PhD Spotlight: Yu Yin, PhD’23, Computer Engineering
After completing a bachelor’s degree from the School of Electronic Engineering at the Wuhan University of Technology and a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, Yu Yin began a PhD in computer engineering at Northeastern in 2019, advised by distinguished professor Yun Raymond Fu. Yin’s research interests broadly include visual synthesis and understanding, multi-modality fusion, and transfer learning. She is devoted to developing machine learning frameworks and synthetic data generators to make computer vision and AI systems more accurate, affordable, and scalable. Her primary focus during her doctoral studies was synthetic data generators, which provide a reliable and controllable source for training machine learning models while reducing the reliance on real-world data collection. Her dissertation mainly investigates the potential for understanding human behavior by recreating it using image synthesis.
Yin’s technical contributions have led to more than two dozen peer-reviewed papers on leading AI and data mining conferences, such as the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, AAAI Annual Conference, ACM International Multimedia Conference, SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, and top IEEE transaction journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. In recognition of her research contributions, Yin received the National Science Foundation I-Corps grant in 2022 and the Northeastern University Dissertation Completion Fellowship in 2023. She also worked at Microsoft and Zillow as a research intern.
Throughout her academic journey, Yin has actively contributed to the academic community. She served as a teaching instructor for a data visualization course at Northeastern, chaired workshops on image recognition and analysis at several prominent conferences, and served as a reviewer and program committee member for multiple prestigious journals and conferences.
Upon completing her PhD,Yin commenced her role as an assistant professor of computer and data sciences at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Engineering in the fall of 2023.