Junyao Shi

Machine Learning Research at Sunday | PhD at University of Pennsylvania

Palo Alto, California, United States

About

https://junyaoshi.github.io/ Liberate humanity from doing dangerous or boring things. Leave them to robots so that we can create and imagine.

Experience

  • Machine Learning Researcher at Sunday
    May 2026 - Present · 3 mos

    Training robot foundation models to take chores off our hands so that we can create and imagine more.

  • Ph.D. Student at University of Pennsylvania
    Aug 2021 - Present · 5 yrs

    Enabling Generalist Robots with Human Data and Foundation Models Advisor: Dinesh Jayaraman ZeroMimic: Distilling Robotic Manipulation Skills from Web Videos https://zeromimic.github.io/ Maestro: Orchestrating Robotics Modules with Coding Agents for Zero-Shot Generalist Robots https://maestro-robot.github.io/ VLMgineer: Vision Language Models as Robotic Toolsmiths https://vlmgineer.github.io/release

  • Research Intern at Skild AI
    Sep 2025 - Apr 2026 · 8 mos

    Teaching robots to make scrambled eggs

  • Research Intern at General AI Lab at Horizon Robotics
    May 2021 - Aug 2021 · 4 mos

  • Columbia University ()
    • Research Assistant
      Mar 2020 - May 2021 · 1 yr 3 mos

      Faculty Advisor: Hod Lipson, Shuran Song

    • Research Assistant
      Jun 2019 - Mar 2020 · 10 mos

      Columbia Robotics Lab, adviced by Prof. Peter Allen Publications: • Accelerated Robot Learning via Human Brain Signals (ICRA 2020) • Maximizing BCI Human Feedback using Active Learning (IROS 2020)

    • Research Assistant
      Oct 2018 - Jun 2019 · 9 mos

      Faculty Advisor: Tony Dear • Deep Reinforcement Learning for Snake Robot Locomotion (IFAC 2020)