Kailai Li Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden Contact: kailai.li [at] liu [dot] se Google Scholar  |  GitHub  |  LinkedIn  |  ORCID  |  Twitter  |  ResearchGate |  ASIG-X

I will be joining the Department of Computer Science at the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence,
University of Groningen (NL) as tenure-track assistant professor in May 2024.

• 2024-04: We have now launched our group account on Github under ASIG-X. Our future opensource projects will be released here exclusively. Stay tuned!
  
• 2024-03: I received a job offer from the University of Groningen as tenure-track assistant professor at the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. I accepted this offer.
  
• 2024-03: I received a job offer from Linköping University as assistant professor (tenure track) at the Department of Electrical Engineering funded by WASP (see below), and I declined it.
  
• 2024-02/03: I received a job offer from TU Delft as assistant professor (academic career track) at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. I declined it.
  
• 2024-02: Ziyu has a paper accepted at 2024 European Control Conference (ECC) about Gaussian processes on the hypertorus [link]. See you in Stockholm!
  
• 2023-11: I have given a talk at the University of Groningen [link].
  
• 2023-10: I have received a ZENITH grant [link]. Check out our project page!
  
• 2023-10: I have given a talk at the Nordic Navigation Workshop.
  
• 2023-10: I have given a talk online at the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen.
  
• 2023-08: Our paper ''Weighted Total Least Squares for Quadratic Errors-in-Variable Regression'' has been accepted by the 31st European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) and selected as Best Student Paper Finalist [link].
  
• 2023-07: Check out my new manuscript on embedding B-splines in recursive state estimation [arXiv].
  
• 2023-06: Our paper '' Continuous-Time Ultra-Wideband-Inertial Fusion'' has been published on RA-L. We have presented the first systematic sensor fusion framework using quaternion-based cumulative B-splines. Check out our code here [GitHub].
  

Short Bio

I am a postdoctoral fellow working at the Department of Electrical Engineering in collaboration with Fredrik Gustafsson at Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden from October 2022. 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 December 2021 under the supervision of Uwe D. Hanebeck. Previously, 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.

Research Profile

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 lists of papers and talks below for more information.

Over the years, I have been very lucky to cooperate with many students as a teacher and supervisor. I also have the gratitude to provide regular academic services to a few major conferences in robotics, control and information fusion. I am experienced with applying for research grants through a few projects together with my collaborators.

Teaching

• TSRT78: Digital Signal Processing (since 2022)
  Master’s level 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 level 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)

Student Supervision

• @ Linköping University (ongoing)
• Ziyu Cao (PhD student, co-supervised with Fredrik Gustafsson)
• Peng Liu (PhD student, co-supervised with Fredrik Gustafsson)
• Elias William (master's student)
• Qihao Yuan (remote master's student)

• @ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (previous)
• Supervisor of 15 students for bachelor’s and master’s theses (2018-2022) [full list]
• Supervisor of 2 students for a one-year master’s level research training program (2019-2020)

Granted Projects

• Cybersecurity with Focus on Realiable Sensing and Autonomy
  Subject area including 1 Asst. Prof, 2 PhD students and 2 postdocs funded by WASP, Sweden [link]
  Acquired amount: about 20M SEK in total. Project duration: 2024-2028
  Role: Principal investigator (PI) and author of the proposal Granted but declined by me
• Computational Agile Sensing and Inference for Intelligent Systems
  Funded within the ZENITH Program by Linköping University, Sweden [link]
  Acquired amount: 600,000 SEK/year for 5 years. Project duration: 2024-2028. [Project Page]
  Role: Principal investigator (PI) and author of the proposal
• Gaussian Process Modeling on Directional Manifolds for Data-Driven Estimation of Rigid Body Motion
  Funded within the Individual Research Grant Program by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Germany [link]
  Acquired amount: 300,000 EUR. Project duration: 2021-2024.
  Roles: Writing of the grant proposal. PI: Uwe D. Hanebeck
• ULearn4Mobility – Ubiquitous Spatio-Temporal Learning for Future Mobility
  Funded within the Helmholtz AI Project Program by the Helmholtz Association, Germany [link]
  Joint project of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) & German Aerospace Center (DLR)
  Acquired amount: 400,000 EUR. Project duration: 2021-2023.
  Roles: Writing of the grant proposal and project execution. PI: Uwe D. Hanebeck
• POMAS – Pose Estimation and Mapping Using Heterogeneous Sensor Networks
  Funded within the Software Campus Program by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany [link]
  In cooperation with Trumpf GmbH + Co. KG as industrial partner
  Acquired amount: 100,000 EUR. Project duration: 2020-2022.
  Roles: Principal investigator (PI) + Project execution in part
  
