Kailai Li Assistant Professor at Department of Computer Science Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence University of Groningen, The Netherlands Contact: kailai.li [at] rug [dot] nl RUG Page  |  Google Scholar  |  GitHub  |  LinkedIn  |  ORCID  |  Twitter  |  ResearchGate |  ASIG-X

I lead the Agile Sensing and Intelligence Group (ASIG) working in the field of autonomous systems and robotics. We constantly look for strong candidates for PhD/postdoc/internship/thesis. Shoot me an email with a brief intro if you are interested, and we will start from this!

• 2024-11: Ziyu and I contributed to the development of GPTR, a new framework for Gaussian process-based continuous-time motion estimation. Check out our paper and open-source code!

About me

Publications  |  Granted Projects  |  PhD Supervision  |  Supervised Bachelor's & Master's Theses

I am assitant professor working at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. I also collaborate closely with Fredrik Gustafsson at Department of Electrical Engineering of Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden, where I was a postdoctoral researcher from 2022-10 to 2024-04. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems (ISAS) Lab, Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, where I obtained my PhD degree in computer science in 2021 under the supervision of Uwe D. Hanebeck. I received my master's degree in Automation Engineering in 2017 from RWTH Aachen University in Germany, including a master's thesis completed at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and my bachelor's degrees in 2014 from Tsinghua University (Wikipedia) in China.

My major research interests lie in agile sensing and trustworthy inference in the general domain of understanding physical and cyber-physical systems, with applications to sensor fusion, robotic perception, and learning dynamical systems. I am also interested in developing planning and control methods for uncertain dynamical systems and have the ambition to methodologically unify these aspects through new representations and models with real-world validation. I had the honor to lead the developments of a few open-source real-world robotic systems, including LiLi-OM, a cross-hardware LiDAR-inertial odometry and mapping system, and SFUISE, a continuous-time UWB-inertial state estimation system. Please refer to the links above for more information.

Awards

• 2023: Best Student Paper Finalist at the 31st European Signal Processing Conference, EUSIPCO 2023 [link]
• 2022: Jean-Pierre Le Cadre Best Paper Award: First Runner-Up by the International Society for Information Fusion (ISIF) at FUSION 2022 [link]
• 2021: Best Lab Practical Course “Machine Learning and Intelligent System” by the Department of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology [link]
• 2016 & 2017: IDEA League Research Grant [link]
• 2017: Dean's List RWTH Aachen for top 5% students with outstanding academic result
• 2014: DAAD Scholarship for RWTH-Tsinghua Strategic Partnership

Job applications

• 2024: Offer - Assistant professor (academic career track) at Delft Center for Systems and Control, TU Delft, the Netherlands. Declined
• 2024: Offer - Assistant professor (tenure track) at Department of Electrical Engineering funded by WASP, Linköping University, Sweden. Declined
• 2024: Offer - Assistant professor (tenure track) at Department of Computer Science, Bernoulli Institute, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Accepted

Teaching

• WMCS040-05: Robotic State Estimation (Semester 1A, from academic year 2024-2025)
  Master’s course in Computer Science, University of Groningen [link]
  Course coordinator, examiner and lecturer (new course)
• WMCS041-05: Multimodal Mobile Sensing (Semester 2A, from academic year 2024-2025)
  Master’s course in Computer Science, University of Groningen [link]
  Course coordinator, examiner and lecturer (new course)
• WMCS042-05: Intelligent Mobile Perception in Practice (Semester 1B, from academic year 2024-2025)
  Master’s course in Computer Science, University of Groningen [link]
  Course coordinator, examiner and lecturer (new course)

• TSRT78: Digital Signal Processing (2022 & 2023)
  Master’s course at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University [link]
  Examiner and lecturer. See also my self-written lecture manuscript [PDF]
  Highest course evaluation recorded for TSRT78 since 2018 by students
• Localization of Mobile Agents (2019-2022)
  Master’s course at the Deparment of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  Teaching assistant for four consecutive years. See also my slides for post-exercise sessions [PDF]
• Seminar: Moderne Methoden der Informationsverarbeitung & Proseminar: Anthropomatik: Von der Theorie zur Anwendung (2017-2021)
  Bachelor's and Master’s level seminars at the Deparment of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  Supervision at least one student for each kind per semester (twice a year)
• Projektpraktikum maschinelles Lernen und intelligente Systeme (2017-2021)
  Master’s level practical course at the Deparment of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  Supervision at least two students (in group) per semester (twice a year)
• Research training program (2019-2020)
  Supervisor of 2 students for master’s level one-year projects at the Deparment of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
• Bachelor’s and master’s theses (2018-2021)
  Supervisor of 15 students at the Deparment of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology [full list]

Academic Services

• Review for journals
  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, IEEE Control Systems Letters, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation Journal of Field Robotics, Statistics and Computing

• Review for conferences
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), European Control Conference (ECC), IFAC World Congress (IFAC), IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems (MFI), International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION)

• Program committee
  Co-organizing the Special Session on Directional Estimation at conferences FUSION (2018, 2019, 2020, 2022) and MFI (2020, 2021)

Invited Talks

• Towards Agile Sensing for Autonomous Intelligent Systems
  Extra seminar Computer Science, Intelligent Systems
  November 2023, Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen
  
• On Sensor Fusion for State Estimation in Mobile Robotics
  October 2023, Nordic Navigation Workshop
  
• On High-Performance Sensor Fusion
  Mini-Workshop on: Magnetic Field Localisation, Combining Sensor Fusion with Machine Learning and Beyond
  June 2023, Linköping University
  
• Towards Universal LiDAR Mapping
  Security Link board meeting
  February 2023, Linköping University
  
• Towards High-Performance Solid-State-LiDAR-Inertial Odometry and Mapping
  February 2022, Remote Sensing Laboratories, University of Zurich
  
• Rigid Body Motion Estimation Based on Directional Statistics
  Virtual Symposium on Directional Statistics
  November 2020, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology [link] [video]