Jiaying Fang
Jiaying Fang

MS EE Student

About Me

I am a Master Student at Stanford University. My research interest lies in the intersection of Robotics, Computer Vision and Haptic Sensing.

I have worked on robot learning at the Interactive Perception and Robot Learning Lab and surgical robotics at Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine Lab at Stanford. In summer 2024, I joined Intuitive Surgical working on Human-Robot Interaction as a Machine Learning Intern.

Prior to my Masters study at Stanford, I finished my BEng degree in Electronic and Information Engineering with the highest award at HK PolyU.

Download CV
Interests
  • Robotics
  • Computer Vision
  • Haptic Sensing
Education
  • MSc in Electrical Engineering

    Stanford University

  • BEng (Honours) in Electronic and Information Engineering

    Hong Kong Polytechnic University

  • Exchange Student

    McGill University

📚 My Research
I have worked on multiple projects in robotics, machine learning and robot learning with haptic feedback.
Selected Projects
Recent Projects
(2024). Force-based Robot Learning from Demonstration for Soft Tissue Manipulation. HAI at Five.
(2022). LQR Control for UGV in SE(2).

Experience

  1. Research Assistant

    Interactive Perception and Robot Learning Lab, Stanford University

    Supervisor: Prof. Jeannette Bohg

    • Designing and implementing a cross-embodiment scheme to zero-shot transfer a policy trained on videos of humans performing a task to a robot. To be submitted in January 2025, aiming for RSS 2025.
    • Evaluated Reinforcement Learning methods on robotics tasks that require fast reactive motions in Mujoco. This project is funded by Toyota Research Institute.
    • Conducted joint torque feedback analysis on a large-scale robotics dataset - DROID dataset. Presented important rules of haptic data collection in future large-scale distributed robotics dataset at Stanford cross-labs robotics meeting.
    Slides
  2. Machine Learning Intern

    Intuitive Surgical
    • Designed and implemented an end-to-end deep learning-based 3D gaze estimation algorithm. The algorithm is robust to head motions, and it improves the gaze estimation performance by 84.5%.
    • Generated more than 100k synthetic images with suitable domain randomization in Blender for gaze estimation training.
    • Designed real-world gaze estimation data collection pipeline and conducted data collection. Conducted detailed analysis and visualization of the dataset.
    • Implemented a semi-auto labeling tool for pupil localization and segmentation using SAM2.
  3. Research Assistant

    Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine Lab, Stanford University

    Supervisor: Prof. Allison Okamura

    • Designed and Implemented a force-aware autonomous tissue manipulation model using imitation learning with da-Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). The task completion rate of autonomous tissue retraction increased 50% with haptic sensing.
    • To be submitted to RAL around December 2024.
    • Presented force-aware autonomous surgery at Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Conference 2024.
    Poster
  4. Computer Vision Algorithm Intern

    China Telecom AI
    • Co-led the team in the ICCV'23 Open Fine-Grained Activity Detection Challenge.
    • Won third place on the video activity recognition track and second place on the video activity detection track.
    Challenge
  5. Undergraduate Research Assistant

    Prof. Mak's Lab, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

    Supervisor: Prof. Man-Wai Mak

    • Implemented deep speaker embedding for speaker verification with a domain loss to alleviate the languages mismatch problem.
    • The performance of the ECAPA-TDNN (pre-trained using the English dataset) on the unlabelled Chinese dataset has improved by 10% with the MMD-based domain loss. Won the Honours Project Technical Excellence Award.
    Report and Code
  6. Undergraduate Research Assistant

    Dynamics, Estimation, and Control in Aerospace and Robotics Lab, McGill University

    Supervisor: Prof. James Forbes

    • Designed a finite-horizon LQR control of UGV for path tracking.
    • Robot Operating System was used during implementation. The state of UGV was represented as an element of direct Euclidean isometries, SE(2).
    Report
  7. Undergraduate Research Assistant

    Autonomous Systems Lab, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

    Supervisor: Prof. Yuxiang Sun

    • Developed a deep learning-based integration of monocular visual odometry and multi-object tracking.
    • Deployed deep optical-flow estimation for localization and 3D object detection models for 3D multi-object tracking.

Education

  1. MSc in Electrical Engineering

    Stanford University

    GPA: 4.18/4.00

    Specialization:

    • Robotics
    • Machine Learning
    • Signal Processing
  2. BEng (Honours) in Electronic and Information Engineering

    Hong Kong Polytechnic University

    GPA: 4.01/4.00

    Minor:

    • Applied Mathematics
  3. Exchange Student

    McGill University
    GPA: 4.00/4.00
Skills
Python, C, C++, Java, MATLAB, R
Linux (Ubuntu), Raspberry Pi, STM32, Arduino
PyTorch, TensorFlow, Jax, ROS, dVRK, Git, Docker, LaTeX, Blender, Mujoco, Gazebo, AutoCAD, SolidWorks
3D Printing, Circuit Design, Prototyping
Awards
Honour Project - Technical Excellence Award
Hong Kong Polytechnic University ∙ June 2023
  • This award aims to recognize final-year students who excel in their Honours Project.
  • Sole recipient of the award in 2022/23.
Outstanding Student Award of Faculty of Engineering
Hong Kong Polytechnic University ∙ December 2022
  • A prestigious annual honor awarded to a single distinguished final-year undergraduate student within the Faculty of Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
  • This award aims to award full-time final-year students who excel in both academic and non-academic pursuits during their studies.
Scholarship on Outstanding Performance
Hong Kong Polytechnic University ∙ December 2021
  • This award aims to recognize outstanding local and non-local students studying Hong Kong.
  • The scholarship is $80,000 HKD a year.
Earlier Projects

Here are a selection of projects that I have worked on earlier.