Hongyang Li is Assistant Professor and Assistant Director (AI Research & Tech Transfer) at the School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), where he leads OpenDriveLab. His research focuses on embodied intelligent systems for robotics and autonomous driving. He led the end-to-end autonomous driving project UniAD, which won the IEEE/CVF CVPR 2023 Best Paper Award and has influenced both academia and industry, including Tesla’s FSD. He proposed the bird’s-eye-view perception model BEVFormer, recognized among the Top 100 AI Papers in 2022, and created AgiBot World, the first large-scale real-robot ecosystem for studying scaling laws in robotic manipulation (IROS 2025 Best Paper Finalist).

Dr. Li has served as Area Chair for CVPR, NeurIPS (2023 Notable Area Chair), ICLR, ICCV, ICML, and RSS, and as a referee for Nature, Nature Communications, and Science Robotics. He chairs IEEE Standards P3474 (IEEE Vehicular Technology Society) and is an IEEE Senior Member. His honors include the China AI Wu Wen Jun Early Career Award (2024), BAAI Young Scholar (2025), and the RSS Early Career Spotlight Award (2026).

In April 2026, he co-founded Archon Robotics, a Shanghai-based company developing a general whole-body humanoid foundation model to enable human-like mobility and manipulation. The company closed a nine-figure RMB seed round in mid-2026 from investors including ZhenFund, Gaorong Capital, IDG Capital, and 5Y Capital, and plans to release its first open-source humanoid base model in late 2026.