Heng Yang
Assistant Professor at Harvard SEAS
Robotics, Vision, Control, Optimization, Learning
I am an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University.
I direct the Computational Robotics Group at Harvard University. My group is broadly interested in the intersection of theory and practice, particularly computational algorithms that are robust, efficient, offer strong performance guarantees, and supercharge the next generation of intelligent systems.
I obtained my Ph.D. in Robotics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I was fortunate to work with Luca Carlone in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.
I am also a part-time research scientist at NVIDIA Research.
News
| Oct 10, 2024 | Presented The Power of Modern Convex Optimization in Nonconvex Perception, Control, and Learning at Northeastern University, INRIA Paris, and LAAS-CNRS Toulouse! |
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| Aug 31, 2024 | I infrequently update my personal website. For frequent updates, please check out my group website. |
| Mar 22, 2024 | Presented Fast and Certifiable Approximation of Pose Uncertainty Sets in the INFORMS Optimization Society conference. |
| Feb 6, 2024 | Preprint on discounted adaptive online prediction, as a downstream application, we give a better algorithm for performing online adaptive conformal prediction! |
| Jan 31, 2024 | Preprint on sparse polynomial optimization with unbounded sets, as an application, we solve optimal control of the Van der Pol oscillator to certifiable global optimality. Congrats to Shucheng! |
| Jan 8, 2024 | Preprint on understanding and computing the true optimal value function of infinite-horizon pendulum swing-up |
| Dec 11, 2023 | Talk at Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, thank you Kim-Chuan Toh! |
| Nov 30, 2023 | Preprint with Yukai Tang and Jean-Bernard Lasserre: revisiting the minimum enclosing ellipsoids of set-membership estimation in control and perception, using convex optimization; my presentation at Autonomy Talks can be found here |
| Sep 30, 2023 | Preprint with Xihang Yu: SIM-Sync, certifiably optimal 3D scene reconstruction with learned depth |
| Jul 30, 2023 | Congratulations to Shucheng Kang on getting his paper “Verification and Synthesis of Robust Control Barrier Functions” accepted to IEEE Conference on Decision and Control! |
Awards & Recognitions
| 2022 | MIT LIDS/ALL Magazine: Honing Robot Perception |
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| 2021 | MIT News Spotlight: Making self-driving cars safer through keener robot perception |
| 2021 | Best Paper Award Finalist at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) |
| 2021 | Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Pioneer |
| 2020 | Graduated Non-Convexity (GNC) algorithm included in Matlab Navigation Toolbox and appeared in MathWorks News and Stories |
| 2020 | Best Paper Award Honorable Mention from IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL) |
| 2020 | Best Paper Award in Robot Vision at International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) |
| 2019 | MIT News Spotlight: Spotting objects amid clutter |
| 2015 | Tsinghua Principal Scholarship (Tsinghua News Spotlight) |