Fangqiang Ding

about me

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

My research centers on Physical AI, intergrating advanced artifical intelligence with physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles, robots, industrial and IoT devices) to enable them to perceive, understand, and act in the physical world. My long-term vision is a human–machine symbiotic ecosystem where human and embodied intelligence coexist, collabroate and co-evolve. Achieving this vision requires the systems that are reliable under changing conditions, responsible around humans, and affordable to deploy at scale. 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 sensors/compute and manual data collection/labeling.