Biography
Tianyu is a Senior AI Research Scientist at Autodesk AI Lab, where he focuses on applying machine learning to optimize decision-making and control processes. His work primarily revolves around graph-structured data, developing scalable algorithms for deep reinforcement learning, and model alignment. He is particularly interested in fine-tuning and adapting models to real-world scenarios, ensuring reliable and consistent output, even with limited training data.
Tianyu’s research spans various areas, including sensor fusion, simulation environment design and implementation, transfer learning, diversity-induced reinforcement learning, multi-agent reinforcement learning, and combinatorial optimization. His expertise across these domains enables him to approach complex problems from multiple perspectives.
During his Ph.D., Tianyu was recognized for his academic excellence with the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship. His master’s and Ph.D. theses were also nominated for the departmental graduate award in 2019 and 2023, including the Outstanding MSc Thesis Award.
What's new?
- January 2024 - I'll be joining the Autodesk AI research team led by Dr. Tonya Cutsis in March 2024!
- December 2023 - I passed my PhD final exam. Big shout out to my advisor, Prof. Omid Ardakanian for his invaluable guidance!
- June 2023 - Our eEnergy workshop paper got accepted!
- May 2023 - We presented a poster on UpperBound AI week.
- May 2023 - Our journal paper is accepted! Check out why we should learn suboptimal policies.
- April 2023 - Congrats Abilmansur for his first paper!
Experience
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Alberta
Department of Computing Science
Advisor: Dr. Omid Ardakanian
Thesis Title: Data-Enabled Optimization of Building Operations*
*Nominated for Departmental Outstanding PhD of Science Thesis Award
Research topic: Energy-efficient smart buildings
My research is inter-disciplinary and utilizes different techniques from machine learning, control systems and communication networks. It could produce innovative data-driven solutions for optimizing the energy consumption of buildings in the context of a smart city.
Master of Science
University of Alberta
Department of Computing Science
Advisor: Dr. Omid Ardakanian
Thesis Title: Building Occupancy and Thermal Modelling in the Wild*
*Departmental Outstanding Master of Science Thesis Award Runner Up
Bachelor of Science with Honors
University of Alberta
Department of Computing Science
Three ACM ICPC Regional medals.
Senior AI Research Scientist
Autodesk Research
Research on RLxF.
Associate Researcher
Huawei Canada (Part-time)
Design a workflow for user to evaluate the robustness of their machine learning classifier. Investigate the application of Reinforcement learning in the domain of Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP), specifically the application of variable selection in Branch-and-Bound method.
Research Assistant
University of Alberta (Part-time)
Assists with academic research include but are not limited to editing and preparing manuscripts, producing academic papers, performing research work in archives, analyzing data, and developing models.
Teaching Assistant
University of Alberta (Part-time)
CMPUT 379 - Operating System Concepts
This course covers the design and implementation of operating systems, and operating systems concepts
that appear in other distributed systems.
CMPUT 366 - Reinforcement Learning
This course provides an introduction to reinforcement learning intelligence, which focuses on the
study and design of agents that interact with a complex, uncertain world to achieve a goal.
CMPUT 272 - Formal Systems and Logic
This course introduces the fundamentals of discrete mathematics and then use that knowledge to
solve problems and communicate the correctness of the solutions.
Library Back-End Programmer
University of Alberta (Part-time)
Deal with university publications. This includes organizing files stored on OpenStack Swift and MySQL entries, structuring and uploading items to the university production server using Ruby on Rails. Uploading items to the Internet Archive.
Publications
- Everything
- Refereed Papers
- Preprints
- Theses
- Presentations
Refereed Papers
- Tianyu Zhang, Omid Ardakanian, "Comfort-aware Optimal Space Planning in Shared Workspaces", In Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy), ACM, 2024.
- Tianyu Zhang, Omid Ardakanian, "Investigating the Impact of Space Allocation Strategy on Energy-Comfort Trade-off in Office Buildings", In Companion Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy), pp.145-149, ACM, June 2023.
- Abilmansur Zhumabekov, Daniel May, Tianyu Zhang, Aakash Krishna, Omid Ardakanian, Matthew E. Taylor, "Ensembling Diverse Policies Improves Generalizability of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms in Continuous Control Tasks", In Proceedings of the Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop (ALA 2023), 9 pages, ACM, May 2023.
