Competitive Taiwan fellowships awarded to two students from Shao's lab

Two mechanical engineering PhD students – both of whom study under Professor Chenhui Shao – won this year’s prestigious Taiwan Fellowship.

Li-Wei Shih and Alice Mei were awarded the Government Scholarship to Study Abroad from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education. They each will receive two years of funding to support their research based on their individual proposals. They will also interact with other fellowship recipients through the Taiwan Global Professional and Scholar Networking system, connecting with other scholars in their field and bringing their unique experiences back to Taiwan.

Mei, entering the third year of her doctoral program, has been working with Shao on harnessing 3D point clouds in manufacturing. Her research on point cloud data and deep learning for informed decision-making in manufacturing blends data science and quality control.

“The financial support provided by the fellowship will enable me to delve deeper into my studies, allocate more time to experimentation, and engage in meaningful knowledge exchange with fellow researchers in my field,” Mei said.

Shih is also a third-year PhD student in Shao’s group. His research focus is on human action recognition in the manufacturing environment. He is developing several machine learning techniques to improve the robustness of the recognition under various real-world factory scenarios. The goal is to monitor the manufacturing process involving human workers and detect incorrect workflow, which can lead to quality problems and safety issues.