Yuhao Chen (He/Him)

Yuhao Chen is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo and a PI of the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab. Dr. Chen received a B.Sc. (2015) and a Ph.D. (2019) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, with a doctoral thesis titled "Estimating Phenotypic Traits from RGB Imagery." Dr. Chen joined the University of Waterloo as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2020 and became Research Assistant Professor in 2023.

Dr. Chen's research is in computer vision and artificial intelligence, with applications in food computing, robotic vision, sports analytics and digital twinning. Dr. Chen has published more than 90 papers, at venues including CVPR, NeurIPS, ICRA and WACV and in journals including IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering and the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics. Three of these papers received best paper awards: at the Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV 2024), the Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference (2025), and the IROS 2025 Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competitions workshop. The research has also been covered by The Wall Street Journal and New Scientist.

Dr. Chen holds an NSERC Discovery Grant as Principal Investigator ("Digital Twinning of Food for Interactive Analysis and Simulation"), is Co-PI on the NRC-funded iVISION project, and is a co-investigator on a Miovision / Collaborate 2 Commercialize traffic analytics project.

• - Computer vision and image processing

• - Artificial intelligence and multimedia analysis

• - Generative AI in vision

• - 3D vision

• - Robotic vision and robotic simulation

• - Food computing

• - Sports analytics

• - Image-based plant phenotyping

• - Digital twinning

Dr. Chen's research is in computer vision and artificial intelligence, with applications in food computing, robotic vision, sports analytics and digital twinning. Dr. Chen has published more than 90 papers, at venues including CVPR, NeurIPS, ICRA and WACV and in journals including IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering and the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics. Three of these papers received best paper awards: at the Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV 2024), the Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference (2025), and the IROS 2025 Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competitions workshop. The research has also been covered by The Wall Street Journal and New Scientist.

Dr. Chen holds an NSERC Discovery Grant as Principal Investigator ("Digital Twinning of Food for Interactive Analysis and Simulation"), is Co-PI on the NRC-funded iVISION project, and is a co-investigator on a Miovision / Collaborate 2 Commercialize traffic analytics project.

• - PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, 2019

• Thesis: "Estimating Phenotypic Traits from RGB Imagery"

• - BSc, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, 2015

• - Best Workshop Paper, IROS 2025 Workshop on Benchmarking via Competitions in Robotic Grasping and Manipulation (RGMCW), 2025

• - Best Research Paper Award, Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference, 2025

• - Best Paper Award, 21st Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV), 2024

• - Best Conference Paper and Best Application Paper Award Finalist, IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2022

• Dr. Chen has chaired the MetaFood workshop at CVPR (2024-2026), co-chaired IAAI-23, IAAI-24 and CVIS (2021-2023), and serves as Area Chair for ICME 2024 and ICASSP 2026. Dr. Chen co-supervises PhD and MASc students and teaches the graduate course SYDE 720-4, Data Representation for Modern Computer Vision.

• "Federated Learning for Robot Picking (FLAIROP): Robots learning without boundaries," Manufacturing Automation Magazine, October 2024
• "Diet-monitoring AI tracks your each and every spoonful," New Scientist, June 2024
• "AI wants to count your calories," The Wall Street Journal, August 2024
• Research team’s AI-powered app watches what you eat