Jiachen Li
Research Engineer at Apple
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJiachen Li is a research engineer at Apple with a PhD from UIUC and eight years of experience building and publishing research-driven systems in multimodal LLMs, visual grounding, detection, and image/video matting and segmentation. He transitioned from doctoral research and teaching at UIUC into industry research roles and internships at Picsart, ByteDance, and Apple, bringing academic rigor to production-focused problems. Jiachen’s work sits at the intersection of perception and language models, with practical experience moving prototypes toward deployable research during internships and at a major tech lab. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he combines deep technical specialization with applied engineering discipline, often tackling the messy engineering needed to scale vision-language models. An uncommon thread in his profile is consistent cross-industry exposure—startups, large tech, and academia—giving him a pragmatic view of research impact and product integration.
8 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Electrical & Computer Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Electrical & Computer Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignBachelor of Science - BS EE, Bachelor of Science - BS EE at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Chinese, English
Github Skills (43)
pytorch10
benchmark10
toolbox10
openmmlab10
mask-rcnn10
instance-segmentation10
vision-transformer10
retinanet10
swin-transformer10
object-detection10
faster-rcnn10
glip9
transformer9
deep-learning8
autofocus8
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
chrisjuniorli/chrisjuniorli.github.io
Jun 2021 - Dec 2022
Contributions:76 commits, 216 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 6 months
SHI-Labs/VMFormer
Aug 2022 - Nov 2022
[Preprint] VMFormer: End-to-End Video Matting with Transformer
Contributions:22 commits, 8 PRs, 14 pushes in 3 months
pytorchmattingvideo-mattingvision-transformerend-to-end
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.