Zhou Chen

Zhou Chen

Auburn University

About Me

Hello, hope you are doing great! I’m first year PhD student at 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

  • 2025.06:  🎉🎉 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

RA-L 2025
ease-paper

EASE: Embodied Active Event Perception via Self-Supervised Free Energy Minimization
Zhou Chen, Sanjoy Kundu, Harsimran Baweja, Sathyanarayanan Aakur
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025. (Impact Factor: 4.6)
Project Link

Information 2021
time-series-gan-paper

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: