About

William Li is a Machine Learning Engineering Manager at Apple, where he leads a team in Siri that researches, builds, and ships natural language understanding (NLU) features, models, and systems for billions of devices and users. With over 6 years of relevant experience, William is actively hiring machine learning engineers, research scientists, data scientists, and data/software engineers with a passion for ML, NLP, data science, and great software. William completed his PhD in Computer Science at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Laboratory for Financial Engineering. He was also a Fellow and Affiliate at the Harvard University Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society, focusing on artificial intelligence and open government datasets. His PhD focused on language technologies for understanding law, politics, and public policy. Previously, he earned master's degrees at MIT in computer science and the Technology and Policy Program, where he focused on natural language understanding in spoken dialogue systems and assistive technology. As an undergraduate, he was an Engineering Science student at Skule™ at the University of Toronto. William is passionate about the fields of assistive technology and accessibility. He has conducted research, taught classes, and built community efforts around assistive technology, accessibility, disability, and inclusion, working collaboratively with people with disabilities to develop technologies that increase independence and broaden participation. Technology is most powerful when it empowers everyone, and he is proud to be part of a company that puts accessibility at the heart of the products they make. In his current role at Apple, William manages the Siri Natural Language Features Team, where they build natural language understanding (NLU) models to support Siri's domains and features across all platforms, develop new machine learning models and software systems to support new Siri capabilities, and lead cross-functional efforts across machine learning, data science, and software teams across Siri and Apple to improve the quality and accuracy of Siri in strategically important areas. William's tech stack includes ML, Senior Software Engineer, NLU, Research Scientist, Data Scientist, and NLP.