Fangqiang Ding

about me

I am a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, advised by Dr. Hermano Igo Krebs, director of The 77 Lab. Before MIT, I worked with Dr. Or Litany at Technion as a Research Fellow. I was honored to be awarded a 2025 RSS Pioneer for my work on robust spatial perception with 4D radar for mobile autonomy. I received my PhD degree in Robotics and Autonomous Systems from the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, supervised by Dr. Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, and my B.Eng degree from Tongji University.

My research centers on reliable and affordable Physical AI, enabling AI-integrated physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles, robots, and IoT) to operate responsibly around humans and deliver societal benefits at scale in the physical world. My current work advances this goal along three key axes: (i) condition-adaptive: maintaining robust performance across illumination, weather and environmental changes, (ii) privacy-aware: protecting user identity and sensitive content in privacy-critical applications, (iii) cost-effective: reducing reliance on expensive sensor/compute and manual data collection/labelling for model training.