About Me
Assistant Professor
I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of California, Riverside (UCR).
I am the Director of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Laboratory (TASL) and a core faculty of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CRIS), UC Riverside Artificial Intelligence Research and Education Institute (RAISE), and the Center for Environmental Research and Technology.
Before joining UCR, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University working with Prof. Mykel J. Kochenderfer at Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL), Stanford Center for AI Safety, and Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). I obtained my Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley working with Prof. Masayoshi Tomizuka at Mechanical Systems Control Laboratory, Berkeley AI Research (BAIR), and Berkeley DeepDrive (BDD). I have interned at Waymo, Toyota Research Institute, and Honda Research Institute.
Attention! I am actively looking for multiple highly motivated Ph.D. students (fully funded, starting in Fall 2026), master students, undergraduate students, and research interns to join my lab. If you are interested, please follow the application instructions HERE. Please feel free to send me an email if any questions.
Research Interest
My research interest lies in the broad intersection of robotics, trustworthy AI & ML, reinforcement learning, control, and computer vision and their applications to intelligent autonomous systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles, mobile robots, drones, cyber-physical systems). I am particularly interested in human-robot interactions and multi-agent systems.
Please refer to my lab website for more details about our recent research!
I am open to research discussion and collaboration, please feel free to get in touch!
News
Please check my lab website for the latest news about myself and my lab! The information below is outdated.
- 08/2024: Serving as an Area Chair for ICLR 2025!
- 07/2024: Received the UC Regents Faculty Fellowship!
- 06/2024: Serving as a Senior Program Committee for AAMAS 2025 and an Associate Editor for ICRA 2025!
- 05/2024: Organizing Southern California Robotics Symposium (SCR 2024)!
- 04/2024: One paper is accepted at IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)!
- 03/2024: One paper is accepted at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV 2024)!
- 02/2024: Serving as an Associate Editor for IROS 2024 and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)!
- 01/2024: Two papers are accepted at ICRA 2024!
- 12/2023: Organizing Machine Learning for Autonomous Driving workshop (ML4AD 2023).
- 11/2023: One paper is accepted at IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters!
- 10/2023: One paper is accepted at IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2024)!
- 08/2023: Selected as an ASME DSCD Rising Star and will give a talk at MECC 2023!
- 07/2023: Two papers are accepted at 2023 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC 2023)!
- 06/2023: Invited talk at IEEE IV 2023 Workshop on Social and Interactive and Safe Behaviors for Intelligent Vehicles: Benchmark, Models, and Applications!
- 06/2023: Organizing three IEEE IV 2023 workshops: Workshop on Socially Interactive Autonomous Mobility (SIAM) , Workshop on Interaction-driven Behavior Prediction and Planning for Autonomous Vehicles, and Workshop on 3D-Deep Learning for Automated Driving!
- 01/2023: One paper about pedestrian action recognition and motion prediction is accepted at ICRA 2023!
- 10/2022: Serving on the program committee of RSS 2023 Pioneers Workshop at RSS 2023!
- 09/2022: Two papers about interaction modeling and physical dynamics modeling are accepted at NeurIPS 2022!
- 08/2022: Organizing NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Machine Learning for Autonomous Driving and NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Progress and Challenges in Trustworthy Embodies AI!
- 07/2022: One paper about occupancy prediction is accepted at IROS 2022!
- 06/2022: Invited talk in the MediaBrain Laboratory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University!
- 05/2022: Selected as one of the 30 Robotics Pioneers at the RSS 2022 Pioneers Workshop!
- 03/2022: One paper regarding diverse human motion forecasting is accepted as Oral presentation at CVPR 2022!
- 01/2022: Two papers regarding scene understanding and behavior modeling are accepted to ICRA 2022!
Research
The ultimate goal of my research is to build trustworthy, interactive, and human-centered autonomous embodied agents that can perceive, understand, and reason about the physical world; safely interact and collaborate with humans; and efficiently coordinate with other intelligent agents so that they can benefit society in daily lives. To achieve this goal, I have been pursuing interdisciplinary research and unifying the techniques and tools from robotics, trustworthy AI/ML, deep reinforcement learning, control theory, optimization, and computer vision.
Please check my lab website for my latest featured research topics!
Publications
Academic Services
Join My Lab
I am currently seeking multiple highly motivated talents to join my laboratory as Ph.D. students (fully funded), master students, undergraduate students, or onsite/remote research interns (outside of UC Riverside), visiting scholars, or postdoctoral scholars. If you are interested in working with me, please check my lab website for application instructions.
Prospective students must also submit an application for a certain program on the UCR official website before the corresponding deadline. If you are applying for a Ph.D. program in EE or CS, please indicate Prof. Jiachen Li as your prospective advisor in the UCR official application form and Statement of Purpose.