Short Bio

I am a Ph.D. student affiliated to ICON@Columbia and the Columbia Core AI Lab (CAIL), where I am advised by Prof. Zhengbo Zou. From 2021 to 2024, I studied as a PhD student at University of British Columbia. I earned my Master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was advised by Prof. Pingbo Tang.

Inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s films, I build robots that perceive, preserve, and reconstruct the world’s dynamics.

Mentoring

I am always interested in mentoring highly motivated undergraduate and master’s students in CE/ME/CS/EE. If you’re at Columbia and would like to discuss project ideas or research opportunities, don’t hesitate to send me an email!

Research Interests

• Indoor Environment Quality
• Robot Design

News

• [Sep. 2026] My paper “RoboTC: a robotic platform for privacy-ware active thermal comfort data collection” has been accepted to the IROS 2026 5th Workshop on Future of Construction: Collaborative Robots for Fabrication, Manufacturing, and Inspection!
• [Apr. 2026] My paper “USIVA: Uncertainty-guided Spatiotemporal Mapping for Indoor Ventilation Assessment” has been accepted to the 5th CVPR Workshop on Computer Vision for the Built World (CV4AEC) 2026!
• [Nov. 2025] My paper “RoboAuditor-LLM: A Robotic System for Energy Auditing via a Large Language Model and an Actionable Semantic Feature Map” has been published in ASCE OPEN: Multidisciplinary Journal of Civil Engineering!
• [Jun. 2025] My paper “Leveraging Open-Vocabulary Object Detection in Goal-Oriented Navigation for Assessing Indoor Energy–Intensive Devices” has been published in Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering!
• [Mar. 2025] My paper “LightSplat” has been accepted to i3CE 2025!
• [Dec. 2024] I just finished my first course project, YUMA, at Columbia.
• [Sep. 2024] Our paper “VIRL” has been accepted to the 2024 Conference on Robot Learning!
• [Aug. 2024] I started my new journey as a PhD student at Columbia University!
• [Jun. 2024] I completed the Plan for Research Impact with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals training course offered by HIKMA Collective and CIFAL Victoria.
• [Sep. 2023] Our paper RoboAuditor has been accepted to BuildSys 2023.
• [Aug. 2023] My first journal paper has been published in Automation in Construction.
• [Feb. 2023] TEA-bot has been featured in UBC Civil News!
• [Sep. 2022] Our paper TEA-bot has been accepted to BuildSys 2022.
• [May 2022] Our paper has been accepted to the IEEE ICRA 2022 Workshop on Future of Construction: Build Faster, Better, Safe – Together with Robotics.
• [Sep. 2021] I was the recipient of the Faculty of Applied Science Graduate Award (First-year CIV-EX Award).

Selected Projects

Services

Conference Reviewers

• 43rd International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction, 2026

• ASCE Construction Research Congress 2024, Conference Proceedings

Journal Reviewers

• ACM Computing Surveys 2024

• Advanced Engineering Informatics

Teaching

Course tutorial

• Hardware tutorial for UBC CIVL 498A

Contact

Address: 500 W 120th St, New York, NY 10027, United States
Email: cai.weijia@columbia.edu