Allen Y. Yang

Research

Drawing from my experience in both academia and entreprenurial careers, I am passionate about investigating disruptive new technologies in emerging AR, VR, and AI areas and their commercialization focusing on human-centric user experience design. Some core research topics include Localization and Mapping, Natural Human Interface, Pattern Recognition such as human and object modeling, and Embedded Computer Vision for Mobile Applications.

At Silicon Valley, I have been involved with a series of startups at different capacities, including Atheer, Grafty, LUCI, Tron, and Pengram. One of my current projects is an open-source AR dev kit called OpenARK. I am excited to see its continuing penetration in the AR/VR market and establish broader alliances with major stakeholders.

Education

PhD, 2006. ECE, University of Illinois

Experience

Dr. Allen Y. Yang is a Principal Investigator at UC Berkeley and a Co-Founder and CTO of Grafty, Inc. Previously he served as CTO and Acting COO of Atheer Inc. His primary research areas include high-dimensional pattern recognition, computer vision, image processing, and applications in motion segmentation, imagesegmentation, face recognition, and sensor networks. He has published four books/chapters, 14 journal papers and more than 30 conference papers. He is also an inventor of 12 US patents/applications.

Allen received his BEng degree in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China(USTC) in 2001. From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), he received two MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics in 2003 and 2005, respectively, and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2006. Among the awards he received are a Best Bachelor’s Thesis Award from USTC in 2001, a Henry Ford II Scholar Award from UIUC in 2003, a Best Paper Award from the International Society of Information Fusion and a Best Student Paper Award from Asian Conference on Computer Vision in 2009. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.