About Me
Hello, hope you are doing great! I’m a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Auburn University, under the supervision of Dr. Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur.
I obtained my Master’s degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from Auburn University, USA, in 2024,
and my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Technology from Central South University, China, in 2021.
Currently, I’m working in the group of Open-ended Reasoning and Knowledge Acquisition (ORCA) Lab led by Dr. Aakur. My research focuses on Active Event Perception, Visual Affordance Grounding and Multimodal Open World Understanding in the context of computer vision for robotic applications.
News
- 2025.07: 🎉🎉 Our work CRAFT is accepted by NeSy2025.
- 2025.06: 🎉🎉 Congratulations to labmate Sanjoy Kundu for receiving the Outstanding Reviewer Award at CVPR 2025.
- 2025.06: 🎉🎉 I presented a paper at the Vision-based Assistants in the Real-World Workshop, CVPR 2025.
Publications
CRAFT: A Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Framework for Visual Functional Affordance Grounding.
Zhou Chen, Joe Lin, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur
Conference on Neurosymbolic Learning and Reasoning (NeSy), 2025.
EASE: Embodied Active Event Perception via Self-Supervised Free Energy Minimization
Zhou Chen, Sanjoy Kundu, Harsimran Baweja, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025. (Impact Factor: 4.6)
Project Link
Prediction Method of Multiple Related Time Series Based on Generative Adversarial Networks
Weijie Wu, Fang Huang, Yidi Kao, Zhou Chen, Qi Wu
Information, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2021, Article 55.
Workshop
-
Learning to Perceive and Act: Active Event Understanding via Predictive Free Energy Minimization
Zhou Chen, Sanjoy Kundu, Harsimran Bhaweja, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur
Vision-based Assistants in the Real-World Workshop, CVPR 2025 -
A Self-supervised Framework for Embodied Active Event Perception
Zhou Chen, Sanjoy Kundu, Harsimran Bhaweja, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur
How do Robots Care? Workshop, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025 -
A Self-supervised Framework for Embodied Active Event Perception
Zhou Chen, Sanjoy Kundu, Harsimran Bhaweja, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur
ICRA 2025 Late Breaking Works
Work
- Hualu Zhida Technology Co., Ltd., Dalian, China
Junior Software Engineer, Embedded Department – Android Development Group
Aug 2021 – Jun 2022
Internships
- 2020.09.07 - 2021.01.03, ZTE Corporation, China.
Collaborators
I am fortunate to collaborate with the following researchers:
