Dear Prospective Students/Researchers,

Thanks for your interest in being a part of our team. We have multiple fully-funded PhD, MPhil, research assistant, and intern/engineer/visitor positions available at the Machine Vision and Intelligence Group (MVIG) (co-supervised with Prof. Cewu Lu) and Qing Yuan Research Institute, SJTU.

Research interests: Human-Robot-Scene

(S) Embodied AI: how to make agents learn skills from humans and interact with humans.

(S-1) Human Activity Understanding: how to learn and ground complex/ambiguous human activity concepts (body motion, human-object/human/scene interaction) and object concepts from multi-modal information (2D-3D-4D).

(S-2) Visual Reasoning: how to mine, capture, and embed the logics and causal relations from human activities.

(S-3) General Multi-Modal Foundation Models: especially for human-centric perception tasks.

(S-4) Activity Understanding from A Cognitive Perspective: work with multidisciplinary researchers to study how the brain perceives activities.

(E) Human-Robot Interaction (e.g. for Smart Hospital): work with the healthcare team (doctors and engineers) in SJTU to develop intelligent robots to help people.

Our big goal:

A really smart (real or virtual) robot like C-3PO and R2-D2.

Team Style:

We are free, rational, 团结, 紧张, 严肃, 活泼. We have weekly meetings, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes group-by-group, on a need basis. As for papers, we prefer the top-tier ML, CV, and ROB conferences and journals (CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, CoRL, ICLR, ECCV, ICRA, TPAMI, etc.). We also work closely with the industry to actively promote the application of our works. Sure, we have sufficient funds and hardware (GPUs, Robots, and ergonomic equipments ) to support our work and your health.

Requirment:

We hope you have a good academic record, English skills, and solid programming skills. Most importantly, we hope you are self-motivated. None of the above requirements are mandatory, as long as you can demonstrate worthwhile scientific research potential or excellent engineering skills, you are welcome to join us. Please also refer to the recruit from Prof. Cewu Lu.

Development:

Usually, you will start with a well-formulated project and cooperate with a senior student to experience the complete research process: curiosity, question, thinking, survey, toy experiment, motivation, insight, trial-and-error, paper writing, submission, get acceptance or recycle if unlucky, camera ready, publication, and happy conference travel. I will attend the whole above process and work together with you. Next, you are going to start an independent project. ...

In general, there are four stages:
(1) Work step-by-step with me and senior students.
(2) Start with a well-defined problem from me and complete it according to detailed suggestions.
(3) Propose a good proposal, discuss it with me weekly, and complete it.
(4) Propose an excellent idea, make steady progress, and teach me a lot of things.
BTW, I expect all of our works open-sourced whenever it is permitted.

Enjoy life, enjoy research. May the force be with you.

Application:

CV and the other essential documents. Feel free to drop me an email, and let's chat (onsite or online).