Dr. Xiaoyang Li (Rebecca) is a GenAI pioneer and was a founding member of Adobe’s groundbreaking AI platform, Firefly. With a unique blend of research, engineering, and leadership expertise, she played a key role in transforming a research concept into a product that generated over 13 billion AI images by 2024, with its applications recognized as one of Time’s Best AI Inventions of 2023.

Rebecca co-founded the Firefly SDK and served as the release tech lead, scaling its contributor base from 10 to over 100 engineers and researchers in just a few months. Her contributions included designing workflows, streamlining processes, and implementing collaboration strategies that became the backbone of Firefly’s rapid productization. She also led cross-functional initiatives on GenAI evaluation, deployed multimodal ML classifiers with vision understanding models, and advanced responsible AI practices through industry-leading safety standards.

Her technical expertise extends to building innovative tools like “Beacon-aug”, a cross-library image augmentation module with 300+ operations that earned the Top Session Award at Adobe Tech Summit 2022.

Rebecca also writes blog posts about AI foundations, career branding, and technology trends, sharing insights to help educate the community on stepping into the ML field, bridging research and production, leadership in AI, and navigating the evolving landscape of machine learning.

Recent Activities

➤   03/2025, Panelist, “Innovation at the Intersection of Technology, Education and Mobility”, Silicon Valley Immersive Experience: AI & Innovation Summit

➤   03/2025, Speaker, “Building Quality AI Product”, Business School of AI, WeeklyWed Talk [Link], Content