Ziyi Yang bio photo

Ziyi Yang

Ph.D. student in Computer Science

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I’m a PhD student in Computer Science at Brown University advised by Prof. Stefanie Tellex and Prof. George Konidaris. My interest lies in the intersection of Robotics, Language, and Planning. My goal is to bridge human concept and robot behaviors with structural systems (neuro-symbolic, compositional, hierarchical, etc.) I believe that The Bitter Lesson might be right for the past, but doesn’t tell us about the future. I enjoy talking with people regarding research ideas and PhD career/application. Please feel free to email me if you would like to talk!

Previously, I obtained my M.S degree in Robotics at Northeastern University, working with Prof. Lawson Wong on the topic of vision-language navigation. I had a background in Mechanical Engineering, while I later found my interest in deep learning & robotics and transferred to the field of robotics in 2020, after finishing my internship at Analogic.

Currently, I’m leading a happy life with my girlfriend fiancé wife (!) and my cat in Providence :)


Current Interests:

  • Representation and abstraction learning for different “concepts” in robotics, e.g., motor skills, objects, spatial & temporal relationships.
  • Skill dicovery and skill composition from robot demonstrations.
  • Language grounding in robot learning and task-level planning.
  • Leveraging large pretrained models for embodied reasoning.
  • Reading manga. Osamu Tezuka is my GOAT. Here is my manga rating page.
  • The Binding of Isaac. (1000+ hrs on record)
  • (Last updated: Apr 26)

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