avatar

Laura Yu Zheng

Ph.D. Student
University of Maryland, College Park
lyzheng (at) umd.edu


About Me

I am currently a 5th year CS Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, supervised by Professor Ming Lin at the GAMMA Group. My north star in research is safer, more transparent, and interpretable autonomous driving. I believe that designing deep learning frameworks for driving with interpretable and transferable priors in mind will ultimately lead to safer, socially-viable, and impactful policies. More specifically, my research interest involves combining simulation techniques and deep learning for autonomous driving and general multi-agent interaction scenarios. While this paradigm has been explored for physics-based simulation, applying it to traffic simulation is challenging since existing mathematical models of simulation describe approximations (rather than exact pathing) of human beings. Previously, I interned at Waymo with Omar Makhlouf, Kitware with Brian Clipp and at GESDISC, NASA Goddard SFC / ADNET Systems with Arif Albayrak, William Teng, and Mohammad Khayat.

Education

Ph.D in Computer Science, Fall 2020 - Present
University of Maryland, College Park

B.S. in Computer Science, Fall 2016 - Fall 2019
University of Maryland, College Park
QUEST; CS; University Honors

News

Publications

  1. IROS '24
    Laura Zheng, Sanghyun Son, Jing Liang, Xijun Wang, Brian Clipp, Ming Lin
    International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024.

  2. IROS '24
    Sandeep Thalapanane, Sandip Kumar, Guru Peethambari, Sourang SriHari, Laura Zheng, Julio Poveda, Ming C. Lin
    International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024.

  3. ICRA '24
    Yu Shen, Laura Zheng, Tianyi Zhou, Ming Lin
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024.

  4. NeurIPS '23
    Sanghyun Son, Laura Zheng, Ryan Sullivan, Yiling Qiao, Ming Lin
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023.

  5. ICRA '23
    Laura Zheng, Sanghyun Son, Ming Lin
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023.

  6. BADUE @ IROS '22
    Laura Zheng, Yu Shen, Ming Lin
    Behavior-Driven Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Environments (BADUE @ IROS), 2022.

  7. NeurIPS '21
    Yu Shen, Laura Zheng, Manli Shu, Weizi Li, Tom Goldstein, Ming Lin
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021.

  8. IROS '20
    Shivam Akhauri, Laura Zheng, Ming Lin
    International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2020.

Unpublished

Services

Conference Review

Journal Review

Volunteering

Teaching

Honors and Awards

Hobbies and Side Quests

FPS and RPG games are one of my favorite past times. Currently, I play VALORANT and Genshin Impact. Two of my favorite titles of all time are Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Enderal: Forgotten Stories, which started out as a Skyrim mod but has a beautiful storyline and fun combat mechanics. I can’t recommend Enderal enough.. if you like Skyrim, you will love Enderal. My favorite music to listen to is original soundtracks from video games, films, and classical music (particularly Liszt and Rachmaninoff).

I also played on the UMD women’s club ice hockey team from 2016-2019 as left wing. It was a blast. Check out the team Instagram if you want to support!

Here’s a playlist of various uploads from my childhood YouTube account, where I post funny music/skating performance videos, gaming montages and the occasional travel vlog:


Powered by Jekyll and Minimal Light theme.