Xu Kristen Yan 阎 旭 🔊

Hi! I'm a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UCLA, where I'm fortunate to be co-advised by Professor Jonathan Kao and Professor Yuchen Cui. My research is to make human-robot collaboration feel as natural and effortless as collaborating with a trusted teammate. If you share that vision, I'm always happy to chat.

Before UCLA, I earned my B.A. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and spent a year at the Center for Brain-like Computing and Machine Intelligence with Professor Bao-Liang Lu, working on multimodal learning for general Brain-computer Interfaces.

Email  /  Scholar  /  GitHub  /  LinkedIn

Research

My recent projects explore shared autonomy - algorithms and interfaces that let imperfect humans and imperfect robots fuse their strengths into seamless, near-perfect teams.

Teaching

ECE 239AS Deep Learning II, Spring 2025
Covered generative modeling (GANs, VAEs, diffusion), seq-to-seq attention and transformers, and imitation and deep reinforcement learning (policy-gradient, actor-critic, value-based, and Deep Q Learning).

ECE C147/247 Deep Learning I, Winter 2025
Covered foundational deep learning concepts (loss functions, back-propagation, optimization, batch normalization, dropout, etc.), computer-vision techniques with CNNs for object detection and segmentation, and RNNs.

ECE 102 Signals and Systems, Fall 2024
Covered continuous-time signal representation, convolution, Fourier series and Fourier transforms, frequency response analysis, sampling theory, the Laplace transform, and filter design.

The website is modified from source code of Jon Barron.