Yixin Zhu is a Boya Assistant Professor at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, where he serves as Assistant Dean. Dr. Zhu received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (2018), advised by Professor Song-Chun Zhu. His research aims to construct interactive AI systems by fusing high-level common sense---including functionality, affordance, intuitive physics, causality, and intent---with raw sensory data such as pixels and haptic signals. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to endow machines with sophisticated representations and robust reasoning capabilities across objects, scenes, shapes, numbers, and intelligent agents.Song-Chun Zhu is a distinguished computer scientist specializing in computer vision, cognitive AI, and robotics. He received his B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China (1991) and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1996). After positions at Stanford University and Ohio State University, he served as professor at UCLA (2002-2020), where he directed the Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning and Autonomy. Since 2020, he has been Chair Professor at Peking University and Tsinghua University, directing the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI). His pioneering work includes the FRAME model, stochastic grammar, and cognitive AI frameworks integrating visual commonsense reasoning. His contributions have earned him numerous accolades, including the David Marr Prize (2003), J.K. Aggarwal Prize (2008), and IEEE Fellow (2011). Through his research, institution building, and leadership in major conferences, Dr. Zhu continues to advance the development of interpretable and generalizable AI systems that bridge computational approaches with human-like reasoning.
