Aria (Yixiao) Kang is a research engineer at Meta Reality Labs Research, specializing in Augmented Reality, Computer Vision, and Generative AI. She is working on Project Aria (www.projectaria.com) with a vision to build all day always on super intelligent assistant. She earned her master’s degree from UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) and her bachelor's degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. Before joining Meta, Aria did research at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (MIT CSAIL, advised by Prof. Stefanie Mueller), Berkeley Robust Deep Learning group (advised by Prof. Michael Mahoney) and Berkeley Swarm Lab(advised by Prof.Bjoern Hartmann). She also conducted research at the National University of Singapore, the University of Nottingham, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. To date, she has submitted and published 10 papers at top conferences, including CHI, UIST, IEEE VR, etc.
Meanwhile, Aria Kang was the co-founder of BeAR Tech, a startup making the AR experience reachable for everyone. As a member of the Berkeley Association of Chinese Entrepreneurs (ACE), IEEE, and ACM, she has the vision to catalyze creativity powered by AI.
Currently, Aria is working on the open source initialitive for Project Aria from Meta Reality Labs Research. She is one of the main contributors to the following projects:
- ATEK, a deep learning training and evaluation framework (5K+ PyPI downloads), presented at ECCV 2024
- Project Aria tools (600+ GitHub stars), enabling access to environmental context and human behavior data.
- Project Aria Hugging Face hub, deploying 6 datasets and 3 models with 6.9K+ downloads
