Dr. Yu Kong is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University. He is now directing the ACTION Lab. He serves Pattern Recognition and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia as an Associate Editor. He also serves CVPR, ICCV, IJCAI, AAAI, Multimedia, FG, etc., as an Area Chair. He is an IEEE Senior Member. His research has been supported by National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, Google, Meta, Nvidia, Adobe, Josiah Mary Jr Foundation, and Knight Foundation.
Dr. Kong’s research seeks to develop AI systems that acquire transferable physical knowledge by observing human actions and interactions. His research investigates how intelligent systems can represent and infer the latent physical knowledge underlying human behavior, and reason about and predict its future evolution, enabling robots to use this knowledge to interact robustly with the physical world. His work spans human motion and human-object interaction modeling, egocentric video understanding, generative world models, and trustworthy AI, providing the computational foundation for next-generation physical intelligence.