Li has B.Sc. in communication engineering from Nanjing University, China; an M.Sc. in signal processing from the Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences; and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California.
His research interests are in the areas of audio, speech and language processing as well as multimodal behavior signal analysis and interpretation. He has published more than 160 papers and served as the member of IEEE speech and language technical committee, APSIPA speech and language processing technical committee. He was the area chair of speaker and language recognition at Interspeech 2016, Interspeech 2018, Interspeech 2020, SLT2022. He is the technical program co-chair at Odyssey 2022 and ASRU 2023. He is an editorial member of Computer Speech and Language and APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing. Works co-authored with his colleagues have won first prize awards at Interspeech Computational Paralinguistic Challenge 2011, 2012 and 2019, ASRU 2019 MGB-5 ADI challenge, Interspeech 2020 and 2021 fearless steps challenge, VoxSRC 2021 and 2022 challenge, ASVspoof21 challenge, ICASSP22 M2Met challenge ADD2023 challenge and ICASSP23 MISP challenge. He received the IBM faculty award in 2016, the ISCA Computer Speech and Language best journal paper award in 2018 and the youth achievement award of outstanding achievements of scientific research in higher education in 2020.