Hello! I’m a researcher interested in the foundations of data science and automation. I will join Zhejiang University as an assistant professor in Spring 2026.

Bio.   I’m spending this fall as a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University, hosted by Aaditya Ramdas. Previously I did my phd at Boston University, advised by Yannis Paschalidis and Ashok Cutkosky, and then spent two years as a postdoc at Harvard University, hosted by Heng Yang. Long ago I did my undergrad at Tsinghua University.

Research.   My past research centers around adaptive online learning, which concerns the theory and practice of sequential decision making with initial guesses. Recently I’ve also been working on uncertainty quantification, especially the use of regularization to relax “hard assumptions” on the nature. I enjoy thinking about properly abstracted theoretical problems, designing (hopefully) creative solutions by bridging ideas from disparate fields, and finally applying those to grand challenges in GenAI and automation. Here is my research statement.

I’m building a warm, supportive and intellectually stimulating research group at Zhejiang University to work on some fun topics. Please reach out if you are interested, thank you!

Email address: zhiyuzresearch [at] gmail (dot) com

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Publication

Five representative works

Other works

PhD Dissertation.  Temporal Aspects of Adaptive Online Learning: Continuity and Representation