Raymond Yeh - RAP Alumni Highlight

RAP Alumni Highlight: Raymond Yeh

After completing his one-year term as a Research Assistant Professor (RAP) at TTIC in 2022, Professor Raymond Yeh joined the faculty at Purdue University in a tenure track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science starting in fall 2022.

Prof. Yeh received his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and doctoral degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Electrical Engineering. His research interests are in computer vision and machine learning. He is particularly interested in developing algorithms to learn effective models ranging across several domains including audio, language, and vision.

After completing his doctorate, Prof. Yeh was looking for a faculty position and received an offer from Purdue, but said he realized that an additional year of research first would be a better option for him, which led him to the RAP position at TTIC, where one of his advisors had interned at and recommended.

“At TTIC, there is a lot of freedom that you get with the RAP position,” Prof. Yeh said. “You get to do your own research and be your own advisor. I wanted to do a bit more research and recruit students to have a more productive start at Purdue.”

Being a RAP at TTIC helped to prepare Yeh for a career in academia in many ways. Prof. Yeh primarily worked with Greg Shakhnarovich and other students, which he says was beneficial because he was able to interact with different types of people and groups.

“I learned a lot from my experiences and they were meaningful to me because I got to see what it’s like to work with different groups of people and students beyond what I experienced when I was completing my doctorate,” Prof. Yeh said. “Professors have different styles of mentoring and running their labs, and this was really valuable for me to see.”

Prof. Yeh said that his favorite part about the TTIC community is that the research environment is amazing, and that the number of talks hosted by TTIC was outstanding and particularly helpful.

At Purdue, Prof. Yeh will be starting his own lab and continue to do research, as well as teach courses. He said he looks forward to teaching, as he has not yet taught a course completely by himself.

Prof. Yeh’s advice to future RAPs is that there is a “lot of potential for collaboration as long as you ask and are open. People are really friendly and open to discussion, and the research is one of the strongest parts of the TTIC community, as most colleagues are experts in related areas and are very passionate about research.”