• Recursive Estimation of Rigid Body Motions
  Funded within the Individual Research Grant Program by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Germany [link]
  Project duration: 2016-2020.
  Roles: Project execution in part as part of my PhD research. PI: Uwe D. Hanebeck

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

Academic Services

• Review for conferences
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2022 & 2023)
  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2021)
  IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2023)
  IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems (MFI 2019-2022)
  Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2019)
  European Control Conference (ECC 2019-2022)
  IFAC World Congress (IFAC 2020 & 2023)
  International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2018-2023)
  
• Review for journals
  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (comparably more regular, >10 papers)
  IEEE Control Systems Letters
  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
  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
  
• Program committee
  Co-organizing the Special Session on Directional Estimation at conferences FUSION (2018, 2019, 2020, 2022) and MFI (2020, 2021)

Preprints

• On Embedding B-Splines in Recursive State Estimation
  Kailai Li
  arXiv preprint, arXiv:2307.00637, 2023 [arXiv]
• Hyperspherical Dirac Mixture Reapproximation
  Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.10411, 2021 [arXiv]

Dissertation

On-Manifold Recursive Bayesian Estimation for Directional Domains
Kailai Li, PhD Thesis, Department of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, December 2021 [PDF]
Graded with highest distinction (summa cum laude)

Peer-Reviewed Publications

2024

• Gaussian Process on the Product of Directional Manifolds
  Ziyu Cao, Kailai Li
  2024 European Control Conference (ECC), Stockholm, Sweden (to appear) [arXiv] [code]

2023

• Weighted Total Least Squares for Quadratic Errors-in-Variable Regression
  Peng Liu, Kailai Li, Gustaf Hendeby, Fredrik Gustafsson
  Proceedings of the 2023 31st European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Helsinki, Finland (Accepted)
  Best Student Paper Finalist [link]
• Continuous-Time Ultra-Wideband-Inertial Fusion
  Kailai Li, Ziyu Cao, Uwe D Hanebeck
  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 8, no. 7, pp. 4338-4345, July 2023 [arXiv] [IEEE] [video] [code and data]

2022

• Optimal Sensor Placement for Multilateration Using Alternating Greedy Removal and Placement
  Daniel Frisch, Kailai Li, Uwe D Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems (MFI), Cranfield, United Kingdom [IEEE]
• The State Space Subdivision Filter for SE(3)
  Florian Pfaff, Kailai Li, Uwe D Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2022 25th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Linköping, Sweden [IEEE]
• Circular Discrete Reapproximation
  Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2022 25th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Linköping, Sweden [IEEE]
  Jean-Pierre Le Cadre Best Paper Award First Runner-Up by International Society for Information Fusion (ISIF)

2021

• Conditional Densities and Likelihoods for Hypertoroidal Densities Based on Trigonometric Polynomials
  Florian Pfaff, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems (MFI), Karlsruhe, Germany [IEEE]
• Deep Likelihood Learning for 2-D Orientation Estimation Using a Fourier Filter
  Florian Pfaff, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Sun City, South Africa [IEEE] [code]
• The State Space Subdivision Filter for Estimation on SE(2)
  Florian Pfaff, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Sensors 2021, 21(18), 6314 [MDPI]
• Towards High-Performance Solid-State-LiDAR-Inertial Odometry and Mapping
  Kailai Li, Meng Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 5167-5174, July 2021 [arXiv] [IEEE] [video] [code and data]
• Progressive von Mises–Fisher Filtering Using Isotropic Sample Sets for Nonlinear Hyperspherical Estimation
  Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Sensors 2021, 21(9), 2991 [MDPI]
• Unscented Dual Quaternion Particle Filter for SE(3) Estimation
  Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  IEEE Control Systems Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 647-652, April 2021 & 2020 59th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Jeju, South Korea [IEEE]

