Fangqiang Ding

about me

I am a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, working with Dr. Hermano Igo Krebs, director of The 77 Lab. I will join HKUST (GZ) this summer as an Assistant Professor. I was honored to be awarded a 2025 RSS Pioneer for my work on robust spatial perception for robotics. Before MIT, I received a Postdoctoral Fellowship from and worked at Technion. I received my Ph.D. in Robotics and Autonomous Systems from The University of Edinburgh, and my B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering from Tongji University.

🎯 My research agenda centers on Physical AI, which integrates advanced artificial intelligence with physical systems (e.g., self-driving cars, robots, wearables, industrial and IoT devices) to enable them to perceive, reason, and interact with the physical world. My long-term vision is a human-machine symbiotic ecosystem where human and embodied intelligence coexist, collaborate and co-evolve.

🚀 Achieving this vision requires systems that are not only increasingly capable, but also trustworthy and scalable in the real world. Trustworthy systems operate safely, reliably, and robustly across diverse environments and tasks, while protecting human privacy. Scalable systems should be developed and deployed at scale in a cost-effective way through affordable sensing, computation and data pipelines. My research aims to address the real-world challenges that hinder the trustworthy and scalable Physical AI.

🤝 If you would like to explore collaboration opportunities, please feel free to reach out via email. I am also actively recruiting motivated PhD, MPhil students, RAs, and interns for my group at HKUST (GZ) — see the group page for details. Email · Google Scholar