Runfa Blark Li 李润发
Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego
Robotics · Embodiment Learning · Dexterous Manipulation · Exoskeleton · Computer Vision & Graphics
Former Qualcomm XR Deep Learning Researcher
Percussionist in UCSD Symphonic Orchestra, Drummer, Singer
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Contextual Robotics Institute (CRI) at UC San Diego. I am advised by Prof. Nikolay Atanasov in the UCSD Existential Robotics Laboratory (ERL), and Prof. Truong Nguyen in the UCSD Video Processing Lab (VPL). My research lies at the intersection of robotics, embodiment intelligence, and computer vision, with a focus on building perception and learning systems that enable robots to understand, reconstruct, and interact with huamn and the physical world.
My recent work focuses on dexterous manipulation, bimanual tool use, humanoid modeling, learning-based exoskeleton, visuomotor world model/VLA, and policy learning. I am particularly interested in how robots and human-assistive/augmentation systems can acquire complex physical skills from visual, geometric, and motion cues. More broadly, my research vision is to develop intelligent systems that can perceive dynamic 3D environments, predict future physical interactions, and execute skillful actions with human-like dexterity.
Previously, my work focused on 3D/4D computer vision on generation, neural scene representations, dynamic SLAM, 3D/4D Gaussian Splatting, neural implicit reconstruction, 3D scene flow estimation, human reconstruction and editing. These works studied how to reconstruct, track, generate, and reason about static/dynamic 3D scenes and human ourselves from monocular or RGB-D observations. This background in 3D/4D perception now forms the foundation for my current research on robot manipulation and embodied learning.
I received my M.S. degree from UC San Diego in 2021, with a specialization in Signal and Image Processing, ECE. I was a former Qualcomm XR deep learning researcher during 2021-2022, and summer 2024, where I worked on high-level tasks including dynamic visual rendering and SLAM for real-time XR devices equipped with Snapdragon chips, 3D body and hand modeling, tracking, reconstruction, and visual understanding, as well as low-level graphical Vulken engineering coding on Snapdragon.
Outside of research, I am the chief percussionist in UCSD Symphony Orchestra, I am also a drummer and a singer. I have trained in percussion since childhood and have performed with many orchestras and bands in both China and the United States. Music remains an important part of my life and also motivates my long-term interest in robots and wearable systems that can assist, teach, or augment complex human skills.
news
| Jan 4, 2023 | Join UCSD Symphonic Orchestra as a percussionist |
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| Jul 3, 2022 | Paper got accepted by ECCV 2022!!! |
| Jun 21, 2021 | Join Qualcomm R&D Computer Vision team as a Deep Learning Researcher !!! |
| Jun 12, 2021 | Got my Master’s Degree from UCSD ECE !!! |
| May 20, 2021 | Paper got accepted by ICIP !!! |













