Shiqin Tong

I'm spending a gap year at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Mengdi Xu, where I work on memory mechanisms for embodied agents, especially spatial memory and its update mechanisms in robots. More broadly, I'm curious about how such memory modules relate to in-context learning in foundation models.

Before that, I earned an M.S. in Health Informatics from Cornell University, advised by Prof. Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee and Prof. Jose Florez-Arango; an M.S. in Artificial Intelligence from the National University of Singapore; and a B.S. in Software Engineering from Dalian University of Technology, advised by Prof. Xiangjie Kong and Prof. Feng Xia.

I like observing real user needs in tightly regulated settings and building improvements for them, be it products, algorithms, or systems. That drew me to Weill Cornell Medicine and to West China Hospital, where I was advised by Prof. Chongyang Wang.

Email / LinkedIn / Github

Research

My work spans memory for long-horizon embodied agents, assistive robotics, and AI for healthcare (Neurotech). Papers under review are shaded blue; those marked * are Neurotech.

All Robotics Neurotech

Dex-X: Learning Visual-Tactile Dexterous Manipulation From Human Demonstration with Simulated Interaction Under review, May 2026 Learning dexterous manipulation that fuses vision and touch directly from human demonstrations.
* (Neurotech) ReTell: LLM-Powered Task-based Learning for Neuro-Inclusive Education of Children with ADHD Under review, January 2026 A task-based learning system designed for neuro-inclusive education of children with ADHD.
* (Neurotech) Social Determinants of Health and Telehealth Utilization for ADHD: A Cross-Sectional Study Under review, January 2026 · AMIA 2025 Workshop A cross-sectional study of how social determinants of health shape telehealth utilization for ADHD care.
	Knowing When Not to Help: Active Estimation of Human Reachability for Just-Right Robot Assistance Ziang Liu, Yunting Yan, Christy Sum Yu Cheung, Tailai Ying, Bodong Liu, Shiqin Tong, Alexander Orkwis, Katherine Dimitropoulou, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2026 A robot actively estimates what a person can and cannot reach, so it steps in only when help is actually needed, and holds back when it isn't.
	FEAST: A Flexible Mealtime-Assistance System Towards In-the-Wild Personalization (Best Paper Award) Rajat Kumar Jenamani, Tom Silver, Ben Dodson, Shiqin Tong, Anthony Song, Yuting Yang, Ziang Liu, Benjamin Howe, Aimee Whitneck, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2025 project page / arXiv / proceedings A modular mealtime-assistance robot that care recipients personalize in-the-wild, using LLM-adapted behavior trees for safe, transparent, and adaptable feeding, drinking, and mouth-wiping.
	Mobile Edge Cooperation Optimization for Wearable Internet of Things: A Network Representation-Based Framework Xiangjie Kong, Shiqin Tong, Hui Gao, Guojiang Shen, Kaoru Wang, Mario Collotta, Ilsun You, Sajal K. Das IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII), 2020 A network-representation framework for optimizing mobile-edge cooperation in wearable IoT. (67 citations)

Industry

My industry work spans CT imaging engines, LLM API and MCP orchestration, and Kubernetes clusters. When teammates were swamped, I also helped out with front-end, back-end, mobile 😂

All Full-time Intern Non-technical Certifications

	Software Algorithm Engineer · Full-Stack · Mentor: Zheng Zhou United Imaging Healthcare, 2024–2025 CT imaging engine and distributed LLM inference for high-concurrency serving.
	Software Algorithm Engineer (Intern) · Full-Stack NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, 2023–2024 Medical dialogue agents and real-time event-stream scheduling.
	Algorithm Engineer (Intern) · Mentor: Lux Anantharaman ASTAR, Singapore*, 2021–2023 Ray-based parallel inference pipeline and diffusion-based anomaly detection.
	NPDP (New Product Development Professional) PDMA, 2025 · product & management
	TOGAF 9 Foundation / Certified The Open Group, 2022 (Singapore) · enterprise architecture & agile
	Tableau Desktop Specialist Tableau, 2022
	JLPT N2 Japanese Language Proficiency, 2020 (Dalian)

Beyond the CV

Books I read, the agent-powered note systems I've built, and side projects that speed up my research. Most of all, I'm grateful to every PhD student who has mentored me: more than the papers, it's these everyday habits that they really taught me.

All Reading Note systems Projects

Roughly 4,956 notes (as of January 2026) and 50k+ words across 140+ books, mostly read over holidays, spanning systems thinking, cognitive science, and philosophy. The ones I annotated most:

Sensemaking Madsbjerg		53
The 7 Habits Covey		35
Intuition Myers		34
Finite & Infinite Games Carse		32
Thinking in Systems Meadows		31

Obsidian knowledge graph (collection)
personal wiki

A vault of atomic Zettelkasten notes linked into a graph I actually think in: every idea is one card, wired to its neighbors.

Self-growing note tree (integrate and discover) · built on n8n
automation

An n8n pipeline that grows the vault on its own and scores how important each note is. A write-up about it drew 400+ comments.

Blender2sim Loader
3D · side project

A loader that pulls scenes from Blender into simulators and composes them on the fly, one-click generating whatever scene I need, with agents assembling the pieces.

Statistics · SPSS
poster (PDF)

Working with pure mathematicians, I found that when an LLM has no obvious signal to follow, the people with real insight can quickly point me to the one we should supervise.

Template based on Jon Barron's website.