Biography

Xiuming Zhang is currently a Principal Research Scientist in Prof. Sanja Fidler's Spatial Intelligence Lab at NVIDIA, working on generative world simulation for closed-loop training of physical AI agents. Prior to joining NVIDIA, he shipped Full Self-Driving (FSD) to both customer and Robotaxi fleets as part of the Tesla Autopilot team and worked on computational photography in Prof. Marc Levoy's Emerging Products Group at Adobe. In 2021, Zhang earned his Ph.D. 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). At MIT, he also received mentorship from Dr. Jonathan T. Barron through internships at Google Research. Zhang's doctoral dissertation Shape, Reflectance, and Illumination From Appearance studies inverse rendering and its applications, including 3D shape reconstruction and free-viewpoint relighting. Recognized by a Snap Research Fellowship in 2019, his research has been exhibited at the MIT Museum and covered by various popular press outlets, including BBC, Forbes, Yahoo!, and Popular Mechanics.