Dr. Lixin Li is a tenured full professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgia Southern. She started at Georgia Southern immediately upon receiving her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2003. Dr. Li is married to Dr. Reinhard Piltner, who also works at Georgia Southern. They have two daughters of whom they are very proud.
Dr. Li’s research focuses on spatiotemporal interpolation methods, air pollution, GIS (Geographic Information System) applications and machine learning. As human population increases, so do human needs and demands for various resources for their survival. However, this leads to an increase in the amounts of pollutants in our environment that affect the health of more and more people. Dr. Li’s research mainly focuses on assessing the trend of various air pollutants using spatiotemporal interpolation algorithms with efficacy and efficiency so that relationships between public health outcomes and spatiotemporally interpolated environmental air pollution values can be evaluated. In particular, her research addresses these challenges by integrating space and time simultaneously in order to achieve better spatiotemporal interpolation accuracy, as well as developing efficient interpolation algorithms that can be applied over a large geographic area. In recent years, she has collaborated with other researchers in public health, computer science and GIS. They combined spatiotemporal interpolation methods with several machine learning methods.
Dr. Li has 57 peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers, and has given 50 conference presentations and invited talks. In 2020, Dr. Li also published a book titled Spatiotemporal Analysis of Air Pollution and Its Application in Public Health, published by Elsevier. Based on the OCLC WorldCat’s statistics on March 15, 2021, 578 academic libraries in more than 30 countries have collected her book, including Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, University of Chicago, Purdue University, New York University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Toronto, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Peking University, etc.
In addition to working at Georgia Southern, Dr. Li was invited by Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, as a SAOT Visiting Professor, August 2012 to August 2013. SAOT is a graduate school of the German Excellence Initiative, founded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She visited the Patten Recognition Lab in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and gained invaluable research experience in medical imaging.
Finally, Dr. Li enjoys working with undergraduate and graduate students in research. She has supervised six graduate students and four undergraduate students for research projects in computer science. Many of them have co-authored publications with Dr. Li.
