About

I’m a graduate student in Artificial Intelligence Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
My expected graduation date is December 2026.

I previously earned a bachelor’s degree in Automation from Southern University of Science and Technology.

You can reach me at [email protected], or find me on GitHub and LinkedIn.

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

M.S. in Artificial Intelligence Engineering

Aug 2025 — Dec 2026 (expected)

GPA 4.0 / 4.0

Southern University of Science and Technology

B.Eng. in Automation

Sep 2021 — Jun 2025

GPA 3.87 / 4.0 · Top 3 in major · Outstanding Graduate

Work Experience

Nebula Security Corp.

AI Research Intern

Jul 2026 — Aug 2026

Cylingo Robotics

Machine Learning Engineer Intern

May 2026 — Jul 2026

For details of these internships, please refer to my résumé.

Research Experience

Carnegie Mellon University

Graduate Researcher

Feb 2026 — May 2026

Improved low-FAR face verification across 15.7M IJB-C template pairs, surpassing TopoFR and LVFace at four of five operating points. Formulated topology-aware training from hard-negative analysis. Separately, developed geometry-aware inference that reduced detection failures by 46% on 1,835 images and improved external RetinaFace detection success from 80.0% to 90.9%.Project Details

North Carolina State University

Undergraduate Researcher

Jul 2024 — Apr 2025

Co-developed heart-rate-aware adaptive inference and a parameter-shared Anytime CNN. On Raspberry Pi 4, reached 91.5% accuracy and 90.6% F1 at 1.33 ms mean latency, improving accuracy by 4.2 percentage points with 60% lower latency than the strongest literature-based baseline and no misses in a 1,000-sample deadline evaluation. Second author, IEEE RTCSA 2025.Project Details

Southern University of Science and Technology

Research Assistant

Sep 2023 — Jul 2024

Built an LLM-to-ROS action interface for a JAKA Zu5 robotic arm, integrating structured tool calls, MoveIt planning, and execution feedback. Demonstrated multi-step language-guided motion in simulation and on physical hardware.Project Details

Publication

Peer ReviewedIEEE RTCSA 2025

Adaptive Model Selection for Real-Time Heart Disease Detection on Embedded Systems

Yixin Li, Zhiling Li, Abdullah Al Arafat, Donald Johnson, Ning Sui, Anil Gehi, and Zhishan Guo

IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications

Paper

Awards & Recognition

2025

Outstanding Graduate Award

Southern University of Science and Technology

2023–24

Outstanding Student Award

Southern University of Science and Technology

2021–24

Undergraduate scholarships

Second Merit Scholarship (2022, 2024), Third Merit Scholarship (2023), and Freshman Comprehensive Scholarship

2023

Guangdong Second Prize · National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest

Visual tracking and embedded control

2023

Third Prize · National Embedded Chip and System Design Competition

Dual-quadcopter coordination

2023

Successful Participant · Mathematical Contest in Modeling

Statistical modeling and prediction