Undergraduate at Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute - UC SanDiego
Profile photo credit to Scott Yang at the Salk Institute, taken at SfN 2025.
About Me
Hi! My name is Kaiwen Bian and I am a 4th year undergraduate student at UC SanDiego double majoring in Data Science and Cognitive Behavoral Neuroscience.
Understanding the representation is all you need: I study computational problems not only from an engineering perspective but also through the lens of neuroscience — asking why biological systems do things the way they do, because the same principles that make them efficient, robust, and generalizable can be used to solve open challenges in AI. Much of my work focuses on embodied agents, where understanding how neurons coordinate to control directly informs how we build agents that operate with the same fluency. My research sits at the intersection of embodied AI, computational neuroscience, robot learning, and representation learning.
Outside of my academic life, I enjoy skateboarding 🛹, surfing 🏄, and immersing myself in the serenity of the natural world 🌲
Journey
Research Intern
Developing computationally efficient deep RL imitation systems (Mimic-MJX) for bio-mechanically realistic agents, discovering topological structure in embodied behavior spaces (TopoMimic), and building neural-aligned embodied agents (Coming).
Visiting Research Scholar
Creating latent dynamical models for planning and generating bio-mechanically realistic behaviors using deep state-space modeling methods. Co-advised on the neural-aligned embodied agent project from Salk.
B.S. Data Science · B.S. Cognitive Behavioral Neuroscience
Graph compositional abstraction for molecular generation (MOSAIC) and topological analysis of embodied agent behaviors. Co-advised on the TopoMimic project from Salk.