Ding Zhao
Associate Professor
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDing Zhao is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the CMU Safe AI Lab, where he builds trustworthy, generalist AI for high-stakes real-world systems such as autonomous vehicles, acute-care robots, and climate-risk monitoring agents. With nine years of academic experience and collaborations with DeepMind, NVIDIA, Ford, Toyota, and others, he translates cutting-edge research into industry-adopted safety frameworks and standards, including participation on ISO committees for automated driving tests. His work has attracted mainstream coverage in outlets like the New York Times and Forbes and spans both foundational AI for robotics and practical deployment in high-risk environments. Beyond academia he co-founded a stealth startup and teaches widely on trustworthy AI and control for robotics, reflecting a rare blend of rigorous PhD-level research and hands-on systemization for real-world safety.
9 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Mechanical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Mechanical Engineering at University of MichiganBachelor's Degree, Automotive Engineering, Bachelor's Degree, Automotive Engineering at Jilin University
English, Chinese
Github Skills (7)
extensible1
reinforcement-learning1
machine-learning1
scale1
deep-learning1
scenarios1
large-scale1
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
zhao-lab/trafficnet-1.0
Aug 2017 - May 2018
Contributions:18 commits, 6 pushes in 8 months
zhao-ding/lab-website
Aug 2018 - Oct 2020
Contributions:19 pushes in 2 years 2 months
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