- Aakash Krishna GS*, Tianyu Zhang*, Omid Ardakanian, Matthew E. Taylor, "Mitigating an Adoption Barrier of Reinforcement Learning-Based Control Strategies in Buildings", Energy and Buildings, vol.285, 112878, Elsevier, April 2023. [Impact Factor: 7.201]
- Tianyu Zhang, Aakash Krishna GS, Mohammad Afshari, Petr Musilek, Matthew E. Taylor, Omid Ardakanian, "Diversity for Transfer in Learning-based Control of Buildings", In Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy), pp.556-564, ACM, June 2022.
- Tianyu Zhang, Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi, Yong Zhang, "Deep Reinforcement Learning for Exact Combinatorial Optimization: Learning to Branch", In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), pp.3105-3111, IEEE, August 2022.
- Tianyu Zhang, Jake Gu, Omid Ardakanian, Joyce Kim, "Addressing Data Inadequacy Challenges in Personal Comfort Models by Combining Pretrained Comfort Models", Energy and Buildings, vol.264, 112068, Elsevier, June 2022. [Impact Factor: 7.201]
- Tianyu Zhang*, Gaby Baasch*, Omid Ardakanian, Ralph Evins, "On the Joint Control of Multiple Building Systems with Reinforcement Learning", In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy), pp.60-72, ACM, June 2021.
- Md Monir Hossain*, Tianyu Zhang*, Omid Ardakanian, "Identifying grey-box thermal models with Bayesian neural networks", Energy and Buildings, vol.238, pp.1-11, Elsevier, 2021. [Impact Factor: 7.201]
- Tianyu Zhang, Omid Ardakanian, "Poster Abstract: COBS: COmprehensive Building Simulator", In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Systems for Built Environments (BuildSys), ACM, November 2020. [Best Poster Runner Up]
- Md Monir Hossain*, Tianyu Zhang*, Omid Ardakanian, "Evaluating the Feasibility of Reusing Pre-trained Thermal Models in the Residential Sector", In Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Workshop on Urban Building Energy Sensing, Controls, Big Data Analysis, and Visualization (UrbSys), pp.23-32, ACM, November 2019.
- Tianyu Zhang, Abdullah Al Zishan, Omid Ardakanian, "ODToolkit: Extensible Toolkit for Occupancy Detection in Smart Buildings", In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy), pp.35-46, ACM, June 2019.
- Tianyu Zhang, Omid Ardakanian, "A Domain Adaptation Technique for Occupancy Estimation in Smart Buildings", In Proceedings of the International Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI), pp.148-159, ACM, April 2019.
Preprints
- Md Monir Hossain*, Tianyu Zhang*, Omid Ardakanian, "Identifying Grey-box Thermal Models with Bayesian Neural Networks", preprint available on arXiv (last revised in September 2020)
Theses
- Tianyu Zhang, "Data-Enabled Optimization of Building Operations", Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Alberta, December 2023.
- Tianyu Zhang, "Building Occupancy and Thermal Modelling in the Wild", M.Sc. Dissertation, University of Alberta, August 2019.
Presentations
- Modeling and Simulation Studies and Tools: Co-simulation Platform for Occupant-centric Control of Buildings, 6th International Symposium on Occupant Behaviour, September 2020.
People
Omid Ardakanian
Yang Liu
Aakash Krishna G.S.
Abdullah Al Zishan
Awards
- University of Alberta Departmental Outstanding PhD Thesis Award Nomination
- 2023
- Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship ($12,000)
- 2022-2023
- University of Alberta Mary Louise Imrie Graduate Student Award ($3,000)
- 2019 & 2022
- NeurIPS ML4CO Competition Dual Task Runner-up
- 2021
- University of Alberta Departmental Outstanding Master Thesis Award Runner Up (2nd place)
- 2020
- University of Alberta Graduate Student Teaching Award
- April 2020
- North America ACM-ICPC Regional Contest Silver Medal
- 2017
- North America ACM-ICPC Regional Contest Bronze Medal
- 2015 & 2016
Latest Posts
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Get In Touch
I'm looking for any collaboration opportunities!
Please send me an email if you are interested. 👋
Email: tianyu[dot]zhang[at]autodesk[dot]com