Yanzhi Wang is a Professor in the College of Engineering at Northeastern University, holding a courtesy appointment in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.

He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2014, where he received the Ming Hsieh Scholar Award. He obtained a B.S. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2009 with distinction.

Research Interests

  • Real-time and energy-efficient deep learning and artificial intelligence systems
  • Embodied AI and robotic foundational models
  • World modeling and physics AI
  • Large language models and large-scale generative AI systems
  • Neuromorphic computing and non-von Neumann computing paradigms

Awards and Recognition

Yanzhi's research has been published broadly in the intersection of AI/ML and hardware/system areas, on various top conferences and journals. Yanzhi's research works have been cited for 28,000 times according to Google Scholar with H-index 81. He received six Best Paper or Top Paper Awards, one Communications of the ACM Cover Featured Article with Interview, have another 12 Best Paper Nominations and four Popular Papers in IEEE TCAD. He received the U.S. Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, IEEE TC-SDM Early Career Award, Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Distinguished Leader Award, Constantinos Mavroidis Translational Research Award, Martin W. Essigmann Excellence in Teaching Award, etc. Besides, his group has received Massachusetts Acorn Innovation Award, Google Research Award, MathWorks Faculty Award, Ming Hsieh Scholar Award, DAC Service Award, etc. His group and students have received the first place in ISLPED Design Contest twice (2012, 2020), the first place in Student Research Competition at CGO 2021, the first place in Student Research Competition at ASP-DAC 2023, EECS Rising Star Award, and awards in multiple other contests such as Low Power Computer Vision Challenge 2019 and NeurIPS MicroNet Challenge 2019.

Yanzhi has delivered over 200 invited technical presentations on research of real-time and efficient deep learning, large-scale generative models, etc. His research works have been broadly featured and cited in around 500 media, including Boston Globe, Communications of the ACM (3 times), VentureBeat, The Register, PRNewswire, Medium, Yahoo News, Reuters, The New Yorker, Associated Press, Wired, NEU News, Import AI, Italian National TV, MRS TV, Quartz, ODSC, MIT Tech Review, TechTalks, IBM Research Blog, ScienceDaily, AAAS, CNET, ZDNet, New Atlas, etc.

Student Mentoring and Commercialization

Yanzhi has a very strong record in supervising students. He has around 18 academic descendants that have found tenure-track faculty positions such as University of Minnesota, University of Arizona, University of Georgia, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Zhejiang University, Nankai University, Chongqing University, etc. The others pursue industry and research careers at Google Research, Google Deepmind, CMU, Facebook Research, IBM Research, Snap Research, Amazon Research, Adobe Research, and Tencent Research U.S. Their sample achievements including contributor to Google Gemini, key author of Qwen 3 and Qwen Image, founder and CEO of Leap.IO, founding scientist of Beijing Humanoid Center, etc.

Yanzhi serves as co-founder and chief scientist of EmbodyX Inc., focusing on robotic learning systems. He is also founder of AIBao LLC. He serves as angel investor and core technical advisor or FedML Inc./TensorOpera/ChainOpera, which has become unicorn company.

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