies approach audiences, journeys and personalization at scale. Previously, she was the Head of Machine Learning, Apple Knowledge Platform, where she led the building of the next-generation machine learning solutions to help power features such as Siri and Spotlight, improving experience for billions of Apple users. Before joining Apple, she was a Distinguished Research Staff Member and Senior Research Manager at IBM Research - Almaden where she built and managed the Scalable Knowledge Intelligence department. She was also an IBM Master Inventor and a member of IBM Academy of Technology. She built systems, developed solutions, and delivered core technologies to over 20 IBM products under brands such as Watson, InfoSphere, and Cognos.

Yunyao is particularly known for her work in scalable natural language processing with human-computer cooperation and declarative text understanding, enterprise search, and database usability. In these areas, she has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, been granted 36 patents, and co-taught multiple graduate-level courses (including 2 Massive Open Online Courses). She co-authored two books: “Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces’’ (2018) and “Natural Language Interfaces to Databases” (2024). Her technical contributions have been recognized by prestigious awards on a regular basis.

Yunyao is an ACM Distinguished Member and serves as an ACM Member-at-Large. She has served the NLP and database communities with distinction through conference organization, senior committee roles, editorial board service, and academic advisory positions. She previously served on the NAACL Executive Board (2023–2024) and has championed and co-chaired industry tracks at leading NLP conferences including ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP. She received her undergraduate degrees from Tsinghua University, and her masters and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor.