Chicago Debate Showcase
Manling Li
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Kuruganti Junior Faculty Fellow
Northwestern University
Head, Multimodal Learning and Language Lab
AI researcher building language, vision, and robotics models that reason, plan, and interact with the physical world.
Biography
Manling
- AI agents
- Multimodal AI
- Reasoning and planning
- Robotics
- Foundation models
- Embodied AI
Manling Li is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University and the Kuruganti Junior Faculty Fellow. She leads the Multimodal Learning and Language Lab and is an affiliate faculty member of Northwestern’s Center for Robotics and Biosystems.
Her research connects language, vision, reasoning, planning and robotics. Her team develops foundation models and AI agents that interact with dynamic environments, moving from systems that generate information toward embodied agents that can act in the world.
Li earned her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford. Her honors include a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, EECS Rising Stars recognition and MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35. Her work has received the ACL Outstanding Paper Award and ACL and NAACL Best Demo Paper awards.
At the Chicago Debate Showcase
Why this question
In this debate, Li brings the technical perspective: how verification, reversibility and audit trails can make AI in healthcare safer, and where human intervention still matters.
Chicago appearance
Chicago Debate Showcase
WhenWednesday, October 21, 2026
WhereThe Ferris, 1 W. Monroe Street, Chicago, IL
Doors5:30 p.m. Chicago time
Confirmed debate. Human oversight or technical safeguards?
Resolved: Over the next decade, efforts to make AI use in healthcare safer should prioritize human oversight over technical safeguards.
The Chicago Debate Showcase
The scheduled date has passed. Check the event page for a verified update or recording.
Northwestern faculty profile (opens in a new tab)Multimodal Learning and Language Lab (opens in a new tab)Kuruganti Junior Faculty Fellowship (opens in a new tab)