About

I am a Machine Learning Research Engineer at Woven Solutions, where I post-train image-generation and vision-language models with distillation and reinforcement learning. I am interested in foundation models for physiological signals — learning from sleep, EEG, and sensor data with little labeled supervision.

Previously, at UCLA and Emory, I pre-trained foundation models for sleep and infant EEG. Before that I built an on-device RAG system at the Naval Information Warfare Center, an agentic assistant for Emory Admission, and graph neural networks for brain connectivity at UNC Greensboro.

Experience

Woven Solutions (DARPA & U.S. Cyber Command Programs)

Machine Learning Research Engineer · McLean, VA

— Present

UCLA & Emory University

Research Assistant · Atlanta, GA

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Emory University · Office of Admission

AI Engineer · Atlanta, GA

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Naval Information Warfare Center

Machine Learning Engineer Intern · U.S. Department of Defense · Guam

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UNC Greensboro · GraLNA

Machine Learning Research Intern · NSF REU · Greensboro, NC

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Certificates

Publications

Google Scholar ↗

PECRC 2026 · Best Research Rapid-Fire and Poster Presentation

EEG Foundation Modeling for Early Prediction of Infant Motor Development

D. Yang, R. Xiao · 8th Annual Pediatric Early Career Researcher Conference, Atlanta, GA

Preprints & Under Review

Under review · NeurIPS 2026 BrainBodyFM

Infant-Adapted EEG Foundation Modeling for Developmental Status Classification in Infants Born Preterm

D. Yang, B. A. Smith, R. Xiao

Awards

Clinton Joiner Career Development Award

Best Research Rapid-Fire and Poster Presentation · 8th Annual Pediatric Early Career Researcher Conference, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta

NSF/CRA REU Travel Grant

Computing Research Association

Focus

Research
Foundation models · self-supervised learning · post-training with RL and distillation · vision-language models · graph neural networks
Languages
Python · SQL · Java · C++ · JavaScript / TypeScript · R · Bash
Frameworks
PyTorch · TensorFlow · scikit-learn · LangChain · FAISS · Neo4j · LoRA / PEFT · GRPO
Infrastructure
AWS · Azure AI Foundry · GCP · Docker · Linux · Git · Ollama