Hi, I’m Norman, Renhao Zhang (张仁浩), currently a Computer Science PhD student in Autonomous Learning Laboratory at University of Massachusetts Amherst, advised by Professor Bruno Castro da Silva. (The founder, Andrew Barto, and the first student, Richard Sutton, of this lab were honored with the 2024 Turing Award for ‘creating’ RL)
My current research mainly sits at reinforcement learning and its intersection with robotics, diffusion models and LLMs. Besides, I’m also interested in multimodal learning and computer vision.
I got my master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Brown University, working on reinforcement learning with Prof. George Konidaris in Intelligent Robot Lab and computer graphics with Prof. Daniel Ritchie in Brown Visual Computing Group. Previously, I was cross-registered at Harvard University during 2023 fall, working on an AI in healthcare project with Prof. Finale Doshi-Velez. Before that, I got my Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Information Engineering in Dalian University of Technology, advised by Prof. Xuanheng Li on applications of RL in wireless communication settings and Prof. Shenglan Liu on computer vision.
News
- March 2025: Got my summer internship as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon SCOT team. I’ll be in Bellevue from this May to August.
- Sept 2024: Learning to Edit Visual Programs with Self-Supervision is accepted to NeurIPS 2024! I’ll be in Vancouver this November.
- Sept 2024: Start my new role of a PhD student at UMass Amherst.
- August 2024: I’ll attend RLC 2024 at UMass Amherst.
- May 2024: DLPA is accepted at ICML 2024. I’ll be in Vienna this July.
- April 2024: Graduated at Brown as an ECE master!
Education
University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA - Amherst, MA, USA
- Degree: Ph.D. in Computer Science
- Duration: 09/2024-04/2029 (Expected)
Harvard University - Cambridge, MA, USA
- Exchange student in Computer Science (GPA: 4.0)
- Duration: 09/2023-12/2023
Brown University - Providence, RI, USA
- Degree: M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (GPA: 3.8)
- Duration: 08/2022-05/2024
- Teaching Assistant: Scientific Programming in C++, Introduction in Robotics
Dalian University of Technology - Dalian, Liaoning, China
- Degree: B.S. in Electrical Information Engineering (GPA: 3.8)
- Duration: 09/2018-06/2022
- Teaching Assistant: Object Detection
Work
Dalian Hi-think Computer Technology Corp - Dalian, Liaoning, China
- Position: Research intern, AI Lab
- Duration: 04/2022-06/2022
- Project: Japanese Script Recognition; Defect Detection; Deep Learning Framework Migration
Panasonic Software Development - Dalian, Liaoning, China
- Position: Algorithm Engineer
- Duration: 06/2021 - 07/2021
- Project: Time and Attendance System based on face recognition
Honor
- Paul Utgoff Memorial Scholarship, UMASS, 01/2025
- Outstanding Graduates, 06/2022
- Second Prize, China Computer Design Competition, 05/2020
- Scholarship for Academic Excellence, 09/2019