Yingsi Qin
Complete Bio
Yingsi is a PhD candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Aswin Sakaranarayanan and Prof. Matthew O'Toole. Yingsi is broadly interested in embedding fundamental physical laws, such as complex light transport and 3D geometry, into computational frameworks and generative algorithms to better understand and interact with the visual world. Her work in novel programmable imaging and 3D display systems demonstrates how strong physical priors integrated with programmability can overcome the limits of traditional sensing and perception. Specifically, her research introduces spatially adaptive cameras and displays, building the foundation for next-generation machine vision, computational imaging, and immersive displays. Her research area involves a fusion of computer vision, 3D perception, signal processing, optics, and machine learning. Yingsi's work has been recognized with the Best Paper Award at SIGGRAPH 2023, the Best Demo Award at ICCP 2023, and the Best Paper (Marr prize) Honorable Mention Award at ICCV 2025. Yingsi is also a recipient of the Tan Endowed Graduate Fellowship and the James Sprague Presidential Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University.
Prior to CMU, Yingsi obtained her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Columbia University and her Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Colgate University. She was a research intern at Meta Reality Labs in the Display Systems Research team (2024, 2025) and Snap Research in the Computational Imaging team (2020). She was also a software engineering intern at Google Search (2019).