Hello friends! My name is Youjing Yu, currently a PhD student supervised by Dr Guillaume Hennequin based in the Computational and Biological Learning Lab at the University of Cambridge. Before starting my PhD, I completed Bachelor of Arts and Master of Engineering, both at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

My PhD research in NeuroAI has two main focuses: developing optimisation methods for neural network training and exploring meta-continual learning. My broader research interests also include neural data analysis, system identification from real-world data and memory-efficient differentiable control approaches. Beyond my current lab, I have worked on projects in computer vision, human-computer interaction and natural language processing (NLP).

In my free time, I have been a member of choir, chinese orchestra, tennis team and badminton team. I also play Guzheng (an ancient Chinese instrument) and the violin, and have been taking German lessons for four years. Feel free to get in touch if you want to know more about me! And don’t forget to check out my research experiences, extra-curricular activities, courses taken and CV here!

Publications

• Yu, Y., Shi, Z., & Lipani, A. (2024, June). Understanding Users’ Confidence in Spoken Queries for Conversational Search Systems. In International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks (pp. 405-418). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
• Yu, Y., Xia, R., Ma, Q., Lengyel, M., & Hennequin, G. (2024). Second-order forward-mode optimization of recurrent neural networks for neuroscience. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 37, 92101-92129.
• Artemev, A., Xia, R., Boyd, B. M., Yu, Y., Dangel, F., Hennequin, G., & Bernacchia, A. (2026). Exploiting weight-space symmetries for approximating curvature. In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 306, 3856–3890.
• Walker, S., Yu, Y., Atkins, N. A Data-Driven Approach for Generalisable Prediction of Hot Gas Ingestion Across Unseen Geometries. (under review)

Education

• PhD (student) in Information and Computer Engineering, University of Cambridge, 2023 - Present
• MEng in Information and Computer Engineering, University of Cambridge, 2022 - 2023
• BA in Information and Computer Engineering, University of Cambridge, 2019 - 2022
• A-Levels, Science Stream, Hwa Chong Institution, 2017 - 2018

Awards

• Cambridge University Research Scholar - Oct 2023
• Trinity College Internal Graduate Studentship – Aug 2023;
• Trinity College Mathison Prize - Aug 2023;
• Trinity College Richard and Valery Garrett Prize - Aug 2023;
• Prince of Wales Student Award - July 2023;
• Trinity College Examination Prize - July 2023;
• AT&T Prize for Information and Communications Engineering - June 2023;
• Cambridge University Trinity College Senior Scholar - July 2022;
• Trinity College Examination Prize - July 2022;
• Trinity College Summer Studentship - Mar 2022;
• Cambridge University Trinity College Senior Scholar - July 2021;
• Trinity College Examination Prize - July 2021;
• Cambridge Trust Overseas Scholarship - Mar 2019;
• Trinity College Overseas Bursary - Mar 2019;
• Hwa Chong Diploma with Distinction - 2018;
• Singapore Science and Engineering Fair Silver Award - March 2018;
• Singapore Youth Festival Gold Award - May 2017;

Skills

• Microsoft Office
• Programming Languages
  • OCaml
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • MATLAB
  • C++
• Web Design
  • Bootstrap
  • CSS
  • jQuery
• Languages
  • English (Full working proficiency)
  • Chinese (Native)
  • German (Intermediate)