I am the founder and CEO of Simular, the autonomous computer company, with the mission to build accessible general intelligence to liberate human labor. I am also a researcher aiming to build lifelong learning agents, with broad applied experiences across AI infrastructure, autonomous driving, videos, cameras, maps and advertisements.
Previously, I worked at Google DeepMind, Baidu Apollo, Facebook AI Research, CMU Robotics, Apple, Google Streetview, and Comcast Labs DC. I received my Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland College Park. My PhD thesis is spatial perception from visual and linguistic information.
Publication
- On the Reliability of Computer Use Agents. 2026. bib
- Retrospective Feature Estimation for Continual Learning. TMLR 2026 Featured Certification (presented at ICML 2026). bib
- Scaling Agents for Computer Use (Agent S3). TMLR 2026. bib
- Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents. COLM 2025. bib
- Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Human. ICLR 2025. bib
- Building an open-vocabulary video CLIP model with better architectures, optimization and data. PAMI 2024. bib
- PolicyCleanse: Backdoor Detection and Mitigation for Competitive Reinforcement Learning. ICCV 2023. bib
- Transforming CLIP to an Open-vocabulary Video Model via Interpolated Weight Optimization. ICML 2023. bib
- Hyperspherical Federated Learning. ECCV 2022. bib
- Semi-Supervised Vision Transformers. ECCV 2022. bib
- Neural Mean Discrepancy for Efficient Out-of-Distribution Detection. CVPR 2022. bibtex
- Information-theoretic Online Memory Selection for Continual Learning. ICLR 2022. bibtex
- AEVA: Black-box Backdoor Detection Using Adversarial Extreme Value Analysis. ICLR 2022. code bibtex
- One Pass ImageNet. NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on ImageNet. bibtex
- Task-agnostic Continual Learning with Hybrid Probabilistic Models. ICML 2021 workshop. bibtex
- The Effectiveness of Memory Replay in Large Scale Continual Learning. CVPR 2021 Workshop on Continual Learning. bibtex
- PredCoin: Defense against Query-based Hard-label Attack. 2021.
- Learning to Incentivize Other Learning Agents. NeurIPS 2020. bibtex code
- SOLA: Continual Learning with Second-Order Loss Approximation. ICML 2020 Workshop on Continual Learning. bibtex
- The AVA-Kinetics Localized Human Actions Video Dataset. 2020. data bibtex
- Hybrid Models for Open Set Recognition. ECCV 2020 Oral. bibtex
- PhysGAN: Generating Physical-World-Resilient Adversarial Examples for Autonomous Driving. CVPR 2020. bibtex
- Orthogonal Gradient Descent for Continual Learning. AISTATS 2020. bibtex
- Prediction, Consistency, Curvature: Representation Learning for Locally-Linear Control. ICLR 2020. bibtex
- Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistant. AAAI 2020. Bibtex
- Data Efficient Training for Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Behavior Policy Sharing. NeurIPS 2019 workshop. bibtex
- Cross-View Policy Learning for Street Navigation. ICCV 2019. bibtex
- Improving Open Set Domain Adaptation Using Image-to-Image Translation. ICME 2019.
- Layout-induced Video Representation for Recognizing Agent-in-Place Actions. ICCV 2019. bibtex
- C-WSL: Count-guided Weakly Supervised Localization. ECCV 2018. bibtex
- NISP: Pruning Networks using Neuron Importance Score Propagation. CVPR 2018. bibtex
- Dynamic Zoom-in Network for Fast Object Detection in Large Images. CVPR 2018. bibtex
- Learning Visual N-Grams from Web Data. ICCV 2017. bibtex
- Visual Relationship Detection with Internal and External Linguistic Knowledge Distillation. ICCV 2017. bibtex
- Generating Holistic 3D Scene Abstractions for Text-based Image Retrieval. CVPR 2017. poster data code bibtex
- Towards Unified Data and Lifecycle Management for Deep Learning. ICDE 2017. bibtex
- On Model Discovery For Hosted Data Science Projects. SIGMOD 2017 workshop. bibtex
- Selective Encoding for Recognizing Unreliably Localized Faces. ICCV 2015 spotlight. youtube code bibtex
- Efficient Discriminative Nonorthogonal Binary Subspace with its Application to Visual Tracking. 2015. bibtex
- Planar Structure Matching Under Projective Uncertainty for Geolocation. ECCV 2014. youtube bibtex
- Object Tracking Using Learned Feature Manifolds. CVIU 2013. bibtex
- Bag of Textons for Image Segmentation via Soft Clustering and Convex Shift. CVPR 2012. bibtex
- Discriminative Nonorthogonal Binary Subspace Tracking. ECCV 2010. bibtex
Talks & Interviews
- AGI Playground 2026. Gardens by the Bay, Singapore, August 2026.
