Dr. Xiaoyang Li (Rebecca) is a GenAI pioneer and a founding member of Adobe’s groundbreaking AI platform, Firefly. With a unique blend of research, engineering, and leadership expertise, she helped transform 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 include 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, deploying multimodal ML classifiers with vision understanding models, and advancing 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 holds a Ph.D. from the University of Houston, where she specialized in large-scale medical image processing under Dr. Badri Roysam. Her research has been published in top journals (Nature Communications) and presented at leading AI conferences (CVPR, NeurIPS, MICCAI).

With experience spanning creative image generation, medical imaging, self-driving cars, and energy industries, Rebecca excels at bridging research and real-world applications. She’s passionate about scaling AI innovations to solve impactful problems and fostering cross-functional collaboration to drive results.

➤   What’s next?

Rebecca is eager to explore opportunities to apply her expertise in GenAI, responsible AI practices, and cross-team leadership to new challenges. Connect with her on LinkedIn or via email to discuss collaborations or career opportunities.

Recent Activities

➤   05/2024, Technial Insight Speaker, “Harm and Bias Evaluation and Solution for Adobe Firefly”, Embedded Vision Summit [Conference)

➤   02/2024, Keynote Speaker, “The Journey of Firefly in Adobe GenAI”, University of Houston, Education Innovation & Technology AI Event [Conference]

➤   09/2023, Reprentitive, Research/GenAI Ambassador, Grace Hopper Celebration, Adobe Booth [Conference]