Laura Yu Zheng

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.

Aside from my thesis work in autonomous driving, I am also working on projects in social virtual reality, e-sports, and public health.

I will be joining Waymo full-time in August 2025!

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

• [Jun. 2025] Working with REU students for this summer term. 🌻
• [Jun. 2025] Our paper on Quantifying and Modeling Driving Style in Trajectory Forecasting is accepted to IROS 2025! 🎉
• [May 2025] SensAug paper has been accepted to ICML 2025! 🎉
• [Mar. 2025] Passed my preliminary exam and successfully advanced to candidacy 😁
• [Feb. 2025] Parallelized Differentiable Traffic Simulation paper is accepted to ICRA 2025! 🎉
• [Jan. 2025] I was selected for Future Leaders in Robotics and AI seminar series! 🎉
• [Jul. 2024] “Deep Stochastic Kinematic Models for Probabilistic Motion Forecasting in Traffic” is accepted to IROS 2024! 🎉
• [Jul. 2024] Our paper on our co-simulated driving and traffic simulation in VR, TRAVERSE, is accepted to IROS 2024! 🎉

Selected Publications

Service

• ICRA, IROS, RA-L Reviewer
• Graduate Peer Mentor, 2023-2024
• 3x Graduate Mentor at Tech+Research for Technica @ UMD, the largest hackathon for marginalized genders, 2020-2022

Teaching

• Teaching Assistant, Learning-based Modeling, Simulation and Animation for Professor Ming Lin, Fall 2022
• Teaching Assistant, Data Structures for Professor Hanan Samet, Fall 2021
• Teaching Assistant, Data Science for Professor Jose Calderon, Spring 2022 and Spring 2021

Honors and Awards

• Selected speaker @ Future Leaders in Robotics and AI Seminar Series (Spring 2025)
• Recipient of Maryland Transportation Initiative Fellowship (Fall 2024)
• Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award (AY 2023-2024)
• Attendee @ CRA-W Grad Cohort for Women 2023
• Spotlight Talk at BADUE at IROS 2022
• CS Summer Research Fellowship, Fall 2021
• Grace Hopper Scholarship, Fall 2020
• Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School, Summer 2020 [Certificate]
• QUEST Honors Program, Cohort 29, Fall 2017
• President’s Scholarship, Fall 2016 - Spring 2020

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:

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