Biography

Xiuming Zhang is currently a Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Tesla Autopilot, working on 3D object and scene understanding for vehicle and robot autonomy. Before Tesla, he worked on computational photography at Adobe Emerging Products Group. In August 2016, Xiuming earned his Ph.D. (CS) in computer vision and computer graphics with Prof. William T. Freeman at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During MIT, he also received mentorship from Dr. Jonathan T. Barron via internships at Google Research. Xiuming's doctoral dissertation Shape, Reflectance, and Illumination From Appearance studies inverse rendering and its applications, including 3D shape reconstruction and free-viewpoint relighting. He received his S.M. (CS) from MIT in 2018 and B.Eng. (EE) from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2015, with Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal. At NUS, his bachelor's thesis was advised by Prof. B. T. Thomas Yeo on Bayesian modeling of brain disorder heterogeneity. Besides Tesla, Adobe, Google, MIT, and NUS, Xiuming has also spent time in the research labs of the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, and the University of Waterloo, Canada. Recognized by a Snap Research Fellowship in 2019, his research has been placed on exhibition in the MIT Museum and covered by various popular press outlets, including BBC, Forbes, Yahoo!, and Popular Mechanics.