Zechen Li - Academic Homepage

About Me

I am a third-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, supervised by Prof. Flora Salim and Prof. Hao Xue. I am also a Student Researcher at Google Health, working on the intersection of multimodal foundation models and health AI.

My research lies at the intersection of wearable sensing, large language models, and intelligent health systems. I am broadly interested in human activity recognition, continuous glucose monitoring, multimodal health modeling, and LLM4Health, with a focus on interpretable reasoning, personalized insights, and intelligent agents for real-world healthcare applications.

News

ZARA accepted to ACL 2026. See you in San Diego! (Apr 9, 2026)
COMODO accepted to IMWUT / UbiComp 2026. See you in Shanghai! (Apr 1, 2026)
Started as a Student Researcher at Google Health in Mountain View. (Feb 2, 2026)
SensorLLM accepted to EMNLP 2025. See you in Suzhou! (Aug 20, 2025)

Education

University of New South Wales, Sydney

PhD in Computer Science

Advisors: Prof. Flora Salim and Prof. Hao Xue

Sep 2023 - Present

Northeastern University, Boston

Master of Science in Data Analytics Engineering

GPA: 3.917/4.0

2019 - 2021

Southern Medical University, Guangzhou

Bachelor of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering (Information Technology)

2015 - 2019

Experience

Google

Student Researcher

Mentors: Dr. Ahmed Abdelhadi Metwally, Prof. Yuzhe Yang

Feb 2026 - Present

UNSW Sydney

Casual Academic (Tutor)

COMP6713 NLP COMP9517 Computer Vision DATA9001 Data Science Fundamentals COMP9444 Neural Networks & Deep Learning

Feb 2025 - Present

Singapore University of Technology and Design

Visiting Researcher

Advisor: Prof. Wei Lu

Mar 2023 - Jul 2023

University of Copenhagen

Research Assistant (Part-time)

Advisor: Prof. Anders Søgaard

Aug 2021 - Aug 2022

UC San Diego

Research Assistant (Part-time)

Advisor: Prof. Pengtao Xie

Jun 2020 - Mar 2021

Publications

*: equal contribution

ZARA: Training-Free Motion Time-Series Reasoning via Evidence-Grounded LLM Agents.

Zechen Li, Baiyu Chen, Hao Xue, Flora D. Salim.

ACL Main, 2026.

Paper Code Poster Video
COMODO: Cross-modal Video-to-IMU Distillation for Efficient Egocentric Human Activity Recognition.

Baiyu Chen, Wilson Wongso, Zechen Li, Yonchanok Khaokaew, Hao Xue, Flora Salim.

IMWUT/UbiComp, 2026.

Paper Code
SensorLLM: Aligning Large Language Models with Motion Sensors for Human Activity Recognition.

Zechen Li, Shohreh Deldari, Linyao Chen, Hao Xue, Flora D. Salim.

EMNLP Main, 2025.

Paper Code Poster Video
Enhancing Spatio-temporal Quantile Forecasting with Curriculum Learning: Lessons Learned.

Du Yin, Jinliang Deng, Shuang Ao, Zechen Li, Hao Xue, Arian Prabowo, Renhe Jiang, Xuan Song, Flora Salim.

SIGSPATIAL, 2024.

Paper Code
QLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Quantificational Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning.

Zechen Li, Anders Søgaard.

NAACL Findings, 2022.

Paper Code
Self-supervised Regularization for Text Classification.

Meng Zhou*, Zechen Li*, Pengtao Xie.

TACL, 2021. Oral Presentation at NAACL 2021

Paper Code Video
On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19.

Meng Zhou, Zechen Li, Bowen Tan, Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Xuehai He, Zeqian Ju, Subrato Chakravorty, Shu Chen, Xingyi Yang, Yichen Zhang, Qingyang Wu, Zhou Yu, Kun Xu, Eric Xing, Pengtao Xie.

ACL Short Paper, 2021.

Paper