ECE Professor Ang Li Receives 2026 NSF CAREER Award

nsf award

Professor Li wearing dark blue plaid suit jacket with white shirt with high ceilinged window behind him.

ECE Professor Ang Li has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his project titled The Co-Evolve Ecosystem: Collaborative and Evolving Systems for Embodied Intelligence at the Edge. He will be awarded $600,000 over five years to support his research. The NSF Career Award is awarded to early-career faculty who have contributed to advances in the mission of their department and serve as academic role models in research and education.

Li's project aims to advance collaborative embodied AI—the intelligence that enables robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, wearable devices, and other smart systems to learn and work together in the physical world. As these intelligent machines become increasingly integrated into everyday life, they must cooperate across different environments, organizations, and hardware platforms to accomplish complex tasks. However, today's AI systems are largely designed to learn and operate in isolation, limiting their ability to collaborate effectively.

His research will develop new AI foundations that enable diverse intelligent machines to share knowledge, adapt through collective experience, and coordinate their decisions while respecting practical constraints such as heterogeneous hardware, distributed ownership, and data privacy. By making collaboration among intelligent machines scalable and reliable, this research will help shape the next generation of embodied AI and accelerate intelligent services across healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and smart cities.

Professor Li has earned a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Duke University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Arkansas. Prior to joining ECE in 2023, he was research associate at Qualcomm AI Research. His research concentrates on the intersection of machine learning and edge computing, particularly on the development of large-scale networked and trustworthy systems.

Published August 6, 2026