Jingquan (Renny) Li

Hello! I'm Jingquan Li, or you can call me Renny. You can also hear how to pronounce my name. I'm a first-year Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at University of California, Merced, advised by Prof. Ahmed Sabbir Arif. My research interests lie in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI).

I graduated with a B.Eng. in Computer Science from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, where I worked with Prof. Haizhou Li in the C3 Lab. During my undergraduate studies, I also conducted research with Prof. Xiang Wan at the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, and Prof. Pengcheng An at SUSTech.

Outside academia, I'm a passionate drummer and music lover with a broad taste across fusion, R&B, nu-metal, progressive rock, metalcore, and post-rock. Some of my favorite bands include Bring Me The Horizon, toe, Linkin Park, and Polyphia.

Thanks for stopping by! Feel free to reach out: jingquanli@ucmerced.edu

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Research

My research interests lie in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). I am broadly interested in how neural and physiological signals can be used to understand human perception and emotion, and how these insights can enable more natural and accessible forms of interaction.

We present GenMemo, a GenAI-enabled pipeline that transforms abstract concepts in structured propositional texts into concrete visual mnemonics to support encoding and recall. A three-group between-subjects study (N=69) shows that GenMemo improves immediate and delayed recall when adjacent frames share one mnemonic in overlapping pairs.

We propose a multilevel deep learning framework retrained on short-protein datasets to improve the prediction and analysis of protein–peptide interactions, aiding peptide drug target discovery and viral infection research.