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

• Construction Robotics: navigation, perception
• Indoor Environment Quality: simulation, robotic information gathering
• Gaussian Splatting: 3D representation
• Large Language Model: planning

News

• [April. 2026] My paper “USIVA: Uncertainty-guided Spatiotemporal Mapping for Indoor Ventilation Assessment” has been accepted by CVPR 5th 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!
• [June. 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 by i3CE2025!
• [Dec. 2024] Just finished my first course project YUMA at Columbia.
• [Sep. 2024] Our paper “VIRL” has been accepted by 2024 Conference on Robot Learning!
• [Aug. 2024] I started my new journey as a PhD student at Columbia University!
• [Jun. 2024] I completed PLAN FOR RESEARCH IMPACT WITH THE UNITED NATIONS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS training course from HIKMA COLLECTIVE and CIFAL Victoria.
• [Sep. 2023] Our paper RoboAuditor has been accepted to BuildSys2023.
• [Aug. 2023] My first journal has been published in Automation in Construction.
• [Feb. 2023] TEA-bot on UBC Civil News!
• [Sep. 2022] Our paper TEA-bot has been accepted to BuildSys2022.
• [May. 2022] Our paper has been accepted to IEEE ICRA 2022 Workshop on Future of Construction: Build Faster, Better, Safe – Together with Robotics.
• [Sep. 2021] I was the receipt 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