Dr. Ya Li is an Associate Professor and Ph.D. Supervisor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Her research focuses on speech synthesis, affective computing, and multimodal interaction. She previously worked at the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR) at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Baidu, Inc.

She holds memberships in several professional committees, including the Technical Committee on Speech Dialogue and Auditory of the China Computer Federation (CCF), the Standing Committee of the National Conference on Human-Computer Speech Communication, the Technical Committee on Metaverse Technologies of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI), the Technical Committee on Affective Computing of CAAI, and the Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction of the China Society of Image and Graphics.

Dr. Li has published over 100 papers in prestigious international journals and conferences, such as IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (IEEE TASLP), IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAC), Speech Communication, AAAI, ICML, ACM Multimedia, ICASSP, and INTERSPEECH. She holds 24 authorized national patents.

She has led three National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) projects, one project of the National Key Research and Development Program, and many other national scientific research projects, and participated as a key member in multiple NSFC projects, National Key R&D Programs, and the National High-Tech Program (863 Program). 

Her research achievements have won the First Prize of the Science and Technology Progress Award of the Chinese Institute of Electronics in 2018 and the Second Prize of the Beijing Science and Technology Award in 2014. She also guided her students to win the Best Student Paper Award at INTERSPEECH 2016 and three Best Student Paper Awards at the National Conference on Human-Computer Speech Communication (NCMMSC).