Dr. Kun Li is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University. He was previously a Senior Research Scientist at Microsoft Research. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT, CAS), and conducted research internships at Microsoft Research and Peking University.

He has been recognized with numerous honors, including the CCF Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, ACM SIGHPC China Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, CCF Youth Talent Award in HPC, and ACM SIGHPC China Rising Star Award. His work has been published in top-tier CCF-A conferences such as SC, PPoPP, ATC, ASPLOS, and ICS, earning the Best Paper Award at PPoPP’24, SC’25 Best Student Paper Award Finalist, and SC’25 Reproducibility Challenge Finalist.

He serves as a keynote speaker at CCF HPC China 2024, ACM ChinaSC 2025, as an Executive Committee Member of the CCF Technical Committee on High-Performance Computing and Computer Architecture, and as a Program Committee Member for PPoPP 2026 (Distinguished Reviewer & Best Paper selection committee), ISC 2026.

My research focuses on highly scalable computing systems at the intersection of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). I aim to advance this vision through three core research directions:

• Physical AI – studies embodied intelligence, developing learning agents that perceive, act, and reason in the physical world through long-horizon, physically grounded interaction and decision-making.
• AI for Science – investigates large-scale, supercomputing-driven scientific intelligence by tightly integrating AI with extreme-scale simulations, enabling previously intractable studies in nuclear materials irradiation, quantum chemistry, and free energy calculations (FEP).
• Efficient AI – advances hardware-aware algorithms, compilers, and system optimizations that bridge high-performance computing and large-scale AI models, enabling efficient execution on modern AI accelerators.

I am continuously recruiting interns and postdoctoral researchers to join our AIoT group at Tsinghua AIR. Ph.D. positions are primarily offered to outstanding interns. If you are interested in joining the group, please feel free to contact me with your CV and a brief description of your research interests.