Rebecca Li
Senior AI Research Manager at Canva
San Jose, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRebecca Li is a Senior AI Research Manager and GenAI pioneer with 9 years of experience turning research ideas into production-grade products, most recently leading CORE’s US/Canada AI research team at Canva after driving Leonardo.AI work. Previously an engineering founder on Adobe Firefly, she scaled GenAI efforts from prototype to platform—helping generate billions of safe images globally—while building evaluation frameworks, inference SDKs, and industry-leading safety standards. Her background spans academic bio-image analysis and production ML systems, giving her a rare blend of rigorous research, hands-on engineering, and product leadership. Rebecca is known for scaling teams and processes (10→100+ contributors), advancing multimodal evaluation with LLM judges, and shipping foundational tooling like a 300+ operation image augmentation API. She also communicates widely on GenAI fundamentals and Responsible AI, and maintains a technical blog and portfolio documenting her applied research and engineering work.
8 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Electrical and Computer Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of HoustonBachelor of Science-BS Information Engineering, Bachelor of Science-BS Information Engineering at Xidian University
Github Skills (45)
scoring10
polygon10
correspondence10
keras10
heatmap10
mask10
segmentation10
object-detection10
contrast10
apollo10
image-processing9
machine-learning9
stylegan9
affine-transformation9
instance-segmentation9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
Xiaoyang-Rebecca/xiaoyang-rebecca.github.io
Jul 2020 - Mar 2025
http://xiaoyang-rebecca.github.io
Contributions:2 PRs, 368 pushes, 4 branches in 4 years 9 months
Xiaoyang-Rebecca/PatternRecognition_Matlab
Oct 2017 - Jun 2021
Contributions:12 commits, 11 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 8 months
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