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Weijia Cai 蔡伟嘉

Ph.D. Student
Columbia University
cai.weijia (at) columbia.edu



Short Bio

I am a Ph.D. student affiliated to ICON@Columbia, where I am fortunate to be 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 lucky to be advised by Prof. Pingbo Tang.

My motivation for research originates from Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, through which I learned to appreciate the beauty of perceiving, preserving, and reconstructing the world’s dynamics through art. I am fortunate enough to embrace the rise of AI and robotics during my PhD. With these advances, my robots with spatial perception and reasoning, are able to interact with the environments and describe the world 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

News

Selected Projects

  1. CoRL
    VIRL: Self-Supervised Visual Graph Inverse Reinforcement Learning
    Lei Huang, Weijia Cai, Zihan Zhu, Chen Feng, Helge Rhodin, Zhengbo Zou* (*Corresponding author)
    The 8th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024.
    PDF Project Page Poster Presentation

  2. BuildSys
    RoboAuditor: Goal-Oriented Robotic System for Assessing Energy-intensive Indoor Appliance via Visual Language Models
    Weijia Cai, Lei Huang, Zhengbo Zou* (*Corresponding author)
    Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys), 2023.
    PDF Project Page Oral Presentation

  3. AutoCon
    Dexterous manipulation of construction tools using anthropomorphic robotic hand
    Lei Huang, Weijia Cai, Zihan Zhu, Zhengbo Zou* (*Corresponding author)
    Automation in Construction, 2023.
    PDF Project Page Journal

  4. AutoCon
    Actively-exploring thermography-enabled autonomous robotic system for detecting and registering HVAC thermal leaks
    Weijia Cai, Lei Huang, Zhengbo Zou* (*Corresponding author)
    Automation in Construction, 2023.
    PDF Journal

  5. BuildSys
    TEA-bot: a thermography enabled autonomous robot for detecting thermal leaks of HVAC systems in ceilings
    Weijia Cai, Le Zhang, Lei Huang, Xinran (Celia) Yu, Zhengbo Zou* (*Corresponding author)
    Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys), 2022.
    PDF Oral Presentation

  6. ICRA workshop
    A Reinforcement Learning Based Approach for Conducting Multiple Tasks using Robots in Virtual Construction Environments
    Weijia Cai, Lei Huang, Zhengbo Zou* (*Corresponding author)
    IEEE ICRA 2022 Workshop on Future of Construction, Build Faster, Better, Safe – Together with Robotics. (ICRA), 2022.
    PDF Virtual Presentation

Services

Conference Reviewers


Teaching

Course tutorial


Contact

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