2020

• Nonlinear von Mises–Fisher Filtering Based on Isotropic Deterministic Sampling
  Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems (MFI), Karlsruhe, Germany [IEEE]
• Estimating Correlated Angles Using the Hypertoroidal Grid Filter
  Florian Pfaff, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems (MFI), Karlsruhe, Germany [IEEE]
• Optimal Reduction of Dirac Mixture Densities on the 2-Sphere
  Daniel Frisch, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  IFAC-PapersOnLine, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 1282-1287, 2020 & 21st IFAC World Congress, Berlin, Germany [ScienceDirect]
• The Spherical Grid Filter for Nonlinear Estimation on the Unit Sphere
  Florian Pfaff, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  IFAC-PapersOnLine, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 2354-2360, 2020 & 21st IFAC World Congress, Berlin, Germany [ScienceDirect]
• Improved Pose Graph Optimization for Planar Motions Using Riemannian Geometry on the Manifold of Dual Quaternions
  Kailai Li, Johannes Cox, Benjamin Noack, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  IFAC-PapersOnLine, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 9541-9547, 2020 & 21st IFAC World Congress, Berlin, Germany [ScienceDirect]
• Hyperspherical Unscented Particle Filter for Nonlinear Orientation Estimation
  Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  IFAC-PapersOnLine, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 2347-2353, 2020 & 21st IFAC World Congress, Berlin, Germany [ScienceDirect]
• Dual Quaternion Sample Reduction for SE(2) Estimation
  Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2020 23rd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Rustenburg, South Africa [IEEE] [video]
• A Hyperhemispherical Grid Filter for Orientation Estimation,
  Florian Pfaff, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2020 23rd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Rustenburg, South Africa [IEEE]
• Highly Parallelizable Plane Extraction for Organized Point Clouds Using Spherical Convex Hulls
  Hannes Möls, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Paris, France [IEEE] [video]
• Grid-Based Quaternion Filter for SO(3) Estimation
  Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2020 European Control Conference (ECC), St. Petersburg, Russia [IEEE]

2019

• Stereo Visual SLAM Based on Unscented Dual Quaternion Filtering
  Simon Bultmann, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2019 22nd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Ottawa, Canada [IEEE] [video]
• Hyperspherical Deterministic Sampling Based on Riemannian Geometry for Improved Nonlinear Bingham Filtering
  Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2019 22nd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Ottawa, Canada [IEEE]
• Fourier Filters, Grid Filters, and the Fourier-Interpreted Grid Filter
  Florian Pfaff, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2019 22nd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Ottawa, Canada [IEEE]
• Geometry-Driven Deterministic Sampling for Nonlinear Bingham Filtering
  Kailai Li, Daniel Frisch, Benjamin Noack, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2019 European Control Conference (ECC), Naples, Italy [IEEE]
• Geometry-Driven Stochastic Modeling of SE(3) States Based on Dual Quaternion Representation
  Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber Physical Systems (ICPS), Taipei, Taiwan [IEEE]
• Comparative Study of Track-to-Track Fusion Methods for Cooperative Tracking with Bearings-only Measurements
  Susanne Radtke, Kailai Li, Benjamin Noack, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber Physical Systems (ICPS), Taipei, Taiwan [IEEE]
• Association Likelihoods for Directional Estimation
  Florian Pfaff, Kailai Li, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber Physical Systems (ICPS), Taipei, Taiwan [IEEE]
• Variable Step-Size Discrete Dynamic Programming for Vehicle Speed Trajectory Optimization
  Ziqi Ye, Kailai Li, Michael Stapelbroek, Rene Savelsberg, Marco Günther, Stefan Pischinger
  IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 476-484, Feb. 2019 [IEEE]

2018

• Nonlinear Progressive Filtering for SE(2) Estimation
  Kailai Li, Gerhard Kurz, Lukas Bernreiter, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2018 21st International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Cambridge, United Kingdom [IEEE]
• Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Using a Novel Dual Quaternion Particle Filter
  Kailai Li, Gerhard Kurz, Lukas Bernreiter, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2018 21st International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Cambridge, United Kingdom [IEEE]
• Wavefront Orientation Estimation Based on Progressive Bingham Filtering
  Kailai Li, Daniel Frisch, Susanne Radtke, Benjamin Noack, Uwe D. Hanebeck
  Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE ISIF Workshop on Sensor Data Fusion: Trends, Solutions, Applications (SDF), Bonn, Germany [IEEE]

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]