Miao YU

I am a geophysicist and AI engineer whose work spans two domains that rarely meet: the mathematical foundations of seismic imaging and the real-world engineering of urban safety systems. My research began with a deceptively hard problem — how do you reconstruct what lies beneath the Earth’s surface using only the vibrations recorded at its face? My PhD at Université de Paris led me to optimal transport theory as a principled answer, resulting in one of the earliest applications of Sinkhorn divergence to full waveform inversion (FWI).

That foundation in rigorous mathematical modeling proved to be far more portable than I expected. After completing my doctorate, I brought the same signal-processing intuition into a new arena: cities. As a founding R&D leader at BS Inc., I led the design and deployment of seismic-based monitoring systems for bridges, tunnels, dams, highways, and airports — building, from scratch, the algorithms, pipelines, and hardware integrations that turn continuous ground-vibration data into actionable safety intelligence. Over nearly four years, I managed a cross-disciplinary team of approximately 20 people, co-invented 15 patents (including 2 PCT international filings), and oversaw commercial deployments across multiple cities in China.

My current work, as a Visiting Researcher at the Southern University of Science and Technology, focuses on Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) and edge computing for urban mobile source tracking — extending fiber-optic sensing technology into smart city applications where real-time interpretation of vibration signatures can inform decisions about infrastructure, safety, and urban mobility.

I am equally committed to the human dimensions of science. I serve as South China Regional Liaison for Tree Hole Rescue, a mental health crisis intervention initiative, and as a volunteer with the Shenzhen Association of Young Scientists. I believe that technical expertise earns its fullest meaning when it is paired with a genuine sense of responsibility to the communities it serves.