PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Rose Yu

Also known as Qi Yu

Rose Yu is a computer scientist whose deep learning models build in the laws of physics, with applications in traffic, climate and turbulence. After studying computer science at Zhejiang University, she earned a doctorate at the University of Southern California in 2017, and her traffic-forecasting model DCRNN reached Google Maps in 2018. She joined UC San Diego in 2020 after an assistant professorship at Northeastern University, and in 2023 she coauthored ClimSim, which NeurIPS honored as an Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper. MIT Technology Review named her an Innovator Under 35 in 2024, she received a Presidential Early Career Award in January 2025, and Samsung named her a 2025 AI Researcher of the Year. She is a professor of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego and cofounder and CEO of GistFlow.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2017

    A doctorate at USC

    She majors in computer science at Zhejiang University in China, then earns a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Southern California in 2017, with an award for best dissertation.

  2. 2017–2018

    A traffic model in Google Maps

    She joins Caltech as a postdoctoral scholar in 2017. With Yaguang Li, Cyrus Shahabi and Yan Liu, she coauthors the Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (DCRNN), which models traffic flow as a diffusion process on a directed graph and appears at ICLR 2018. The Los Angeles traffic forecasts stay reliable for one hour, up from about 15 minutes, and Google Maps deploys the code in 2018.

  3. 2020

    Joining UC San Diego

    After serving as an assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, she joins the faculty of UC San Diego's Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 2020.

  4. December 2023

    ClimSim and a NeurIPS award

    ClimSim, a dataset of 5.7 billion pairs of input and output vectors from multi-scale climate simulations built for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation, counts her among its authors. NeurIPS 2023 names it an Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper in December 2023.

  5. 2024

    MIT Innovators Under 35

    MIT Technology Review names her one of its 2024 Innovators Under 35 for physics-guided deep learning. She works with scientists to find the physical laws that matter for their research and develops models that obey them, including climate-model work on turbulence tied to hurricanes and El Niño.

  6. January 2025

    A Presidential Early Career Award

    She is one of five UC San Diego faculty members who receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in January 2025, the highest honor the US government gives to early-career scientists and engineers. The award recognizes her work bringing AI models and real-world physics together, in particular symmetries.

  7. 2025

    Samsung AI Researcher of the Year

    At Samsung AI Forum 2025, she is named one of three Samsung AI Researcher of the Year winners, alongside Nicolas Papernot and Lerrel Pinto. Yoshua Bengio presents her award.

  8. As of October 2026

    Professor and GistFlow CEO

    She is a professor of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego, where her research applies machine learning to large-scale spatiotemporal data, and cofounder and CEO of GistFlow.

Career

  1. Since 2020University of California, San DiegoProfessor
  2. NowGistFlowCofounder and CEO
  3. Until 2020Northeastern UniversityAssistant Professor
  4. From 2017California Institute of TechnologyPostdoctoral Scholar

Education

  1. 2017University of Southern CaliforniaPh.D.
  2. Zhejiang University

From the biography.

Videos

YouTube videos in which Rose Yu speaks or appears, newest first. A model chose them from YouTube search results. List updated 22 October 2026.

  1. Spatiotemporal Data Analysis with Rose Yu - #508The TWIML AI Podcast with Sam Charrington · 9 August 2021 · 33 min

Video data from YouTube API Services. By watching you agree to the YouTube Terms of Service. How we use YouTube data.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Rose Yu. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. Universities keep AI researchers for a median of 6 years, compared with 2 years at frontier labsIncludes University of California, San Diego. Across 15,811 dated work stays (6,529 people), median role tenure runs from 6 years at universities to 2 years at frontier labs. We compare all five organization types, starting decades from the 1970s to the 2020s, and the organizations that keep people longest.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of California, San Diego. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of California, San Diego. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Rose Yu yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Improving Deep Learning With a Little Help From Physics quantamagazine.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Faculty Profiles | Jacobs School of Engineering jacobsschool.ucsd.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Rose Yu Homepage roseyu.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Rose Yu | MIT Technology Review technologyreview.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network: Data-Driven Traffic Forecasting arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Announcing the NeurIPS 2023 Paper Awards blog.neurips.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation proceedings.neurips.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. HDSI Faculty Rose Yu Recognized as MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 datascience.ucsd.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. Five UC San Diego Researchers Receive Presidential Early Career Awards today.ucsd.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. UC San Diego Computer Scientist Rose Yu Named 2025 Samsung AI Researcher of the Year jacobsschool.ucsd.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  11. Samsung Electronics Opens Samsung AI Forum 2025 news.samsung.com. Checked 22 October 2026.