Science Alumni Spotlight: Yuqing Tang

Dr. Yuqing Tang received his PhD in Computer Science from the Graduate Center of CUNY in 2012. Today, he is senior director/researcher at XPeng Motors XLab, a Shenzhen-based lab of researchers and engineers taking on ambitious projects to reshape human-robot systems.  

After graduating from GC, Yuqing worked at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute as a postdoctoral fellow and a project scientist from 2012 to 2016. Leaving academia for a few years, Yuqing then took research scientist roles in the industry, such as labs at Microsoft Research, Facebook AI, and Alexa AI.

Over his multi-faceted career so far, Yuqing has contributed to a broad range of topics across AI: large-scale unsupervised pre-training, multi-modality and multi-task machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, computational dialectics, argumentation theory, symbolic model checking, multi-agent planning, and multi-agent dialogues, human-robot interaction, trust models and human factors, agent-based simulation, and more. 

Looking back, Yuqing believes his experiences at CUNY built an important piece of the foundation of his academic and industrial career. “Before the dawn of deep learning, my PhD advisor Simon Parsons taught reinforcement learning, and a course called 'Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems.' I was exposed to this subject early on, which went on to become the focus of my whole career. Through conferences and multi-institute research projects, my PhD advisor also introduced me to the leading researchers across US and Europe, paving my way to high-value research community networks and opportunities, e.g. an internship at IBM research, a postdoc at CMU, and so on.”

From his time at the Graduate Center to his current role at XPeng, Yuqing says all of his endeavors have centered on pursuing the integration of free form knowledge, data-driven machine learning, and physical actuators of robots into intelligent systems with cognitive capability.

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