Medical AI & Robotics Research 

 

I conducted research at the Robotic Collaboration and Autonomy Lab (RoCAL) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). In November 2024, I first joined Professor Yangming Lee's online lab meeting during his office hours then met him in person after attending one of his C++ lectures. He introduced me to Yicheng Zhu, a PhD student, whom I later worked with closely.

 I began by identifying and testing AI-based face-detection models using OpenCV to anonymize surgical videos, which RIT receives from partner hospitals and must process under HIPAA privacy requirements. For the next two months, I met with Yicheng in person for about eight hours per week, with additional meeting afterward, to evaluate model performance and experiment with how much facial information could be removed while still preserving clinical usefulness.

 

I then contributed to a review paper on deformable object manipulation, which examined how robots interact with soft, fragile materials such as fruit and biological tissue. I reviewed literature on grippers, proprioception, and visual and tactile feedback, including work on microrobotics, soft sensors, and grocery-packing applications. These objects present a unique challenge: they must be grasped and moved without being damaged.

My role involved synthesizing ideas across many papers to analyze how different sensing and control strategies affect performance. I summarized motivations, technical methods, keywords, and results in a structured Google Sheet that helped organize the literature. Through this project, I discovered that I enjoy working across disciplines and communicating complex technical ideas clearly, skills I hope to continue developing as I pursue research in AI, robotics, and medical technology.