A new academic year at IIIS always means a fresh batch of brilliant students. Since its establishment, IIIS has become a preferred choice for many international talents. Tia Chen, a UC Berkeley graduate from the United States, has joined us in 2024 with a deep passion for embodied AI. In an exclusive interview, she told us about her choice and experience of pursuing a doctoral degree at IIIS.
Visiting 2024 World Robot Conference in Beijing
Tia Chen is currently a first year doctoral student in Professor Huazhe Xu's group at Tsinghua IIIS. Her research area is intelligent robotics and efficient learning algorithms. Since young, she has been fascinated by intelligent robots that can implement human commands. In middle school, her favorite teacher was a very nice lady who was wheelchair bound. For someone like her, simple tasks like erasing the whiteboard required a lot of efforts. Tia began to appreciate how helpful intelligent robots could be for people who share similar needs as her teacher. Once in college, she took AI, machine learning, and robotics classes with a dream in mind - to create household robots that can assist people with their daily tasks.
RoboCook: Long-Horizon Elasto-Plastic Object Manipulation with Diverse Tools
What connected her to Tsinghua IIIS was a paper written by Professor Huazhe Xu. The paper came with interesting videos of a robot manipulating dough to make dumplings. Watching them, she imagined how useful they could be for people with limited mobility. Tia decided to contact the group to learn about the project and the people behind it. Enthusiastic response from the group gave her a very positive and lasting impression. She continued interacting with them and decided to join the group in Fall 2024.
Visiting the Forbidden City
To get an early start, in Spring 2024, she arrived at Tsinghua as a visiting student. The research group's welcoming environment immediately dispelled her worries about adapting to the new environment. From day one, she always felt fully welcomed as a member of the team. She happily joined the group's social and academic activities, both on and off campus. Currently, she is working on data augmentation for improving robotic training. When having specific questions, other group members readily provide help and guidance.
Registration Day at Tsinghua University with Sister Sara
Tia said, she expects her study and life at Tsinghua IIIS to continue their upwards trajectories. The group, the institute, and the university have provided her with a nurturing growth environment. In addition, her sister Sara is also studying at Tsinghua's Aerospace Engineering department, so in many ways, being at Tsinghua feels like being at a home away from home, and the community feels like her own greater family. There will be challenges ahead, but this environment gives her optimism to resolve them. She is grateful to be on a journey that brings her closer to her dream of helping people.
Since its establishment, IIIS has aimed to cultivate top international talent in computer science, artificial intelligence, and quantum information. It has become a preferred choice for many international students from countries such as the United States, Canada, Germany, Poland, South Korea, Pakistan, Malaysia, Brazil, Belgium, Sweden, South Africa, and the Netherlands.
Many students have chosen to pursue their master’s or doctoral degrees at IIIS after graduating from University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University College London (UCL), New York University, University of Southern California, UC Berkeley, University of Toronto, and Lund University, etc. We look forward to having you join us! Link: https://iiis.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/join
Editor: Yueliang Mona Jiang
Reviewer: Xiamin Lv
