Xiaolong Wang

Xiaolong Wang is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego with additional affiliations in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, Center for Visual Computing, Contextual Robotics Institute, and Artificial Intelligence Group. He serves on the Robotics team for the TILOS NSF AI Institute and has been faculty since 2020 after promotion from assistant to associate professor.

Wang earned his Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University under Abhinav Gupta, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley with Alexei Efros and Trevor Darrell. His academic journey includes collaborations with Berkeley AI Research, Facebook AI Research, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

His research program focuses on exploiting structural information in data for visual representation learning, emphasizing spatial-temporal structures in videos and connections to 3D geometry and semantics. Key thrusts include self-supervised learning to eliminate manual labeling, video understanding for activity analysis, common sense reasoning for scene affordances, and robotic applications in dexterous manipulation and humanoid learning. The group develops comprehensive representations enabling robots to generalize across diverse physical environments through supervision signals from data, language, and common sense knowledge.

Wang has received elite recognition including the Sloan Research Fellowship (2025), J.K. Aggarwal Prize (2024), and NSF CAREER Award (2023), alongside faculty honors from Intel, Cisco, Adobe, and multiple Amazon Research Awards. His fellowship pedigree includes Facebook, Nvidia, and Baidu Fellowships.

• Sloan Research Fellowship (2025)
• J. K. Aggarwal Prize (2024)
• NSF CAREER Award (2023)
• Intel Rising Star Faculty Award (2023)
• Cisco Faculty Award (2023)
• Adobe Data Science Research Award (2023)
• Amazon Research Award (2022 Spring)
• Amazon Research Award (2022 Fall)
• Amazon Research Award (2023 Fall)
• Sony Research Award (2021)
• Facebook Fellowship
• Nvidia Fellowship
• Baidu Fellowship

He actively mentors award-winning students including Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship recipients (Jianglong Ye, An-Chieh Cheng, Yuzhe Qin, Yang Fu, Yinbo Chen, Jiarui Xu) and NVIDIA Graduate Fellow Nicklas Hansen. His research is funded by NSF, Amazon, Adobe, Sony, and industry grants while he serves as Area Chair for top AI conferences including ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR, and ICCV.

Wang leads a high-impact research group at UC San Diego with extensive industry partnerships (Amazon, NVIDIA, Qualcomm), producing award-winning work like the IROS 2024 Best Paper on Mobile Manipulation and ICRA 2024 Best Paper for Open X-Embodiment. The group's research spans foundational computer vision and machine learning to real-world robotics applications, with strong emphasis on technology transfer and embodied AI systems.