Hi, I'm Zhihao đź‘‹
Ph.D. student in Computer Science at George Mason University.
ZZ

About

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at George Mason University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. David Porfirio in the Autonomous Robot Interaction (ARI) Lab.

I have worked as a Research Assistant in the Computational Engineering & Robotics Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Kenji Shimada, and as a research assistant with Prof. Dajiang Liu at Chongqing University.

Previously I worked as a backend engineer at Walmart Global Tech and completed a game-AI internship at Tencent.

Research interests

My research focuses on embodied AI and robot learning: building systems that perceive, act, and improve through interaction with the physical world. I am particularly interested in learning-based task and motion planning—including long-horizon skill composition, reasoning under partial observability, and integrating learned policies with structured planners for reliability.

I also care about generalization and deployment: transferring behaviors across embodiments and environments, grounding high-level goals in executable controllers, and closing the sim-to-real gap for fieldable autonomy in assistive, construction, or mobile-manipulation settings.

News

Selected publications

  1. Towards High-Quality CGRA Mapping with Graph Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning

    Towards High-Quality CGRA Mapping with Graph Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning

    Yan Zhuang, Zhihao Zhang, and Dajiang Liu. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), 2022. DOI:10.1145/3508352.3549458

Projects

GNN–RL CGRA mapping optimization

GNN + RL maps loop DDGs onto CGRAs (min II, legal routes). ICCAD 2022.

GNN–RL CGRA mapping optimization

ActivityTracker — metric-aware construction safety

Metric depth + BEV distances for single-camera construction safety (LiDAR cal., SAM2 regions). CMU CER.

ActivityTracker — metric-aware construction safety

Education

G

George Mason University

2026 - Present
Ph.D. in Computer Science
C

Carnegie Mellon University

2022 - Dec 2024
M.S. in Computational Design and Manufacturing
U

University of Cincinnati

2018 - May 2023
B.E. in Mechanical Engineering
C

Chongqing University

2018 - June 2023
B.E. in Mechanical Engineering

Work Experience

W

Walmart Global Tech

Apr 2025 - Present
Backend Software Development Engineer
T

Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.

May 2022 - Aug 2022
Technical Game AI Designer Intern

Get in Touch

Please contact me at zzhang34 AT gmu DOT edu, or through this form.