PhD Spotlight: Haoqing Li, PhD’24, Electrical Engineering
Haoqing Li, PhD’24, electrical engineering, focused research on robust signal processing and statistical machine learning, with applications in satellite-based positioning systems and satellite-based image remote sensing. His technical contributions were published in more than two dozen peer-reviewed publications.
Prior to joining the PhD program in 2018, Haoqing Li earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Wuhan University and a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 2018 from Northeastern.
Li’s research interests broadly include robust signal processing and statistical machine learning, with applications in satellite-based positioning systems and satellite-based image remote sensing. Advised by Pau Closas, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, the focus of his dissertation was on developing inference techniques that are robust to different modalities of outliers. He has proposed groundbreaking methodologies to perform automatic outlier rejection, which will impact such processes as mitigating interferences in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers. He applied these methodologies to direct-positioning schemes yielding to high-sensitivity and robust positioning solutions using GNSS signals. Li also explored machine learning data-driven models that contributed to improving the overall performance of physics-based models, particularly to address the long-standing problem of multipath propagation in the GNSS literature. Additionally, he contributed to the field of hyperspectral imaging and satellite-based remote sensing through the development of robust filtering techniques for multi-sensor data fusion.
Haoqing’s technical contributions were published in more than two dozen peer-reviewed publications. His dissertation work was published in top-tier journals such as IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, and the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. In these works, he has collaborated with multiple leading researchers from around the globe. He participated in projects that were funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, National Geographic Society, and Google.
During his thesis period, Li actively participated in the academic community by mentoring incoming PhD students and serving as teaching assistant for several signal processing courses. He has also been a regular reviewer in prestigious journals and conferences.
Li will be continuing research on GNSS interferences (multipath and spoofing) detection and mitigation techniques as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary, Canada.