Michael Ying Yang received the PhD degree (summa cum laude) from University of Bonn in 2011. From 06/2016 until 03/2024, he was Assistant Professor at University of Twente, heading a group working on scene understanding. Since 03/2024, he is Professor of Visual Computing at University of Bath.

From 2008 to 2012, he worked as Researcher with the Department of Photogrammetry, University of Bonn, under supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Förstner. From 2012 to 2015, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Institute for Information Processing, Leibniz University Hannover, under the supervision of Prof. Bodo Rosenhahn. From 2015 to 2016, he was a Senior Researcher with Computer Vision Lab Dresden, TU Dresden, collaborating with Prof. Carsten Rother. He received the venia legendi in Computer Science from Leibniz University Hannover in 06/2016.

His research is in the fields of Visual Computing and Computer Vision with specialization on Scene Understanding, Multimodal Learning, Deep Generative Models. He published over 100 papers in international journals and conference proceedings. He serves as Editorial Board Member of International Journal of Computer Vision, and recipient of the Best Science Paper Award at BMVC 2016 and The Willem Schermerhorn Award (2021). He co-organized 12 workshops with CVPR/ICCV/ECCV, and is guest editor of 4 journal special issues. He is regularly serving as program committee member of conferences and reviewer for international journals.