I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
I received my Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2024, advised by Prof. Jianjun Shi. I also hold an MS in Computational Science and Engineering from Georgia Tech. I obtained my B.Eng in Energy and Power Engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.
My current research interest is in AI/ML-enabled data analytics for quality, productivity and energy efficiency improvement in complex engineering systems, interfacing with statistics, large-scale optimization, (physics-informed) machine learning, and computational science. You can find my CV here and a brief overview of my research here.
Ph.D. Students Position Opening: I am actively looking for PhD students starting in Spring/Fall 2025. Students in statistics, mathematics, computer science, engineering, or related majors with proficient coding skills are welcome to apply. Please feel free to contact me with CV (and/or transcripts, sample publications) attached if you are interested. For more information, please check the Ph.D. programs in ISyE.
For current undergraduate and graduate students at UMN, if you are interested to work with me, please feel free to send me an email.
Remote research assitants are welcome to join the group as well!
🏅 2025 - 10: Our paper "Heavy-traffic queue length behavior in a switch under Markovian arrivals" was recently selected in Applied Probability Collection: October 2025 Queueing Models, as one of the ten articles published in the Journal of Applied Probability or Advances in Applied Probability.
Congrats to Prof. Siva Theja Maguluri
🏅 2025 - 10: Deyi Kong was selected as a finalist for the INFORMS QSR Best Student Paper Award for her paper, “Natural Hypergradient Descent: Algorithm Design, Convergence Analysis, and Parallel Implementation.”
Finalists will present during the competition session at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta on Sunday, October 26, 2:45–4:00 PM, Building B, Level 4, Room B402.
This is Deyi’s first PhD work—congrats, Deyi, and way to go!
🏅2025 - 06: Received the our group has received a unrestricted gift of computing credits from NVIDIA to support our research project:
Big VISION: Advancing Data Quality for Vision-Based Industrial Inspection.
Many thanks to the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program NVIDIA AI for supporting our research and innovation!
🏅2025 - 04: Selected as a recipient of the Sigma Xi Best Ph.D. Thesis Award from Georgia Tech. This award recognizes ten outstanding dissertations chosen from Ph.D. graduates across all majors at Georgia Tech every year.
🧑🏫 2025 - 03: Invited visiting to Samsung and presentation on AI/ML enabled quality efficiency and productivity improvement in complex engineering systems.
🧑🏫 2025 - 02: Invited Presentation on Seed Grant Showcase & Spotlight on Big VISION Initiative, where we aim to develop the Large-scale Dataset and Industry and Academia Forum for Vision-based Industrial Inspection (VISION).
🏅 2025 - 01: Our paper Physics-Informed Neural ODE with Heterogeneous Control Inputs (PINOHI) for Quality Prediction of Composite Adhesive Joints has won the 2025 SPES + Q&P Student Paper Competition! Yifeng will present the paper at a special topic-contributed session at JSM 2025 in Nashville. Congratulations, Yifeng!
🧑🏫 2025 - 01: Invited talk: "Physics-Informed Learning: Methodology and Applications in Engineering Design and Optimal Control", at Apple DMLI Weekly Sharing.
🏅 2024 - 11: We are honored to receive the Samsung Global Research Outreach Award ($150k) to leverage AI/ML for improving HVAC system efficiency!
🏅 2024 - 11: Congratulations to Michele for winning the Undergraduate Research Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Award!
🧑🏫 2024 - 10: Invited talk: "AI/ML Enabled Quality & Productivity Improvement of Advanced Manufacturing Systems", at Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) Conference.
Time: Wednesday, October 16 • 11:15 AM
Location: Room 103 B, Minneapolis Convention Center
📖 2024 - 9: New paper accepted by IISE Transactions: Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Manufacturing: PINOHI for Quality Prediction of Composite Adhesive Joints. Congratualtions Yifeng!
🏅 2024 - 9: Invited to join Tomorrow’s Leaders Program in Advanced Manufacturing Minneapolis.
🧑🏫 2024 - 9: Invited talk: "AI/ML-enabled Data Fusion for Complex Engineering Systems", at CSE DSI Machine Learning Seminar, University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
📖 2024 - 8: New paper on Arxiv: Uni-3DAD: GAN-Inversion Aided Universal 3D Anomaly Detection on Model-free Products
🏅 2024 - 6: Invited talk "Distributional-assumption-free Robust Learning for Fine-grained Anomaly Detection", at the Natrella Session of Joint Research Conference -- An award session of Mary G. and Joseph Natrella Scholarship Receipients.
📰 2024 - 5: Star Wars Day interview with the ISYE department: May the 4th be with you!
🏫 2024 - 4: VISION'24 workshop @ ECCV 2024
🚀 We are organizing the VISION'24 workshop together with ECCV 2024: 2nd workshop on Vision-based InduStrial InspectiON
📢 Calling all researchers and enthusiasts: Get ready to showcase your expertise in vision-based inspection techniques! Our call for paper submissions and data challenge is underway. Don't miss out on this opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge advancements in the field.We're currently preparing the call for paper submissions and data challenge.
🔍 Stay tuned for more updates!
📖 2023 - 11: New paper accepted by Advances in Applied Probability: Heavy Traffic Queue Length Behavior in a Switch under Markovian Arrivals. [Arxiv]
🏫 2023 - 06: We are organizing the VISION'23 workshop together with CVPR 2023: 1st workshop on Vision-based InduStrial InspectiON; I am also co-oragnzing the VISION'23 data challenge competition with great success.
🏅 2023 - 06: Our paper RGI paper got the Best Track Paper Award in Quality Reliability & Statistics Division of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering 2023
✨ 2023 - 06: Shancong will continue his role as student board member of the Quality Control & Reliability Engineering (QCRE) Division of IISE for the 2023-2024 term