- How AI Redefines Time. IC Your Trade, IC Markets with Bloomberg Media Studios, July 2026.
- SNU AIIS × Simular Computer-Use Agents Research Forum. Seoul National University AI Institute, July 2026.
- The Autonomous Computer: Full-stack Infrastructure for Computer Use Agents. Workshop at AI Engineer World's Fair 2026, San Francisco, June 2026.
- Xoogler Meetup with Simular's Ang Li. Xoogler and Singapore Global Network with SGInnovate, June 2026.
- Computer-use agents for governments and enterprises. The World Bank Group, June 2026.
- One Society, or Two? The Age of Autonomous Computers. SuperAI Summit 2026, Singapore, June 2026.
- The 100x Company: Rebuilding the Business Around AI. Panel at SuperAI Summit 2026, Singapore, June 2026.
- Simular: Innovating in Autonomous Computing with Ang Li. theCUBE + NYSE Wired, SiliconANGLE, April 2026.
- Industry Lightning Talk. UCSB CRML Agentic AI Summit, January 2026.
- StartX Demo Day. Stanford StartX, 2026.
- Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First Demo Day. Google Cloud, NY Tech Week, June 2025.
- AI Gatherings at Google I/O. Google, May 2025.
- How computer-use agents will take over everything we do. Second Order Effect, Episode 1, May 2025.
- Is the Defensible Moat a Myth in AI?. Fund/Build/Scale, January 2025.
- Computer use agents that think fast and slow. AI at Princeton, November 2024.
- The Race to AGI. Panel at Ai4 2024, Las Vegas, August 2024.
- Simular demo. SPC Demo Faire, South Park Commons, December 2023.
Press Coverage
- Simular sees Korea's hardware edge in AI agent era. The Korea Herald.
- Simular's AI agent wants to run your Mac, Windows PC for you. TechCrunch.
- Simular raises $21.5M for AI agent that controls your PC. The Tech Buzz.
- Former Google DeepMind engineer behind Simular says other AI agents are doing it wrong. The Register.
- Meet Simular, the startup that wants to build autonomous computers. IBM Think.
- Meet the AI Agent With Multiple Personalities. WIRED.
- Baidu Apollo Day: Expanded robotaxi operations and new autonomous driving software and hardware. Autonomous Driving International.
- Baidu Announces Plan to Build the World's Largest Fully Driverless Ride-Hailing Service Area in 2023. PR Newswire.
- DeepMind’s One Pass ImageNet: A New Benchmark for Resource Efficiency in Deep Learning. Synced Review
- ETA Prediction with Graph Neural Networks in Google Maps (Paper Explained). The AI Epiphany.
- An algorithm that evolved Starcraft bots is also training self-driving cars. MIT Technology Review
- Waymo and DeepMind mimic evolution to develop a new, better way to train self-driving AI. TechCrunch
- How evolutionary selection can train more capable self-driving cars. DeepMind Blog.
- Using automated data augmentation to advance our Waymo Driver. Waymo Blog
- How Google Maps uses DeepMind’s AI tools to predict your arrival time. The Verge.
- DeepMind claims its AI improved Google Maps travel time estimates by up to 50%. VentureBeat
- Traffic prediction with advanced Graph Neural Networks. DeepMind Blog
- DeepMind’s AI uses aerial and ground-view data to navigate unseen areas. VentureBeat
Academic Service
- Area Chair: NeurIPS Workshop on Meta Learning, 2021–2022.
- Senior Program Committee: AAAI 2021, IJCAI 2020–2021, AAMAS 2020.
- Session Chair: IJCAI 2021.
- Program Committee: ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, IJCAI, AISTATS, ACM Multimedia.
- Journal Reviewer: TPAMI, TNNLS, TIP, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, The Visual Computer, SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Machine Learning.