Hello! This is Jianing “Jed” Yang (杨佳宁). I am an AI Engineer at Figure AI, where I’m working on building the future of general-purpose humanoid robots. I recently completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at University of Michigan, where I was a member of SLED lab, advised by Joyce Chai and frequently collaborating with David Fouhey. My research focused on understanding the 3D physical world through vision and language, enabling robots to act in such environments in a generalizable and controllable manner, and using natural language as feedback to teach and improve embodied agents. My dream is to build and deploy household robots to homes around the world to help humans with daily tasks and needs.
Before joining UMich, I obtained my Master’s in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University where I worked with Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency and Prof. Matt Gormley on Multimodal Natural Language Understanding, Dataset Bias Analysis, and Machine Learning. I got my Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.
Before I delved fully into research, I worked as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services, intern and full-time.
Outside of work, you will find me skiing/cooking/baking/photographing.
Click here for my full bio and here for my CV.
Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, 2025
University of Michigan
M.S. in Machine Learning, 2020
Carnegie Mellon University
B.S. in Computer Science, 2018
Georgia Institute of Technology