Tianao (Owen) Zeng

About / Contact

Building AI systems that are measurable, reliable, and ready to ship.

I am an AI Systems / ML Engineer focused on LLM systems, generative models, multimodal perception, and robot-learning data infrastructure. I like problems where research ideas have to survive real constraints: limited compute, noisy data, latency budgets, reproducibility requirements, and production operations.

During my software engineering internship at Abundant, I built AI-agent benchmarks, RL task environments, and evaluation infrastructure for frontier labs, focused on long-horizon DevOps/SRE tasks. I designed multi-service incidents, task families with distinct root causes, and hidden verifiers, then built the runtime and review tooling needed to evaluate them reliably. The goal was to measure whether agents could sustain an investigation across tools and services, resolve operational failures, and generalize beyond memorized fixes.

At Carnegie Mellon, my VLA / robot-learning research focuses on reliable data pipelines for manipulation datasets. Across agent evaluation and robotics, I care about the same question: how do we build environments, data, and measurements that tell us what an AI system can actually do?

My research path also includes EEG and wearable-sensing work at Khan Lab at USC, where I built experiment software, firmware support, data-processing pipelines, and machine-learning classifiers for cognitive and affective-state analysis.

AI Systems

LLM reinforcement learning, diffusion editing, multimodal perception, robotics data pipelines, and evaluation-first ML engineering.

Systems Engineering

Production infrastructure, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, observability, and reliable data pipelines.

Research Tools

VLA dataset collection, simulation debugging, experiment software, firmware support, physiological signal processing, and classical ML.

Contact

Location
Pittsburgh, PA / United States

Work

Abundant

Software Engineer Intern | Jun. 2026 - Aug. 2026

XPENG Motors

Software Engineer Intern | May 2024 - Aug. 2024

Education

Carnegie Mellon University logo

Carnegie Mellon University

Master of Science, Artificial Intelligence Engineering - Electrical and Computer Engineering

3.95/4.0 | Expected Dec. 2026

University of Southern California logo

University of Southern California

Bachelor of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering

3.76/4.0 | Jan. 2023 - May 2025

Research

Control & Learning Group at CMU

Built and validated robot manipulation data pipelines for VLA and robot-learning research using Unitree G1/Dex1 simulation, LIBERO-style tasks, and LeRobot/OpenPI-compatible datasets.

DetailsControl & Learning Group

Khan Lab at USC

Built software, firmware, data processing, and ML analysis workflows for EEG-based cognitive and affective-state experiments.

DetailsKhan Lab